Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 57m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred forty-sixth day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 1:30 PM.
On this day in 1941, the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge is established.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jonathan O’Connell, Emma Brown, Steven Rich, and Aaron Gregg report Faulty data collection raises questions about Trump’s claims on PPP program:
A trove of data on $517 billion in emergency small-business loans contains numerous errors that cast doubt on the Trump administration’s jobs claims and obscure the real economic impact of the program, according to a Washington Post analysis and interviews with bankers and borrowers.
A Post analysis of data on 4.9 million loans released last week by the Small Business Administration shows that many companies are reported to have “retained” far more workers than they employ. Likewise, in some cases the agency’s jobs claim for entire industries surpasses the total number of workers in those sectors.
And for more than 875,000 borrowers, the data shows that zero jobs were supported or no information is listed at all, according to the analysis.
The flaws raise questions about the claims by the Trump administration that 51 million jobs were “supported” by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which has been a rare bright spot for the administration at a time of a surging coronavirus pandemic and a suddenly stalling economic recovery. Many economists credit the program with helping staunch the deep wounds in the job market by offering forgivable loans to small businesses that rehire or keep workers on their payroll.
(Emphasis added.)
Rob Mentzer reports Voter Participation Declining In Wisconsin, Civic Health Measures Mixed (‘A New Study Of Civic Engagement In Wisconsin Finds Trends Toward Disconnectedness’):
Wisconsin has seen a “dramatic” decline in voting rates in recent years, and Wisconsinites are less likely than the national average to say they volunteer or do favors for their neighbors, a new study of the state’s civic health finds.
The new “Civic Health in Wisconsin” study by the Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison represents the first time civic engagement data has been tracked statewide, said Mary Beth Collins, the center’s director and one of the study’s principal authors. It looks at data on Wisconsinites’ connectedness to their communities using a range of measures, from volunteerism and voting to the amount of time spent with neighbors and friends.
Civic engagement is important, Collins said, because it represents the way people relate to those around them and our ability to come together to improve our communities.
….
In local government, rural Wisconsin has seen an especially acute decline in the number of candidates willing to contest elections to village boards or city councils. From 2008 to 2018, more than 44 percent of these boards became less competitive, the report finds. Collins called it one measure of how engaged people feel in their communities.