Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will see light rain with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 23m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is both the one thousand four hundred seventy-eighth day and the nineteenth day.
On this day in 1863, at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, Union forces led by General Grant break the Siege of Chattanooga by routing Confederate troops under General Braxton Bragg.
Recommended for reading in full —
“ ‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000…and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”
— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020
….
Let’s debunk these claims one by one.
“In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee.”
False. Wisconsin law allows any registered voter to request an absentee ballot, and no excuse has been required since 2000.
“Under Wisconsin law, voters do not need a reason or excuse, such as being out of town on Election Day, to vote absentee,” the state’s election website says. “Any voter who prefers to vote by absentee ballot may request one.”
“In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000.”
Under Wisconsin law: “Voters who are indefinitely confined due to age, illness, infirmity, or disability may request that a ballot be automatically sent to them for each election. Indefinitely confined voters do not need to provide a photo ID with their absentee ballot request.”
This is an accommodation for voters who cannot physically go to the polls. They have the option of receiving mail ballots automatically for each election and don’t need to provide a photo ID with their request. The requirements are stricter for other Wisconsin absentee voters, who must request ballots for specific elections or years.
The suggestion here is that the number of indefinitely confined voters in Wisconsin grew suspiciously this year. But these numbers from Trump and Toensing are inaccurate, contradicted by the state’s official statistics. The real numbers tell a different story, and Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told us “we have seen no evidence of fraud.”
Magney said that in November 2016, the state recorded 56,978 indefinitely confined absentee voters out of 144,802 absentee-by-mail voters. (That’s 39 percent.)For November 2020, Wisconsin’s preliminary figures show 215,713 indefinitely confined absentee voters out of approximately 1.32 million absentee-by-mail voters, or 16 percent. (Final figures will not be available until mid-December.)
“Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.”
Republican observers have been present throughout Wisconsin’s counting process, during the initial count and now during the recount. In fact, local election officials say that Trump’s observers are seeking to gum up the works, “in some instances by objecting to every ballot tabulators pulled to count,” according to the Associated Press.
Maggie Haberman and reports Trump Is Said to Plan Pardon of Flynn:
President Trump has told aides that he plans to pardon his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and that it is one of a string of pardons he plans to issue before leaving office, a person familiar with the discussions said on Tuesday.
Mr. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016 and early 2017. He was the only former White House official to plead guilty in the inquiry led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference.
i presume you have noted that Foxconn has now announced that they are going to build servers in their $10B mega-factory. “Building Servers” has a satifyingly hi-tech sound to it, but it really isn’t all that big a deal. Designing and writing software for servers is a big deal, but contract manufacturing them consists of stuffing printed circuit boards, which is something a half-dozen places in Wisco-World can do now, with no sugar from the state. It’s insane to build them in the US, as Foxconn’s Asian production lines can make them a ton cheaper.
Put this under the heading of just another episode of Foxconn fluffing their numbers and spouting bullshit.
Thanks for this – I’d heard, but hadn’t yet grasped its meaning. You’ve supplied a sound context for thinking about the announcement. Appreciated as always.
Don’t expect all that many jobs to happen, either. Printed Circuit Board manufacturing is almost entirely automated. Setup for a PCB run involves loading a bunch of reels of parts stuck to tape into a pick-and-place robot, but then you just stand back and watch the machine do everything else. Pick-and-place robots pick the parts off the reels and put them on the pcb in a blur. Then the PCB goes thru a heat-tunnel and comes out the other end all soldered together. Inspection, both visual and functional, is totally automated and astoundingly fast. Anything failing testing gets kicked off the line for rework. There is rather little manual work involved, other than bagging the assembled and tested PCB’s in anti-static packaging and putting them in boxes.