Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 32m 32s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

On this day in 1990, Lithuania declares independence from the Soviet Union.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Molly Beck reports Speaker Robin Vos, Assembly official denied immunocompromised lawmaker’s request to work virtually during COVID pandemic:

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, and the Legislature’s human resources director, Amanda Jorgenson, have rejected requests from Rep. Jodi Emerson, D-Eau Claire, to participate in floor sessions and committee hearings from her office.

The requests were made by Emerson and her doctor to reduce Emerson’s risk of contracting the virus until she became fully vaccinated because of a medication she takes to suppress her immune system to manage an autoimmune disease Emerson was diagnosed with years ago.

“As you are aware, COVID-19 is not an airborne transmitted disease,” Jorgenson wrote to Emerson on April 4 rejecting the request. “Therefore, protection for you is based on limiting particulate exposure.”

Jorgenson and Vos offered Emerson a portable plexiglass barrier instead.

….

Patrick Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, agreed.

“I don’t know what research they are reading. But COVID-19 can clearly be transmitted via airborne spread,” Remington said. “It might not be the predominant mode of transmission, but it is clearly able to be transmitted via small particles through the air.”

James Downie writes of The big myth about Cheney, Trump and the GOP:

The reason there’s no battle is that while Cheney, Hogan and others want to argue that their vision of the Republican Party competes with Trump’s, that’s simply not the case. I’ve written previously that the GOP is still Trump’s GOP. But the reverse is also true: Trump’s GOP is the GOP as it’s ever been.

Others have noted that the distance between Cheney’s GOP and Trump’s GOP is far smaller than she’d admit. As the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd notes in a new column, Cheney’s father, Richard B. Cheney, as vice president, “spread fear, propaganda and warped intelligence” to push the United States into the disastrous Iraq War, while encouraging President George W. Bush to shred the Constitution in expanding presidential and surveillance powers. And long before Trump became president, Liz Cheney was reluctant to criticize birtherism, only describing it on CNN as “people [being] uncomfortable with having for the first time ever, I think, a president who seems so reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

AJ Vicens and Ali Breland report How HBO Helped the Guy Hosting QAnon Dodge a Serious Accusation:

Over the course of his new six episode HBO documentary, Into The Storm, filmmaker Cullen Hoback exhaustively details the intrigue and shadowy players involved in the QAnon conspiracy theory. As CNN’s Brian Lowry explains, “Hoback appears determined not to leave any stones unturned.”

The documentary is comprehensive and does flip a lot of stones. Hoback leverages sustained access to key players in the QAnon movement to tell a story about one of the most consequential disinformation operations of the Trump era. He does, however, pass on overturning one rather large stone: chief Q-enabler Jim Watkins’ history of running an internet company that has profited off child porn themes. The omission deprives HBO’s audience of key information on Watkins’ past, especially given his prominent role in movement seeking vengeance against a supposed cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.

Is a Yukon road trip the ultimate wild ride?:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see intervals of clouds and sunshine with a shower in places, and a high of 55. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 30m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board meets in closed session at 6 PM and open session at 6:15 PM.

On this day in 1869, the First Transcontinental Railroad, linking the eastern and western United States, is completed at Promontory Summit, Utah with the golden spike.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Emma Brown, Aaron C. Davis, Jon Swaine, and Josh Dawsey report The making of a myth (‘Russell J. Ramsland Jr. sold everything from Tex-Mex food to light-therapy technology. Then he sold the story that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump’):

ADDISON, Tex. — Key elements of the baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump took shape in an airplane hangar here two years earlier, promoted by a Republican businessman who has sold everything from Tex-Mex food in London to a wellness technology that beams light into the human bloodstream.

At meetings beginning late in 2018, as Republicans were smarting from midterm losses in Texas and across the country, Russell J. Ramsland Jr. and his associates delivered alarming presentations on electronic voting to a procession of conservative lawmakers, activists and donors.

Briefings in the hangar had a clandestine air. Guests were asked to leave their cellphones outside before assembling in a windowless room. A member of Ramsland’s team purporting to be a “white-hat hacker” identified himself only by a code name.

….

The enduring myth that the 2020 election was rigged was not one claim by one person. It was many claims stacked one atop the other, repeated by a phalanx of Trump allies. This is the previously unreported origin story of a core set of those claims, ideas that were advanced not by renowned experts or by insiders who had knowledge of flawed voting systems but by Ramsland and fellow conservative activists as they pushed a fledgling company, Allied Security Operations Group, into a quixotic attempt to find evidence of widespread fraud where none existed.

To assemble a picture of the company’s role, The Washington Post obtained emails and company documents and interviewed 12 people with direct knowledge of ASOG’s efforts, as well as former federal officials and aides from the Trump White House. Many spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters or out of fear of retribution. Three individuals who were present in the hangar for those 2018 meetings spoke about the gatherings publicly for the first time.

 Laura Silver writes Ideological divisions over cultural issues are far wider in the U.S. than in the UK, France and Germany:

When it comes to key cultural issues, Americans are significantly more divided along ideological lines than people in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted in the four countries in fall 2020.

Across 11 questions on cultural subjects ranging from nationalism to political correctness, the gap between the ideological left and right in the United States – or liberals and conservatives, in the common U.S. parlance – is significantly wider than the ideological gaps found in the European countries surveyed. In some cases, this is because America’s conservatives are outliers. In other cases, it’s because America’s liberals are outliers. In still other cases, both the right and left in the U.S. hold more extreme positions than their European counterparts, resulting in ideological gaps that are more than twice the size of those seen in the UK, Germany or France.

Heaven or sacrilege? Italy’s pizza vending machine stirs controversy:

Good morning.

Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 28m 06s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1815, Francis Ronalds describes the first battery-operated clock in the Philosophical Magazine.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Philip Bump writes Time has only weakened the argument that the Russia probe was a victory for Trump:

For example, in early February 2019, a member of Mueller’s team argued to a federal judge that an August 2016 meeting between Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and a man named Konstantin Kilimnik went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating” — that is, the question of possible coordination. In the final Mueller report, though, the investigators admitted that they couldn’t answer key questions about that meeting.

At that meeting, Manafort had shared campaign data with Kilimnik, though Mueller’s team “could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period.” This was hampered by Manafort offering false information to his team and to the grand jury and by Manafort’s using encrypted messaging apps.

“Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik,” the Mueller report reads, his team, referred to as “the Office,” “could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting.”

Only last month was the question of what happened more fully answered: Kilimnik — who had been previously identified as a Russian intelligence agent (including casually by Manafort’s number two at the campaign) — “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”  

 Adam Gopnik writes What Liberalism Can Learn from What It Took to Defeat Donald Trump:

The first lesson, and vindication, for those of that liberal turn of mind is the continuing demonstration of the superiority, both moral and pragmatic, of pluralism to purism. That truth has been demonstrated twice by that improbable liberal hero Joe Biden, first in the Democratic primaries and then in the general election. There was an extended moment, in 2018 and 2019, when a dominant belief on the left was that the only way to counter the extreme narrowness of Trumpism was with an equally pointed alternative. Bernie Sanders, whose values and programs—Medicare for All, breaking up the banks, a Green New Deal—have long appeared admirable to many, still seemed to rest his campaign on a belief that one could win the Democratic nomination without a majority, as long as the minority was sufficiently motivated and committed, and as long as the rest of the field remained fragmented.

But the inflamed flamed out. Biden, despite his uninspiring social-media presence and his generally antediluvian vibe, shifted, like his party, to the left, yet managed to pull together a broad coalition to win the nomination, and then did it again against Donald Trump. The pluralism of that coalition stretched from its base, among African-American women, to those suburban white women who turned on Trump, to disaffected McCain Republicans, in Arizona, to Latinos—who, warningly, in some areas voted less Democratic than in the past, but still voted Democratic. (And not to forget those neocon Never Trumpers who seem to have played a small but significant role in turning key votes in key places.)

How 7 Million Flowers Are Planted At Keukenhof Every Year:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 58. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 25m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 9.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, the German Instrument of Surrender signed at Reims comes into effect.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ben Tractenberg writes of Fighting the Last Free Speech War:

As legal scholar Heidi Kitrosser put it in a 2017 article in the Minnesota Law Review, there has been “tremendous imprecision” in the campus speech debate. “Many commentators,” she explained, “decry political correctness as a threat to free speech but leave unclear whether, by political correctness, they mean campus speech codes, informal social pressures, or something else.”

In other words, the incidents often cited as evidence of the “free-speech crisis” usually don’t involve censorship of speech. In fact, when it comes to actual censorship, today there is little appetite or support for it on either the left or the right. Thus, a recent National Review piece allowed that campus activists on the left no longer “disinvite” speakers with whom they disagree—but accomplish the same thing by not inviting them in the first place.

In The Big Lebowski, the Dude cuts to the chase: It’s “not a First Amendment thing, man.” If you express your ideas and people respond by laughing at you or even calling you a racist, they may be rude or unkind—but no one has trampled on your rights.

Alla Katsnelson reports A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains:

It’s well established that growing up in poverty correlates with disparities in educational achievement, health and employment. But an emerging branch of neuroscience asks how poverty affects the developing brain.

Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies have found that children raised in meager circumstances have subtle brain differences compared with children from families of higher means. On average, the surface area of the brain’s outer layer of cells is smaller, especially in areas relating to language and impulse control, as is the volume of a structure called the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory.

These differences don’t reflect inherited or inborn traits, research suggests, but rather the circumstances in which the children grew up. Researchers have speculated that specific aspects of poverty — subpar nutrition, elevated stress levels, low-quality education — might influence brain and cognitive development. But almost all the work to date is correlational. And although those factors may be at play to various degrees for different families, poverty is their common root. A continuing study called Baby’s First Years, started in 2018, aims to determine whether reducing poverty can itself promote healthy brain development.

“None of us thinks income is the only answer,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist and pediatrician at Teachers College, Columbia University, who is co-leading the work. “But with Baby’s First Years, we are moving past correlation to test whether reducing poverty directly causes changes in children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development.”

Dr. Noble and her collaborators are examining the effects of giving poor families cash payments in amounts that wound up being comparable to those the Biden administration will distribute as part of an expanded child tax credit.

Cat carried away from Scottish polling station:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 56. Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 23m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 16.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1920, Soviet Russia recognizes the independence of the Democratic Republic of Georgia only to invade the country six months later.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Nathalie Baptiste reports The Wave of GOP Anti-Protest Bills Will Criminalize Protesters—and Sabotage Police Reform, Too:

In the wake of the widespread George Floyd protests last year, Republican lawmakers across the country flooded the zone with so-called anti-riot bills. Last month, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law the draconian “Combating Public Disorder” measure that expands the definition of riot to mean a “violent public disturbance involving 3 or more people,” increases the penalty for participating in a riot, and gives police the discretion to decide what a riot is—and isn’t.

“The criminal aspects of this bill are already illegal,” Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said. “[It] protects no one, makes no one safer, and does nothing to make people’s lives better. It’s simply to appease the Governor’s delusion of widespread lawlessness.”

Despite being criticized for extremism, dozens of Republican-dominated states like Ohio and Arizona have similar measures succeeding in state legislatures and on their ways to become laws. “I think you’re going to see other states sort of picking up the ideas as well, so yeah, this is a real victory for him,” Florida State University Professor Carol Weissert told an NBC affiliate.

 Bruce Vielmetti reports Lawsuit alleges cheese fraud in Bagel Bites Pizza Snacks:

An Elroy woman has sued food giant Kraft Heinz, saying the packaging of its Bagel Bites Pizza Snacks amounts to fraud.

Kaitlyn Huber’s federal lawsuit, filed over the weekend in Madison, says a box featuring the Real Dairy seal, and the large type announcing mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce, are “false, deceptive and misleading.”

The suit, which seeks class-action status on behalf of anyone who bought the bites in Wisconsin, asks the court to make Kraft Heinz correct its packaging and for unspecified damages.

“Wisconsin consumers want real mozzarella cheese in pizza because they value (1) its soft, moist texture, (2) its milky, yet tangy taste and (3) its high protein and relatively low calories and sodium compared to other cheeses,” the suit states.

The suggestion that Bagel Bites Pizza Snacks are made with tomato sauce is also bogus, according to Huber’s suit.

“Reasonable Wisconsin consumers expect a product claiming to contain ‘Tomato Sauce’ will contain only tomato ingredients and seasonings instead of thickeners like cornstarch and methylcellulose,” it reads.

Huber’s lawsuit claims Wisconsin and federal regulations require any purported mozzarella that contains added food starch — in place of milk — to be labeled as imitation mozzarella cheese.

Traffic: This 100-Year Failure Is Getting a Solution:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 61. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 21m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 24.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, the Alcohol Licensing Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:45 PM, and the Community Development Authority via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1889, the Eiffel Tower is officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Alec MacGillis reports Kushner Companies Violated Multiple Laws in Massive Tenant Dispute, Judge Rules:

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh brought the consumer-protection case against Westminster Management, the property-management arm of Kushner Companies, in 2019 following a 2017 article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine on the company’s treatment of its tenants at the 15 housing complexes it owned in the Baltimore area, which have served as profitable ballast for a company better known for its gleaming properties in New York. The article revealed the company’s aggressive pursuit of current and former tenants in court over unpaid rent and broken leases, even in cases where tenants were in the right, as well as the shoddy conditions of many units.

To build its case, the attorney general’s office subpoenaed records from the company and solicited testimony from current and former tenants, who provided it via remote video link to Administrative Law Judge Emily Daneker late last year.

In her 252-page ruling last week, which was first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Daneker determined that the company had issued a relentless barrage of questionable fees on tenants over the course of many years, including both the fees identified in the 2017 article and others as well. In more than 15,000 instances, Westminster charged in excess of the state-maximum $25 fee to process a rental application. In more than 28,000 instances, the company also assessed a $12 “agent fee” on court filings against tenants even though it had incurred no such cost with the courts — a tactic that Daneker called “spurious” and which brought the company more than $332,000 in fees. And in more than 2,600 instances, the Kushner operation assessed $80 court fees to tenants at its two complexes within the city of Baltimore, even though the charge from the courts was only $50. “The practice of passing court costs on to tenants, in the absence of a court order,” Daneker wrote, “was deceptive.”

The manifold fees suggested a deliberate strategy to run up tenants’ tabs, Daneker wrote, repeatedly calling the practices “widespread and numerous.” She concluded that “these circumstances do not support a finding that this was the result of isolated or inadvertent mistakes.”

 Christina Lieffring reports The Price of Vaccine Hesitancy: More Than 1,000 Wasted Doses a Week in Wisconsin:

Demand has dropped off so sharply that 1,000 to 2,000 doses are being wasted per week, Wisconsin’s No. 2 health official said Tuesday. Vials of vaccine contain multiple doses that must be used within hours of the vial being opened.

During a press briefing on Tuesday, Julie Willems Van Dijk, deputy DHS secretary, said that her department had anticipated a slowdown once “the people who were most eager or most anxious, or most committed to getting vaccines largely have been able to secure a vaccine.” But she did not anticipate how quick the drop-off would be.

“I would call it a pretty precipitous drop in demand,” Willems Van Dijk said. “When the vaccine supply started to stabilize and we opened up to larger and larger populations, people were very quickly able to get doses. And then very quickly we saw a demand dropoff here in Wisconsin, as we have seen in other places.”

Starship SN15 High-Altitude Flight Test:

Video set to play at 10 seconds before liftoff; successful landing begins at 12:00 mark.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 63. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 18m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 33.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

There will be a joint meeting of the Whitewater Planning Commission, Common Council, and Community Development Authority via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM, followed by an audiovisual meeting of the Whitewater Common Council.

On this day in 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Michael S. Schmidt reports Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions:

A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.

“The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Judge Jackson wrote of Mr. Trump.

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.

Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”

 Dan Diamond reports The coronavirus vaccine skeptics who changed their minds:

Kim Simmons, a 61-year-old small-business owner in Illinois, vividly remembers the moment she went from vaccine skeptic to vaccine-ready: watching a Johns Hopkins University doctor on C-SPAN make the case for why the shots are safe.

For Lauren Bergner, a 39-year-old homemaker in New Jersey, it was when she realized it would make it easier for her family to attend New York Yankees games, after the team announced fans would need to show proof of a negative coronavirus test or that they had been vaccinated.

And for Elizabeth Greenaway, a 34-year-old communications consultant in Pennsylvania, it was the sudden fear that if she got sick, she wasn’t sure who would take care of her 2-year-old daughter, who has a rare health condition.

“Thinking about herd immunity, thinking about my daughter, thinking about all of that, I just realized — it’s about being a part of something bigger than yourself,” said Greenaway, who’s had to cut back on work to care for her daughter.

Space-aged wine could sell for $1 million after spending 14 months on International Space Station:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 61. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 7:59 PM, for 14h 16m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 43.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1814, Napoleon arrives at Portoferraio on the island of Elba to begin his (first) exile.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Elliot Hughes reports Two more Wisconsin men — one of them a National Guard member — charged with entering U.S. Capitol during Jan. 6 riot:

Two more Wisconsin men — one of them a member of the Wisconsin Army National Guard — were charged Monday in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

According to federal court documents, the men drove from the Madison area to Washington in January and entered the U.S. Capitol during the storming of the building.

Brandon Nelson and Abram Markofski, the Guard member, both admitted entering the building after attending then-President Donald Trump’s rally south of the White House earlier in the day, according to a criminal complaint.

The two have been charged with entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a restricted building, violent entry, and parading or demonstrating in a Capitol building.

They are at least the fourth and fifth Wisconsin residents — among more than 400 nationwide — charged in connection with the Jan. 6 raid on the Capitol.

 Haley BeMiller reports Radisson gunman threatened former boss before deadly shooting but allowed by court to possess firearms:

ASHWAUBENON – A gunman who killed two people and injured a third at Duck Creek Kitchen + Bar was under a restraining order, but still allowed to possess firearms, after he threatened his former boss.

Brown County Sheriff Todd Delain said Monday that Bruce K. Pofahl shot and killed Ian J. Simpson, 32, and Jacob T. Bartel, 35, and seriously injured 28-year-old Danny Mulligan in an attack Saturday that began at the restaurant inside the Radisson Hotel & Conference Center. The hotel is attached to the Oneida Casino in Ashwaubenon.

Police shot and killed the 62-year-old gunman outside the building.

Pofahl was fired from his job as the restaurant’s food and beverage manager earlier this year, Delain said. He was not allowed to be on the property.

 Tom Humburger reports U.S. trustee opposes NRA bankruptcy petition in blow to gun rights group:

The recommendation bolstered the arguments of New York Attorney General Letitia James (D), whose office has fought the NRA’s attempts to relocate from New York to Texas, and came after senior NRA executives acknowledged in court testimony that they received lavish perks.

Linda Lambert, a lawyer with the U.S. trustee’s office — which participates in bankruptcy cases to protect taxpayer interests and enforce bankruptcy laws — told the court that the evidence presented in the hearing showed that the nonprofit organization lacked proper oversight and that personal expenses were masked as business costs.

Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy expert at the Georgetown University Law Center, said the position of the trustee — a Justice Department official who typically remains neutral in a bankruptcy proceeding — does not bode well for the NRA.

“I don’t see how the NRA pulls off a win here,” he said, adding: “I think it’s pretty clear that the NRA loses. The real question is what the remedy will be.”

 Apple Faces Landmark App Store Lawsuit: