FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 7.30.20

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 31m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the one thousand three hundred sixtieth day. 

 On this day in 1974, Pres. Nixon releases subpoenaed White House recordings after being ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Peter Whoriskey reports First he got $4 million in COVID-19 relief loans. Then he bought a Lamborghini:

One of the first things David T. Hines bought when he got $4 million in COVID-19 relief loans from the feds for his supposedly ailing South Florida moving business was a super-luxury Lamborghini Huracan Evo, authorities say.

Needless to say, the Italian-made sports car — purchased by Hines in May for $318,497 — was not on the list of permissible expenses under a Small Business Administration loan program meant to protect employees and cover other legitimate costs like rent during the coronavirus pandemic.

Hines, who was arrested Friday, also spent thousands of dollars on dating websites, jewelry and clothes, along with stays at high-end hotels such as the Fontainebleau and Setai on Miami Beach.

The SBA’s Payroll Protection Program totaling nearly $650 billion was approved by Congress as part of the CARES Act after the coronavirus struck the nation in March, but Hines’ and other similar fraud cases are starting to pop up in South Florida and other parts of the country. The PPP loans are forgiven by the government if they are properly used by businesses. Congress is considering another major SBA loan infusion as the raging pandemic continues to hurt the U.S. economy.

Federal investigators linked the Lamborghini to Hines, who appeared in Miami federal court on fraud and other charges Monday, after he was involved in a hit-and-run accident on July 11. Miami police impounded his car, and now prosecutors plan to seize it.

….

According to a criminal complaint, Hines’ four South Florida moving businesses applied for seven SBA loans totaling $13.5 million through the Bank of America, saying the money would be spent on at least 70 employees with a monthly payroll of $4 million. The bank approved three of his applications, totaling $3,984,557.

 Molly Roberts writes The delusional experiment of sports during a pandemic:

The Miami Marlins clubhouse is crawling with the coronavirus. At least 17 players and coaches have tested positive for covid-19; the Philadelphia Phillies, plus their umpiring crew and stadium staff, await results after their dust-up with the infected Floridians; the New York Yankees were in lockdown before heading to Baltimore.

That’s the box score only after opening weekend — yet Major League Baseball says it’s not planning on cutting short its already stunted season.

Meanwhile, the entire National Basketball Association has gone to Disney World.

The show must go on, apparently, because we don’t know what we’d do without it. We’re looking to sports for a grand reprise of our regular lives in a very irregular summer.

The illusion starts with a delusion: that it’s really possible to wipe away risk altogether amid a pandemic. Next come the efforts to pretend, at least for nine sweet innings or four quarters, that there’s no pandemic at all.

What we learned from Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook’s Capitol Hill testimonies:

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