Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 25m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred ninety-eighth day.
At 12:30 PM today, Whitewater will hold its 28th annual Crop Hunger Walk. The walk begins at Fairhaven Senior Services, 435 W Starin Road and ends at Whitewater’s Old Armory, 146 W. North Street. Registration Time is 12:30 PM at Fairhaven, and the walk will begin at 1 PM, with walking distances of one or three miles.
On this day in 1774, Wisconsin becomes part of Quebec:
On this date Britain passed the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec. Enacted by George III, the act restored the French form of civil law to the region. The Thirteen Colonies considered the Quebec Act as one of the “Intolerable Acts,” as it nullified Western claims of the coast colonies by extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi River on the west.
Recommended for reading in full — It’s a myth that economic anxiety drove the bulk of the Trump vote, Lindsey Graham as a sad story, Susan Collins as a sham maverick, Facebook gives away users’ contact information, and a video visit to a place of 2,000 temples —
John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck debunk Five myths about the 2016 election:
MYTH NO. 4Trump’s victory was due to economic anxiety.One particular rationale for Trump’s victory came to the fore immediately after the election: He “tapped into the anger of a declining middle class,” as Bernie Sanders put it, with a message that appealed to “people [who] are tired of working longer hours for lower wages.” The journalist David Cay Johnston concurred: “Trump won because many millions of Americans, having endured decades of working more while getting deeper in debt, said ‘enough.’?”
But the evidence is clear: Both in the Republican primaries and in the general election, white voters’ attitudes about African Americans, Muslims and immigration were more closely associated with how they voted than were any strictly economic concerns. In fact, racial attitudes were the prism through which voters thought about economic outcomes — something we call “racialized economics.” For example, after Obama became president, attitudes toward blacks suddenly became linked with people’s views on the economy: the less favorable their view of blacks, the less favorable their view of the economy. Scholars who did extensive interviews with whites in Youngstown, Ohio, and rural Louisiana reported many racially loaded statements about economic circumstances. One Youngstown factory worker said people who received government assistance had “gold chains and a Cadillac, when I can barely afford a Cavalier.”
During the 2016 campaign, the most potent political sentiment held that “people like me” were not getting ahead because of “people like them.” In the primary race, for example, support for Trump among white Americans was weakly associated with whether people were worried about losing their jobs but strongly associated with whether people believed that employers were giving jobs to minorities instead of whites. In the general election, the belief that split Trump and Clinton supporters was not whether “average Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” Majorities of both groups agreed. Instead, the dividing line was whether they thought “blacks have gotten less than they deserve”: Fifty-seven percent of Clinton supporters agreed, but only 12 percent of Trump supporters did.
Frank Bruni contends Lindsey Graham Is the Saddest Story in Washington (“His fight for Brett Kavanaugh completed his transformation into Donald Trump’s slobbering manservant”):
That’s Senator Lindsey Graham you see at the head of the pack. That’s Graham you hear talking and talking and talking some more, in committee rooms and on stages and before the television cameras that he rushes to the way a toddler chases soap bubbles. His words are whichever ones guarantee a major role and a powerful patron, which means that these days he sounds like a more articulate echo of his golfing buddy: Donald Trump.
That wouldn’t, by itself, be cause to dwell on him. Washington is lousy with lackeys, and not even the maddest of kings thins their ranks.
But Graham is special. He really is. I can’t think of another Republican whose journey from anti-Trump outrage to pro-Trump obsequiousness was quite so illogical or half as sad, and his conduct during the war over Kavanaugh completed it. For the president he fought overtime, he fought nasty and he fought without nuance.
Jennifer Finney Boylan writes Susan Collins Is the Worst Kind of Maverick (“She votes with the most right-wing members of her party, even while attempting to occupy some imaginary moral high ground”):
There’s another kind of “maverick,” though — the kind of centrist who wants to please everyone. For Ms. Collins, it’s often meant voting with the most right-wing members of her party, even while attempting to occupy some imaginary moral high ground. It’s hard to see what our senator got for her vote supporting the tax cut last fall. It’s just as hard for me to see her vote for Judge Kavanaugh as anything other than a warm embrace of Donald Trump and everything he stands for, her 45-minute speech notwithstanding.
Two years ago, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, she said she would not be voting for him: “I revere the history of my party, most particularly the value it has always placed on the worth and dignity of the individual, and I will continue to work across the country for Republican candidates. It is because of Mr. Trump’s inability and unwillingness to honor that legacy that I am unable to support his candidacy.”
And yet, at some of the most crucial moments of Mr. Trump’s presidency, she has voted to empower him. In giving him a victory on Judge Kavanaugh, she has emboldened Mr. Trump to continue down the very path she claims to detest: denigrating women, bullying opponents, choosing the most combative approach to every disagreement. Based on the judge’s snarling, partisan, bullying demeanor at his hearing, Judge Kavanaugh seems determined to be the kind of justice who is exactly the opposite of that legacy she once spoke of preserving.
In so doing, she has proved herself, in the end, to stand for nothing.
Kashmir Hill reports Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information:
Giridhari Venkatadri, Piotr Sapiezynski, and Alan Mislove of Northeastern University, along with Elena Lucherini of Princeton University, did a series of tests that involved handing contact information over to Facebook for a group of test accounts in different ways and then seeing whether that information could be used by an advertiser. They came up with a novel way to detect whether that information became available to advertisers by looking at the stats provided by Facebook about the size of an audience after contact information is uploaded. They go into this in greater length and technical detail in their paper.
They found that when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks. So users who want their accounts to be more secure are forced to make a privacy trade-off and allow advertisers to more easily find them on the social network. When asked about this, a Facebook spokesperson said that “we use the information people provide to offer a more personalized experience, including showing more relevant ads.” She said users bothered by this can set up two-factor authentication without using their phone numbers; Facebook stopped making a phone number mandatory for two-factor authentication four months ago.
The researchers also found that if User A, whom we’ll call Anna, shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for User B, whom we’ll call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using that phone number, which I call “shadow contact information,” about a month later. Ben can’t access his shadow contact information, because that would violate Anna’s privacy, according to Facebook, so he can’t see it or delete it, and he can’t keep advertisers from using it either.