Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of 55. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 24m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5 PM.
On this day in 1895, Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single-handedly around the world, sets sail from Boston, Massachusetts aboard the sloop Spray.
Recommended for reading in full —
Brian Klaas writes of Peter Pomerantsev in He worked in Russian media. He recognizes the same tactics at Fox News:
In a newly released report, U.S. intelligence agencies outline how Russia yet again sought to subvert American democracy. The findings confirm that the Kremlin tried to plant damaging disinformation about Joe Biden among associates of then-President Donald Trump.
That report and others that preceded it are important, because the foreign threat to American democracy is real and growing. But they should not distract us from a disturbing reality: The most serious danger to the United States from the Russian propaganda playbook doesn’t come from Moscow. It comes from Manhattan, where Fox News prime-time hosts broadcast conspiracy theories and disinformation while mimicking tactics that insiders in Russian media easily recognize.
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Specifically, Pomerantsev points to two major areas of strategic overlap. First, there’s a shared war on facts that tries to convince the viewer that accountability is a fool’s errand because true objectivity does not exist.
“There’s this kind of pop-postmodernism, where Sean Hannity will say things like objectivity doesn’t exist, everybody’s biased,” Pomerantsev says. He points to Hannity’s infamous interview with Ted Koppel, in which he contrasted his own style with what he sees as the charade of “objective” facts in other areas of the press. “I don’t pretend that I’m fair and balanced and objective,” Hannity bizarrely boasted.
“That’s exactly the same argument the Russians make,” Pomerantsev says. He recalls a famous phrase uttered by Dmitry Kiselev, a prime-time TV host who was also appointed by Vladimir Putin to run Kremlin’s international propaganda network, Rossiya Segodnya. “Objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.”
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Pomerantsev sees another commonality between Fox News and Russian media. Both, he argues, treat news as entertainment, complete with characters designed to depict those who hold opposing viewpoints as buffoonish caricatures. “They turn everything into a Jerry Springer show. … Essentially, Tucker Carlson has ‘idiot liberals’ on.” Fox, he says, likes to present extreme left-wingers whose positions can be easily caricatured; Russian TV uses cartoonish members of the opposition as objects of ridicule.
Sam Levine reports Republicans wage ‘coordinated onslaught’ on voting rights:
Republicans have openly talked about their intentions. “Everybody shouldn’t be voting,” John Kavanagh, a Republican in the Arizona state legislature, told CNN earlier this month. “Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality of votes, as well.”
Some Republicans say that their efforts to put new voting restrictions in place are part of an effort to restore confidence in elections and prevent voter fraud, which is extremely rare.
But others have shown that their motivation is anti-democratic. Trump dismissed proposals to make it easier to vote last year by saying: “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” And this month, Michael Carvin, a lawyer representing the Arizona Republican party, said something similar when Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked him what interest the party had in defending two Arizona voting restrictions. Lifting those restrictions, Carvin said, “puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game.”
(Video link updated) Suez Canal Blocked by Stuck Container Ship: