Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred thirty-fourth day.
It’s the 244th year since America declared independence.
Recommended for reading in full —
Jonathan O’Connell reports Treasury, SBA appear to miss deadline to disclose small business loan data:
The Treasury Department and Small Businesses Administration appear unlikely to release information on hundreds of thousands of Paycheck Protection Program loans this week as planned, a setback in the Trump administration’s promises to be transparent about one of the largest economic stimulus packages ever created by the federal government.
After offering contradictory statements on how much information they would release about more than 4.8 million forgivable loans issued from the $660 billion program, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza announced last week that they would release the names of borrowers who received at least $150,000 in funds before the holiday weekend.
But as of Friday afternoon — a government holiday — the Treasury Department and SBA did not indicate any plans to release the data. Congressional aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the press, said they don’t expect the data to be released before Monday
David Rothkopf asks ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader?:
The worst among American presidents prior to Trump—Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce, for example—were all produced by the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century—a party that sought to defend or forgive slavery, and that tolerated and promoted a divided nation. Since President Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the modern Republican Party increasingly taken on that mantle. Trump is often said to have commandeered the GOP. But properly viewed in historical terms, the reverse is also true: President Trump could not exist without the post-Nixonian GOP that has Mitch McConnell patrolling the Senate and Bill Barr providing legal cover for the virtually unlimited power of the “unitary executive.”
….
Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections. That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.
Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. Just as Hamilton warned, a confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” Seizing the opportunity, unscrupulous “insolent men” have pandered to the lowest common denominators of fear and greed to win power and exploit it for a small elite. November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Or else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.