Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:02 PM, for 10h 45m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred twelfth day.
On this day in 1867, Plains Indian tribes and the United States government sign the first of three treaties now known collectively as the Medicine Lodge Treaty: “The Medicine Lodge Treaty is the overall name for three treaties signed between the Federal government of the United States and southern Plains Indian tribes in October 1867, intended to bring peace to the area by relocating the Native Americans to reservations in Indian Territory and away from European-American settlement. The treaty was negotiated after investigation by the Indian Peace Commission, which in its final report in 1868 concluded that the wars had been preventable. They determined that the United States government and its representatives, including the United States Congress, had contributed to the warfare on the Great Plains by failing to fulfill their legal obligations and to treat the Native Americans with honesty.”
Recommended for reading in full — Another former cabinet secretary criticizes Scott Walker, Rep. Jason Lewis once mocked women who felt traumatized by unwanted touching, Commerce Secretary Ross lied to Congress about a plot to rig the census, Trumpists build their own media ghettos, and video of bears putting household items to the test —
Matthew DeFour reports Fourth former Scott Walker secretary comes forward to criticize governor:
A fourth former secretary for Gov. Scott Walker has come forward to criticize the Republican governor after resigning from his job leading Madison’s economic development agency in order to speak more freely.
Paul Jadin, the first CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., informed the board of the Madison Region Economic Partnership on Wednesday that he was resigning from his $208,000-a-year job. He said the resignation was necessary to avoid entangling the agency with his political activity.
On Thursday, Jadin released to the Wisconsin State Journal an open letter, co-signed by former Corrections Secretary Ed Wall and former Financial Institutions Secretary Peter Bildsten, slamming Walker and endorsing Walker’s Democratic opponent State Superintendent Tony Evers. Both Wall and Bildsten have recorded videos for Evers’ campaign.
Another ex-cabinet official, former Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb, has also come out against Walker in recent months, saying the governor hasn’t been telling the truth about road funding. Gottlieb didn’t sign the letter.
In their letter, the three former secretaries say they joined his administration with a “fervent belief” that Walker shared their desire to improve the state. But over time, they said, “it became clear that his focus was not on meeting his obligations to the public but to advancing his own political career at a tremendous cost to taxpayers and families.”
“Governor Walker has consistently eschewed sound management practices in favor of schemes or coverup and has routinely put his future ahead of the state.” the letter states. “The result is micromanagement, manipulation and mischief. We have all been witness to more than our share of this.”
Andrew Kaczynski and Jamie Ehrlich report GOP Rep. Jason Lewis once mocked women who felt traumatized by unwanted touching:
Republican Rep. Jason Lewis once mocked women who were traumatized by unwanted sexual advances, including those inappropriately kissed or who had their thighs touched, a CNN KFile review of his former radio show reveals.
The Minnesota congressman made his comment during a November 2011 broadcast of “The Jason Lewis Show,” a syndicated radio program that aired from 2009 until 2014 before he was elected to the House in 2016. Lewis was discussing sexual harassment allegations leveled against then-Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain from his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.
Cain had been accused of sexually harassing employees and having a 13-year affair. Two women who were at the National Restaurant Association while Cain was president received settlements after accusing him of sexual harassment. He denied the allegations at the time and was never criminally charged.
“I don’t want to be callous here, but how traumatizing was it?” Lewis said. “How many women at some point in their life have a man come on to them, place their hand on their shoulder or maybe even their thigh, kiss them, and they would rather not have it happen, but is that really something that’s going to be seared in your memory that you’ll need therapy for?”
“You’ll never get over? It was the most traumatizing experience? Come on! She wasn’t raped,” Lewis added, using a voice mocking an emotionally distraught woman.
Lewis and his campaign did not return a request for comment.
(We’re a culture beset by unacculturated men like Lewis, ones who are malevolently perverse. Whether he was born or developed this way, he now finds himself here: a life worse than wasted, a man unfit for the company of others.)
Jay Michaelson writes Wilbur Ross Lied to Congress About the GOP’s Plot to Rig the Census. This Should Be a National Scandal:
The reason is a single question that the administration has sought to add to the census: whether the respondent is an American citizen. On the surface, this may seem innocuous, but based on several studies, it will almost certainly lead to under-participation by communities of color, especially Latinos. As a result, some states will have less representation in the House of Representatives than they otherwise should and will get less money from the federal government. “Blue states” like California and New York would be hardest hit, as would Texas, which is increasingly Democratic.
In other words, the citizenship question is another tactic of voter suppression.
Secretary Ross approved the question on March 26, but there are now six lawsuits over the change. One of them is headed to the Supreme Court, in what will likely be Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s first politically contentious case.
From the start, the proposal was controversial, and opposed by nearly every expert on the census who voiced an opinion about it. Independent experts all agreed it would deter Latinos from answering the census for fear of exposing themselves or family members to deportation or investigation. But whose idea was it?
In March, Secretary Ross testified under oath that the Department of Justice asked him to make the change in a December 2017 letter, so that they could better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But emails uncovered in one of the lawsuits revealed that that was a lie. In fact, Ross had requested that DOJ send the letter to justify the policy change that he’d already decided to make. So if not the Justice Department, then who?
Turns out, Ross also lied under oath about whether he’d talked with presidential advisers Steve Bannon and Kris Kobach. Ross testified that he had not—but now we know that he had discussed the issue with them in the spring of 2017, and that Kobach proposed the specific language for the citizenship question.
Kobach was the architect of voter suppression in Kansas, where as secretary of state he suspended more than 36,000 Kansas voters, disproportionately people of color. Then he was unable to prove any cases of fraud in a federal lawsuit. Kobach then went on to head Trump’s discredited “voter fraud” commission, which disbanded before finding a single instance of fraud. He is now the Republican nominee for the governor of Kansas, having won the primary under suspicious circumstances.
Natasha Singer and Nicholas Confessore report Republicans Find a Facebook Workaround: Their Own Apps:
Amid a chorus of conservative complaints that Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to right-leaning views — and as those social media giants take steps to limit what they see as abusive or misleading viral content — a few Republican consultants have begun building a parallel digital universe where their political clients set the rules.
One start-up has built an app for the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Supporters of President Trump can download an app from Great America, a big-spending pro-Trump political action committee, or America First, Mr. Trump’s official 2016 campaign app, which has some features that remain active. Many backers of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas use Cruz Crew, an app built for his re-election campaign.
The apps deliver curated partisan news feeds on what are effectively private social media platforms, free from the strictures and content guidelines imposed by Silicon Valley giants. Some allow supporters to comment on posts or contribute their own, with less risk that their posts will be flagged as offensive or abusive.
(These Trumpists are – and should be – free to build their own media ghettos, where they will enjoy the less-competitive fellowship of their own ilk. They can’t take the heart, so they abandon the kitchen.)