Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-two.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 20m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1924, Macy’s holds its first Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Recommended for reading in full — 

The Washington Post editorial board writes Biden needs to overhaul our immigration system. Because of Trump, it won’t be easy:

THE PORTION of Americans who favor more immigration stands at the highest level since Gallup began asking the question more than a half-century ago. Nearly 8 in 10 believe immigrants are good for the country. Those views, along with the central role immigrants have played in the United States’ economic success and global standing, buttressed President-elect Joe Biden’s pro-immigration platform.

If he is to implement it, Mr. Biden will also need a single-minded focus on overhauling immigration policy. Which is to say, Mr. Biden must emulate President Trump.

It is broadly true that incompetence has been a hallmark of the Trump White House, yet immigration policy has been a notable exception. The administration has adeptly dismantled decades of immigration policy and norms and, under the relentless tutelage of White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, managed to slash legal migration levels by about half compared with 2016. The administration gutted refugee and asylum admissions; halved the entrance of immediate relatives of current U.S. citizens; and, under cover of the coronavirus pandemic, completely halted the so-called diversity migration program, which grants green cards to underrepresented migrant populations, many from Africa.

To reverse course, as he has pledged to do, Mr. Biden would be wise to appoint his own immigration wizard. He made a good start by announcing he will nominate Alejandro Mayorkas, an immigrant himself and a top official in the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security, to lead that department. Mr. Mayorkas has referred to “dreamers,” the young undocumented migrants raised in this country after their parents brought them here as children, as “part of the tapestry of American life” — not exactly the sort of pronouncement one heard from the Trump administration.

David Frum writes Trump Pardoned Flynn to Save Himself:

Here’s the first and most important thing to understand about the crime for which President Trump just pardoned former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn: Flynn did not lie to protect himself. He lied to protect Donald Trump.

At the end of December 2016, Flynn had a series of conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. A month later, on January 24, 2017, Flynn was asked about those conversations by the FBI agent Peter Strzok.

From Flynn’s own narrow personal point of view, there was no reason to lie about any of these conversations.

….

One potential answer [to the question why Flynn lied], I would propose, is that Sessions and Flynn lied about their conversations with Kislyak precisely because they were not in the loop on Trump’s other contacts with Russia. They knew that the swirling Trump-Russia scandal was lethally radioactive. They did not know exactly where the radioactivity was centered. They lied to protect the group secret, without themselves knowing what the group secret was. They lied about their own contacts with the Russian ambassador because they intuited that there was some terrible truth about Russia that Trump would want concealed. And because they did not know that truth, they lied extravagantly and excessively, when a guiltier person might have lied more strategically and precisely.

How 100 Billion Cranberries Are Harvested In 6 Weeks:

Good morning.

Thanksgiving Day in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 21m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1838, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren write Trump’s Tweets Attacking the Election Echo Russian Trolls:

Since November 2020’s election, tweets from Trump and his inner circle show how close the Trump campaign is in tone and style to Russian disinformation—@DonaldJTrumpJr, “Ever notice the “glitches” only go one way?”. Yet the current campaign by the president and his allies is different in one important way: total impact. The president has brought disinformation to an audience that the IRA [Putin’s so-called ‘Internet Research Agency’] could only dream of. In the week following Election Day, the hashtag #StopTheSteal was used over 1.5 million times on Twitter. Russian disinformation operations have shown some success, but Trump’s campaign has been in an entirely different league in terms of impact. The aftershock of Russian disinformation operations in 2016 strained some Americans’ trust in the electoral process Here, the president—armed with baseless conspiracies about voter fraud—is challenging that trust like never before. No need for Russian trolls; this damage is completely self-inflicted.

Russian disinformation campaigns tried for years to help shape entirely divergent realities for different groups of Americans, hoping to create incompatible realities and groups incapable of compromise. They did so by pulling on the emotions of real Americans to convince them of ideas they were already inclined to believe. As recently as March, accounts we identified as Russian-affiliated were chipping away at America’s trust in fair and free elections with tweets such as that from @DannyMichigan, “I personally believe the driving motive behind the Russia hoax and other diversionary scams by Democrats is to camouflage their campaign of massive voter fraud. Illegal immigrants, dead voters, and their new tactic of “vote harvesting” are suffocating our democracy.” President Trump’s current campaign strategy doubles down on these same efforts and is pulling his followers more and more away from a reality based on shared facts. The president has called 2020 the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.”

This is plainly not true: experts in his own Department of Homeland Security called the election “the most secure in American history.”

 The Guardian reports Pie-eyed and bushy-tailed: Minnesota squirrel gets drunk off fermented pears:

The inebriated squirrel was caught swaying on camera by Katy Morlok of Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, who had put out an old pear from her fridge in her garden for local wildlife to eat. She saw one of the squirrels – whom she dubbed Lil Red – snatch the pear and take it up a tree.

An hour later, Lil Red returned apparently the worse for wear, unsteady on its feet but desperate for another round.

“It kind of dawned on me: ‘Oh no, those pears were so old, I bet they fermented,’” Morlok told local station Fox 9.

But the tipsy squirrel seemed to enjoy the pear so much, that Morlok put out some more. A video shows the glassy-eyed squirrel sitting next to the pears, swaying backwards and almost tipping over before grasping on to the edge of the bowl of fruit.

….

“In the morning, he came back for his little hangover breakfast and he’s been fine ever since,” she said.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see light rain with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 23m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, Union forces led by General Grant break the Siege of Chattanooga by routing Confederate troops under General Braxton Bragg.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Salvador Rizzo reports Trump tweets string of falsehoods about Wisconsin absentee voters:

“ ‘In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee. In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000…and Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.’ @VicToensing @newsmax”

— President Trump, in a tweet, Nov. 24, 2020

….

Let’s debunk these claims one by one.

“In Wisconsin, somebody has to be indefinitely confined in order to vote absentee.”

False. Wisconsin law allows any registered voter to request an absentee ballot, and no excuse has been required since 2000.

“Under Wisconsin law, voters do not need a reason or excuse, such as being out of town on Election Day, to vote absentee,” the state’s election website says. “Any voter who prefers to vote by absentee ballot may request one.”

“In the past there were 20,000 people. This past election there were 120,000.”

Under Wisconsin law: “Voters who are indefinitely confined due to age, illness, infirmity, or disability may request that a ballot be automatically sent to them for each election. Indefinitely confined voters do not need to provide a photo ID with their absentee ballot request.”

This is an accommodation for voters who cannot physically go to the polls. They have the option of receiving mail ballots automatically for each election and don’t need to provide a photo ID with their request. The requirements are stricter for other Wisconsin absentee voters, who must request ballots for specific elections or years.

The suggestion here is that the number of indefinitely confined voters in Wisconsin grew suspiciously this year. But these numbers from Trump and Toensing are inaccurate, contradicted by the state’s official statistics. The real numbers tell a different story, and Reid Magney, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Elections Commission, told us “we have seen no evidence of fraud.”

Magney said that in November 2016, the state recorded 56,978 indefinitely confined absentee voters out of 144,802 absentee-by-mail voters. (That’s 39 percent.)For November 2020, Wisconsin’s preliminary figures show 215,713 indefinitely confined absentee voters out of approximately 1.32 million absentee-by-mail voters, or 16 percent. (Final figures will not be available until mid-December.)

“Republicans were locked out of the vote counting process.”

Republican observers have been present throughout Wisconsin’s counting process, during the initial count and now during the recount. In fact, local election officials say that Trump’s observers are seeking to gum up the works, “in some instances by objecting to every ballot tabulators pulled to count,” according to the Associated Press.

Maggie Haberman and Michael Crowley reports Trump Is Said to Plan Pardon of Flynn:

President Trump has told aides that he plans to pardon his former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn and that it is one of a string of pardons he plans to issue before leaving office, a person familiar with the discussions said on Tuesday.

Mr. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, twice pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his conversations with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition in late 2016 and early 2017. He was the only former White House official to plead guilty in the inquiry led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia’s election interference.

Hundreds of Rural Hospitals in Danger of Closing:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 25m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Sheera Frenkel reports How Misinformation ‘Superspreaders’ Seed False Election Theories:

New research from Avaaz, a global human rights group, the Elections Integrity Partnership and The New York Times shows how a small group of people — mostly right-wing personalities with outsized influence on social media — helped spread the false voter-fraud narrative that led to those rallies.

That group, like the guests of a large wedding held during the pandemic, were “superspreaders” of misinformation around voter fraud, seeding falsehoods that include the claims that dead people voted, voting machines had technical glitches, and mail-in ballots were not correctly counted.

“Because of how Facebook’s algorithm functions, these superspreaders are capable of priming a discourse,” said Fadi Quran, a director at Avaaz. “There is often this assumption that misinformation or rumors just catch on. These superspreaders show that there is an intentional effort to redefine the public narrative.”

Across Facebook, there were roughly 3.5 million interactions — including likes, comments and shares — on public posts referencing “Stop the Steal” during the week of Nov. 3, according to the research. Of those, the profiles of Eric Trump, Diamond and Silk and Mr. Straka accounted for a disproportionate share — roughly 6 percent, or 200,000, of those interactions.

While the group’s impact was notable, it did not come close to the spread of misinformation promoted by President Trump since then. Of the 20 most-engaged Facebook posts over the last week containing the word “election,” all were from Mr. Trump, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned analytics tool. All of those claims were found to be false or misleading by independent fact checkers.

The baseless election fraud claims have been used by the president and his supporters to challenge the vote in a number of states. Reports that malfunctioning voting machines, intentionally miscounted mail-in votes and other irregularities affected the vote were investigated by election officials and journalists who found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

 Annette McGivney reports Trump officials rush to mine desert haven native tribes consider holy:

Last month tribes discovered that the date for the completion of a crucial environmental review process has suddenly been moved forward by a full year, to December 2020, even as the tribes are struggling with a Covid outbreak that has stifled their ability to respond. If the environmental review is completed before Trump leaves office, the tribes may be unable to stop the mine.

In a meeting with environmental groups, local officials said that the push was occurring because “we are getting pressure from the highest level at the Department of Agriculture,” according to notes from the meeting seen by the Guardian. The department oversees the US Forest Service, which is in charge of Oak Flat.

As the curtain closes on the Trump era, officials are hurrying through a host of environmentally destructive projects that will benefit corporate interests. These include opening the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil and gas drilling and rolling back protections on endangered gray wolves.

In Oak Flat, the beneficiaries will be a company called Resolution Copper and its two Anglo-Australian parent firms, the mining conglomerates Rio Tinto and BHP.

Italy’s hospital relief: Hotels repurposed to accommodate coronavirus patients:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 26m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Schools’ board will meet in closed session at 6:15 PM, and in open session via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM. 

On this day in 1992, the first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rosalind S. Helderman and Dan Simmons report In last-gasp maneuver, Trump campaign tries to invalidate thousands of votes as Wisconsin recount gets underway:

President Trump’s campaign is seeking to use a recount of the presidential election in Wisconsin to attempt to invalidate tens of thousands of votes in the state, making sweeping challenges to whole categories of ballots cast in the state’s two Democratic-leaning counties in his last-gasp effort to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s win.

As a recount began on Friday in Dane and Milwaukee counties — home to the cities of Madison and Milwaukee — Trump lawyers argued that officials should not merely retabulate all the votes cast in the Nov. 3 election to reconfirm they’d been counted properly.

Instead, they argued that large batches of ballots had been improperly accepted and counted in the first place. In both Dane and Milwaukee, they sought to disqualify all absentee ballots that had been cast before Election Day in person, rather than by mail.

….

Rick Esenberg, a conservative election law expert and president of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, said he did not believe the Trump campaign would fare better on the issue in court.

While he said there are “legitimate” questions about the state’s rules for people to declare themselves indefinitely confined that the state might examine in the future, he did not believe a court would be inclined to throw out the ballots given that it would be difficult to determine quickly whether any specific voters had unfairly taken advantage of the provision.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that the issue could result in a change in the outcome,” he said.

Jim Rutenberg and Nick Corasaniti report Republicans Rewrite an Old Playbook on Disenfranchising Black Americans
(‘As they try to somehow reverse Joe Biden’s victory, President Trump and his allies have targeted heavily Black cities, painting them as corrupt and trying to throw out huge numbers of votes’):

In Pennsylvania, President Trump and Republicans loyal to him have sought to overturn his defeat by making false claims about widespread voting fraud in Philadelphia.

In Georgia, they have sought to reverse his loss by leveling similar accusations against Atlanta.

In Michigan, Republicans have zeroed in on Detroit, whose elections system the president has falsely portrayed as so flawed that its entire vote should be thrown out.

Lost on no one in those cities is what they have in common: large populations of Black voters.

And there is little ambiguity in the way Mr. Trump and his allies are falsely depicting them as bastions of corruption.

“‘Democrat-led city’ — that’s code for Black,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the civil rights group Repairers of the Breach. “They’re coupling ‘city’ and ‘fraud,’ and those two words have been used throughout the years. This is an old playbook being used in the modern time, and people should be aware of that.”

Big Tech, Vaccine Winners, Black Friday: 3 Things in Markets:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-five.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 28m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

At 10 AM, Whitewater will conduct an audit, as a random selection of the Wisconsin Elections Commission, of Ward 12, Jefferson County, Wisconsin.

On this day in 1963, President Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John Connally is seriously wounded by Lee Harvey Oswald, who also kills Dallas Police officer J. D. Tippit after fleeing the scene.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Danny Hakim, Mike McIntire, William K. Rashbaum, and Ben Protess report Trump Tax Write-Offs Are Ensnared in 2 New York Fraud Investigations:

Two separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James — are being conducted independently. But both offices issued subpoenas to the Trump Organization in recent weeks for records related to the fees, the people said.

The subpoenas were the latest steps in the two investigations of the Trump Organization, and underscore the legal challenges awaiting the president when he leaves office in January. There is no indication that his daughter is a focus of either inquiry, which the Trump Organization has derided as politically motivated.

The development follows a recent New York Times examination of more than two decades of Mr. Trump’s tax records, which found that he had paid little or no federal income taxes in most years, largely because of his chronic business losses.

Adam Winkler writes Trump’s wildest claims are going nowhere in court. Thank legal ethics:

Trump’s legal strategy has run aground — in no small part because of legal ethics. While lawyers are often cast as unscrupulous and immoral, they are required to follow a strict code of professional responsibility established by state bars. The famous duty of lawyers to keep a client’s confidences, for instance, comes from these ethical codes. Law students must take a course in legal ethics, the bar exam includes a section on ethical rules, and continuing-education requirements emphasize lawyers’ duties to clients and to the courts.

Two ethical rules have been fatal to Trump’s election lawsuits in state after state: the lawyer’s duty of candor to a court and the lawyer’s duty to avoid frivolous claims. The president can spew all the theories he wants, and his advocates can say whatever they like on television, but because of these two ethical duties, Trump’s lawyers can make claims before courts only if they can back them up with actual evidence.

….

The duty of lawyers to avoid making frivolous claims has also hurt Trump’s efforts to use the courts to overturn the election. Lawyers are prohibited from making assertions in court or in their filings “unless there is a basis in law and fact for doing so that is not frivolous,” in the words of the ABA’s Model Rules. Lawyers have to be especially careful about this one, because judges can impose monetary sanctions against them on the spot. A whole section of the rules of federal civil proceedings specifies the duties lawyers have to ensure that the factual claims they’re making are supported by evidence and that the legal ones have a sound basis, too.

Animal Stories You Might’ve Missed During Election Week: