Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 01m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1893, Thomas Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jim Rutenberg, Jo Becker, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, Matthew Rosenberg, and Michael S. Schmidt report 77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election:

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne, who warned of “fake ballots” and voting-machine manipulation from China on One America News Network and Newsmax, which were finding ratings in their willingness to go further than Fox in embracing the fiction that Mr. Trump had won.

As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.

As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.

 Daniel Drezner writes of The retro presidency:

Much like during the campaign, Biden is betting big on how post-Trump governance will work. Biden wants to keep the White House focused on high-priority issues such as the pandemic and ameliorating the economic downturn. He is delegating secondary issues to other components of the executive branch. And his White House is not going to comment on everything that animates political Twitter.

Journalists and commentators can debate whether this strategy will work (no doubt it helps that the former excessively online president is cut off from his waning agenda-setting power). For the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts, it represents an interesting reversal in presidential power.

How 800 Million Pounds of Himalayan Salt are Mined Each Year:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1961, as part of Project Mercury, the chimpanzee Ham travels into outer space on Mercury-Redstone 2.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rachel Siegel, Andrew Van Dam, and Erica Werner report 2020 was the worst year for economic growth since World War II:

The U.S. economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged factories, businesses and households, pushing U.S. economic growth to a low not seen since the United States wound down wartime spending in 1946.

Overall, the economy was surprisingly resilient in the second half of the year, given the falloff at the start of the public health crisis, according to data released Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Yet, the 1 percent growth in the fourth quarter signaled a faltering recovery and a long road ahead, with 9.8 million jobs still missing and 23.8 million adults struggling to feed their families.

“2020 has no precedent in modern economic history,” said David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former director of the domestic economics division at the Federal Reserve. “The influenza of 1918 and 1919 predates our modern system of economic statistics, and since World War II, there’s never been a contraction that even remotely approached the severity and the breadth of the initial collapse in 2020.”

 Alana Wise reports ‘Unconscionable’: Capitol Police Union Says Leadership Failed Officers In Riot:

The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force’s leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief’s recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress “a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers.”

The statement Wednesday from the Capitol Police Labor Committee comes a day after acting Chief Yogananda Pittman testified to Congress, saying in prepared remarks:

By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.

Pittman, who apologized in her testimony for her department’s “failings” during the insurrection, told Congress that the former police chief, Steven Sund, had asked the Capitol Police Board, a three-member oversight body, on Jan. 4 to declare a state of emergency for Jan. 6 and to request National Guard assistance.

Adam Goldman, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat (‘Federal law enforcement shifted resources last year in response to Donald Trump’s insistence that the radical left endangered the country. Meanwhile, right-wing extremism was building ominously’)

Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left-wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized, according to two people who worked on Justice Department efforts to counter domestic terrorism. They were told to do so even though the F.B.I., in particular, had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well-organized far-right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the president.

White House and Justice Department officials stifled internal efforts to publicly promote concerns about the far-right threat, with aides to Mr. Trump seeking to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism” in internal discussions, according to a former official at the Department of Homeland Security.

Spacewalk, Elves, Space Debris and more: 

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy, a daytime high of thirty-one, and snow later this evening.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 56m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1930, the Politburo of the Soviet Union orders that a million prosperous peasant families be driven off their farms.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Neil MacFarquhar reports Member of Extremist Group Pleads Guilty in Michigan Governor Kidnapping Plot:

One member of an antigovernment group accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan last fall pleaded guilty on Wednesday in federal court, with documents revealing new details about the group’s plans to storm the Michigan Capitol and commit other violence.

Ty G. Garbin, a 25-year-old airplane mechanic, agreed to testify against the other five defendants charged in federal court in Western Michigan, according to the plea agreement filed by prosecutors. Eight other men have been accused in state court of cooperating with the violent plans, and Mr. Garbin will serve as a witness against them, too, it said.

Under questioning by Judge Robert J. Jonker in court, Mr. Garbin said he realized that his testimony might end up hurting people he knows. His sentencing was scheduled for July 8.

Rachel Weiner and Spencer S. Hsu report Actions by Proud Boy at Capitol show ‘planning, determination, and coordination,’ U.S. alleges:

According to prosecutors, members of the Proud Boys used walkie-talkie-style communication devices to coordinate during the attack. On [Dominic] Pezzola’s computer, [Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik] Kenerson said, FBI agents found information on making homemade firearms, poisons and explosives. Once inside the Capitol, authorities say, Pezzola and the Hughes brothers engaged in a confrontation with Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman at the foot of a staircase, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit, “advancing .?.?. in a menacing manner.” While Doug Jensen, 41, of Des Moines is identified as the “primary aggressor,” the Hughes brothers “followed immediately” behind him, the agent wrote. Pezzola, according to prosecutors, was also part of the group.

 Dan Davies writes The GameStop affair is like tulip mania on steroids:

Towards the end of 1636, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Netherlands. The concept of a lockdown was not really established at the time, but merchant trade slowed to a trickle. Idle young men in the town of Haarlem gathered in taverns, and looked for amusement in one of the few commodities still trading – contracts for the delivery of flower bulbs the following spring. What ensued is often regarded as the first financial bubble in recorded history – the “tulip mania”.

Nearly 400 years later, something similar has happened in the US stock market. This week, the share price of a company called GameStop – an unexceptional retailer that appears to have been surprised and confused by the whole episode – became the battleground between some of the biggest names in finance and a few hundred bored (mostly) bros exchanging messages on the WallStreetBets forum, part of the sprawling discussion site Reddit.

Tokyo as Japan’s city garden:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:05 PM, for 9h 54m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1980, the Rubik’s Cube makes its international debut at the Ideal Toy Corp. in Earl’s Court, London.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David E. Sanger reports Biden Team Rushes to Take Over Government, and Oust Trump Loyalists (‘President Biden named nearly all of his cabinet secretaries and their immediate deputies before he took office, but his real grasp on the levers of power has come several layers down’):

When President Biden swore in a batch of recruits for his new administration in a teleconferenced ceremony late last week, it looked like the country’s biggest Zoom call. In fact, Mr. Biden was installing roughly 1,000 high-level officials in about a quarter of all of the available political appointee jobs in the federal government.

At the same time, a far less visible transition was taking place: the quiet dismissal of holdovers from the Trump administration, who have been asked to clean out their offices immediately, whatever the eventual legal consequences.

If there has been a single defining feature of the first week of the Biden administration, it has been the blistering pace at which the new president has put his mark on what President Donald J. Trump dismissed as the hostile “Deep State” and tried so hard to dismantle.

David Smith reports ‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy:

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship.

(Trump could be wholly sympathetic [to Russia] without being either an agent or an asset.)

 David Folkenflik reports Trumpism At Voice Of America: Firings, Foosball And A Conspiracy Theory:

(Michael) Pack’s seven-month tenure offered a near-perfect encapsulation of Trumpism. Once confirmed by the Senate, Pack announced his charge was “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of [anti-Trump] bias,” as he put it on The Federalist Radio Hour, a conservative podcast. Pack obsessed over staff loyalty, embraced conspiracy theories and refused to allow visa extensions for his foreign journalists.

….

“I have dealt with federal agencies for almost 30 years, through both Democrat and Republican leadership,” said Mark S. Zaid, an attorney who has been representing several USAGM and VOA senior leaders who filed formal whistleblower complaints against Pack. “I have never encountered as many senior political officials to be so petty, vindictive, arrogant, egotistical and mean-spirited, epitomizing the worst of Trump, as I did since Michael Pack arrived at USAGM as CEO.”

Dominion to Sue More People Over Election Misinformation:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 54s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1959, Vince Lombardi is named Packers coach.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Alex Ward reports Biden had his first call with Putin. He said everything Trump wouldn’t: 

Biden pressed Putin on the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which many suspect was an assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin, as well as the government’s arrest of hundreds of protesters who demonstrated in support of Navalny last weekend.

Earlier on Tuesday, the US and six other G7 nations released a statement condemning the Kremlin for the poisoning, the protest crackdown, and for detaining Navalny last week on seemingly bogus charges.

During the call, Biden also affirmed America’s support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, which has been under threat since Russia invaded the country in 2014. During his confirmation hearing to be secretary of state last week, Antony Blinken told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the Biden administration would continue to support Kyiv with lethal aid.

Biden also brought up three major issues related to Moscow’s belligerence toward the United States: Russia’s interference in the 2020 election; its alleged ties to the hacking of dozens of US government agencies and Fortune 500 companies by infiltrating SolarWindssoftware; and reports that Russia had offered cash bounties to Afghan militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan.

See also Whitehouse.gov, Readout of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Oliver Darcy writes of Zuckerberg’s Big Decision:

Mark Zuckerberg built one of the world’s most powerful — if not the most powerful — radicalization engines in history. For years and years, his platform has algorithmically pushed people into ideological political bubbles and reinforced their existing worldviews. It has enabled and rewarded media organizations profiting off of hyper-partisan trash and outright disinformation. And it has looked the other way as conspiracy theories, such as QAnon, flourished on the site

All the while, Zuckerberg was aware. But he defended his platform’s practices, while making a fortune, repeatedly hiding behind a commitment to free expression as reason to allow for poison to be injected into the American political conversation. But on Wednesday, Zuckerberg announced what can only be viewed as an about-face.

The Facebook chief observed on a call with investors — in which the company posted an $11.2 billion profit in Q4, an increase of more than 50% from the year prior — that “there has been a trend across society that a lot of things have become politicized and politics have had a way of creeping into everything.” (Hmm, I wonder what might have contributed to this!) “One of the top pieces of feedback that we’re hearing from our community right now is that people don’t want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our services,” Zuckerberg added.

As a result, Zuckerberg said Facebook is now considering steps it can take to reduce the volume of political content shown to users in News Feed. Additionally, Facebook will continue a practice of not recommending civic and political groups to users, a move that had been implemented ahead of the 2020 presidential election…

(Emphasis in original.)

Teacher Cathy Cluck goes on road trip to teach students from historical sites across U.S.:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 10:30 AM, and the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1967, Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Leonhardt writes Why is there a big debate over the filibuster? Because it benefits one political party much more than the other: 

If you examine the history of the filibuster — a Senate rule requiring a supermajority vote on many bills, rather than a straight majority — you will quickly notice something: It has benefited the political right much more than the left.

In the 1840s (before the term “filibuster” existed), Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina used the technique to protect slavery.

Over the next century, Southern Democrats repeatedly used the filibuster to prevent Black Americans from voting and to defeat anti-lynching bills.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Senate Republicans, working with some conservative Democrats, blocked the passage of laws that would have helped labor unions organize workers.

Over the past two decades, the filibuster has enabled Republicans to defeat a long list of progressive bills, on climate change, oil subsidies, campaign finance, Wall Street regulation, corporate offshoring, gun control, immigration, gender pay equality and Medicare expansion.

Jennifer Rubin writes 50 things that are better already:

1. You can ignore Twitter

2. The White House briefing room is not an Orwellian nightmare of lies

3. We are now confronting white domestic terrorism

4. We are not paying for golf trips

5. There are no presidential relatives in government

6. The tenor of hearings is sober and serious

7. Qualified and knowledgeable nominees have been selected for senior spots

8. We have a first lady who engages with the public

9. We have not heard a word from presidential children

10. We are now tough on Russian human rights abuses

11. We get normal readouts of sane conversations between the president and foreign leaders

12. The White House philosophy is to underpromise and overdeliver, not the other way around

How Dala Horses Are Handmade in One of the Last Factories in Sweden: