Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 29m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred thirteenth day.
On this day in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis is captured: “The 1st Wisconsin Cavalry was one of the first units sent to search for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee. A Michigan unit, also sent to find Davis, accidentally attacked the cavalry before dawn. A few hours later, both units captured the Confederate president in Irwinville, Georgia.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Yascha Mounk writes How Authoritarians Manipulate Elections (“From Russia to Venezuela, the strongmen who have destroyed democratic institutions won high office at the ballot box”):
the new crop of authoritarian leaders is much more invested in retaining the appearance of a genuine democratic mandate. As a result, they have to engage in a more complicated political calculus: They have to give the opposition enough of a chance to compete in the elections to look credible to a significant segment of the population. But they must also capture political institutions such as electoral commissions to a sufficient extent to ensure that the people can’t actually boot them out of office.
As the recent developments in Turkey show, however, it may not be possible to sustain this equilibrium forever. Eventually, even governments that have effectively abolished the freedom of the press risk growing so unpopular that they have to resort to more blatant ways of rigging the vote.
But by the time he held his inspiring speech, Imamoglu knew all too well that, at least for the time being, Erdogan already had. After using his control over most of the country’s media to spread the insane conspiracy theory that a powerless opposition had somehow been able to falsify the outcome of the election, Erdogan went on to use his control over the country’s judiciary to cancel its result. Citing supposed irregularities, the electoral commission announced on Monday that Istanbul would hold new elections in June.
The announcement marks a fundamental turning point in Turkey’s political history: It is now impossible for any reasonable observer to keep denying reality. A country whose president has the power to annul elections when he doesn’t like their outcome has clearly become a dictatorship. From now on, anybody who still insists on calling Turkey a democracy, or treating its elections as a fair barometer of public opinion, is a liar or a fool.