Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 10h 24m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred twentieth day.
Whitewater’s School Board will meet tonight (for a strategic planning discussion) at 6 PM.
On this day in 1864, the 38th Wisconsin Infantry participates in a reconnaissance mission to Harper’s Run, Virginia. They returned with two men wounded.
Recommended for reading in full — Secretive moves in the Wisconsin legislature, Trump’s incitement, Jewish agency fulfilling Biblical injunction to aid immigrants drew attention of mass murderer, Russian disinformation on Facebook, and video explaining the expression ‘foot the bill’ —
CV Vitolo-Haddad and Dee J. Hall report Last-minute surprises and secretive moves hide Wisconsin lawmakers’ actions from public view:
Since 2010, when voters swept Republicans into power, Wisconsin legislators have increasingly used such secretive maneuvers to keep the public in the dark about major spending and policy changes, interviews and records show.
An investigation by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism found the Legislature systematically diminishes the voices of the public by:
— Introducing budget amendments at the end of the approval process with no public notice or debate.
— Approving anonymous, last-minute budget motions containing a grab bag of changes, including major policy items that have nothing to do with state spending.
— Changing the scope and impact of a bill after its public hearing has been held, which excludes regular citizens from having meaningful influence on legislation before it is enacted.
Adam Serwer writes Trump’s Caravan Hysteria Led to This (“The president and his supporters insisted that several thousand Honduran migrants were a looming menace—and the Pittsburgh gunman took that seriously”):
Ordinarily, a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower. But ordinarily, politicians don’t praise supporters who have mercilessly beaten a Latino man, as “very passionate.” Ordinarily, they don’t offer to pay supporters’ legal bills if they assault protesters on the other side. They don’t praise acts of violence against the media. They don’t defend neo-Nazi rioters as “fine people.” They don’t justify sending bombs to their critics by blaming the media for airing criticism. Ordinarily, there is no historic surgein anti-Semitism, much of it targeted at Jewish critics, coinciding with a politician’s rise. And ordinarily, presidents do not blatantly exploit their authority in an effort to terrify white Americans into voting for their party. For the past few decades, most American politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, have taken care not to urge their supporters to take matters into their own hands. Trump did everything he could to fan the flames, and nothing to restrain those who might take him at his word.
Many of Trump’s defenders argue that his rhetoric is mere shtick. That his attacks, however cruel, aren’t taken 100 percent seriously by his supporters. But to make this argument is to concede that following Trump’s statements to their logical conclusion could lead to violence against his targets, and it is only because most do not take it that way, that the political violence committed on Trump’s behalf is as limited as it currently is.
….
The apparent spark for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a U.S. president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. There is no political gesture, no public statement, and no alteration in rhetoric or behavior that will change this fact. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day. But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread, and that his followers chose to amplify.
Miriam Jordan reports HIAS, the Jewish Agency Criticized by the Shooting Suspect, Has a History of Aiding Refugees:
When Mazen Hasan had to flee his native Iraq because his work for the American military had drawn threats on his life, it was a Jewish refugee resettlement agency called HIAS that helped him and his family to settle in Pittsburgh.
“They did everything they can to help us and make it easy to adjust to a new life here,” said Mr. Hasan, 61, an engineer who arrived in the United States in 2014.
HIAS is one of nine agencies with contracts from the State Department to help refugees acclimate to the United States. It has aided immigrants with diverse talents from all corners of the world, including the co-founders of Google and WhatsApp.
It is also the target of many anti-Semitic rants posted on social media by Robert Bowers, the suspect in the mass shooting on Saturday at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh — including one post published only a few hours before the shooting. Eleven worshipers were killed in the attack.
Dana Priest, James Jacoby, and Anya Bourg report Russian disinformation on Facebook targeted Ukraine well before the 2016 U.S. election:
In the spring of 2015, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was desperate for Mark Zuckerberg’s help. His government had been urging Facebook to stop the Kremlin’s spreading of misinformation on the social network to foment distrust in his new administration and to promote support of Russia’s invasion and occupation of parts of Ukraine.
To get Zuckerberg’s attention, the president posted a question for a town hall meeting at Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. There, a moderator read it aloud.
“Mark, will you establish a Facebook office in Ukraine?” the moderator said, chuckling, according to a video of the assembly. The room of young employees rippled with laughter. But the government’s suggestion was serious: It believed that a Kiev office, staffed with people familiar with Ukraine’s political situation, could help solve Facebook’s high-level ignorance about Russian information warfare.
“You know, over time it’s something that we might consider,” the chief executive responded. “So thank you for — the Ukrainian president — for writing in. I don’t think we’ve gotten that one before.”
In the three years since then, officials here say the company has failed to address most of their concerns about Russian online interference that predated similar interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The tactics identified by officials, such as coordinated activity to overwhelm Facebook’s system and the use of impostor accounts, are the same as in the 2016 contest — and continue to challenge Facebook ahead of next month’s midterm elections.