The Woodland Park Zoo’s newest tiger, Azul, has a dubious claim to fame: She was one of the first animals in the world to be diagnosed with COVID-19 last spring while living at New York’s Bronx Zoo.
While there’s an inherent risk in transferring an animal from one zoo to another, Woodland Park isn’t worried that Azul could bring the coronavirus to its animals.
She fully recovered last April, along with other tigers and lions that had tested positive. As she continues adjusting to her new home, Woodland Park hopes she’ll be the mother to future tiger cubs.
The 5-year-old Malayan tiger flew to Seattle with her New York City zookeepers in September. She entered the public enclosure this week after a standard 30-day quarantine and time to adjust to her new home.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 8. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 5:23 PM, for 10h 29m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1932, Hattie Caraway becomes the first woman elected for a full term to the United States Senate.
Businesses owned by Wisconsin lawmakers stand to benefit from legislation they will take up as soon as next week that would cut taxes for employers who received Paycheck Protection Program loans.
At least six legislators or their families have an ownership stake in businesses that received PPP loans, records show.
Among them are Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester and Republican Sen. Joan Ballweg of Markesan, who as a member of the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee voted in favor of the tax cut on Wednesday.
Prosecutors charged the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ top sturgeon expert [Ryan Koenigs] Thursday with obstructing an investigation into allegations that his employees have been funneling the valuable fish’s eggs to a network of caviar processors under the guise of a scientific study.
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Investigators interviewed Koenigs in January 2020. He told them that DNR registration workers collect eggs as part of a fertility study. If a spearer wants the eggs back, the workers won’t collect them or they’ll return them after they’ve been studied, Koenigs said.
Investigators asked him why workers at a registration station were putting eggs in a cooler marked for a caviar processor. Koenigs said he didn’t know the processor, that staff shouldn’t be taking custody of eggs and that he didn’t know the processor kept a cooler at the station.
He said he had never called the processor. When the investigators showed him phone records confirming that Koenigs had in fact done so in May 2018, he said he didn’t know what he and the processor discussed, but that he was sure it wasn’t sturgeon eggs.
The new accounts about the Oath Keepers’ role in the Capitol assault came on the third day of former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment trial and included allegations that a member of the militia group was “awaiting direction” from Mr. Trump about how to handle the results of the vote in the days that followed the election. “POTUS has the right to activate units too,” the Oath Keepers member, Jessica M. Watkins, wrote in a text message to an associate on Nov. 9, according to court papers. “If Trump asks me to come, I will.”
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In a pair of court papers filed on Thursday, prosecutors offered further evidence that the three Oath Keepers planned the attack, citing text messages reaching back to November. In one message from Nov. 16, prosecutors say, Mr. Crowl told Mr. Caldwell, “War is on the horizon.” One week later, court papers say, Mr. Caldwell wrote Ms. Watkins saying he was “worried about the future of our country,” adding, “I believe we will have to get violent to stop this.”
Similar themes were also being struck around the same time by the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, who told the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Nov. 10 that he had men stationed outside Washington prepared to act at Mr. Trump’s command.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said Wednesday that the unemployment rate in January was “close to 10 percent,” significantly higher than the 6.3 percent rate reported by the Labor Department last week.
The discrepancy is partly due to many unemployed Americans being misclassified as employed, Powell said during a virtual speech at the Economic Club of New York. After accounting for people who have left the labor force since February 2020 and other factors, the unemployment rate is much higher than the official figure, he said.
“Correcting this misclassification and counting those who have left the labor force since last February as unemployed would boost the unemployment rate to close to 10 percent in January,” Powell said Wednesday.
Nationally, large numbers of economists watch and evaluate federal data, so talented people are reviewing the accuracy of economic claims.
Locally, however, the story is different. There’s much less local data, and without these data, it’s easy in-the-moment for local policymakers to offer baseless claims about progress.
It’s not easy, as officials in small towns have come to see, to sustain false claims about success: year after year of mediocre performance leads to difficult conditions impossible for rational people to ignore. The impulse to offer baseless claims, including ones with distorted data and fallacious reasoning, runs up against a stark sight: the outward indicia of poverty are everywhere.
Refutation beats boosterism, and the strongest refutation comes from visible and prevalent conditions. Mendacious policymakers descend to where it doesn’t matter how they distort data, as people rightly believe what they see over what policymakers falsely claim.
If small towns had better data, perhaps refutation would have been even more effective. There’s sadness in this, as bad policies lasted longer than they should have, to the detriment of the community.
There’s also tragedy in the present strength of refutation: no caring person – and least of all this libertarian – would have wanted the case against mediocrity to be so true as it now is.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 8. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 5:22 PM, for 10h 26m 51s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Wisconsin is opening its first community-based coronavirus vaccination clinic aimed at reaching people who don’t have access to regular health care. It’s set to start operating at Blackhawk Technical College in Rock County on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers toured Blackhawk Technical College in Janesville, praising the new initiative as a “labor of love.” But Evers said the clinic will start slow, much like many of the 1,500 existing vaccine sites across the state.
“The ability to have supply is critical,” Evers said. “There are lots of people in the state to vaccinate, and we need the supply. If doses stay flat, that’s a problem. We’re opening this great facility, and (doses) come from the state allocation.”
For decades, residents of Centreville, a nearly all-Black town of 5,000 in southern Illinois, just a 12-minute drive from downtown East St Louis, have been dealing with persistent flooding and sewage overflows. The smell of it is in the air all over town after a rain, and bits of soggy toilet paper and slicks of human waste cling to the grass in neighborhoods where children used to play on warm days, locals said. Kids don’t play outside any more. Gardens don’t grow.
Like Smith, other locals say their water tastes odd and refuse to drink from their taps, relying on donated shipments of bottled water. They worry about the long-term health effects of living under such conditions, and they say that for years elected officials and local utility companies inadequately addressed their cries for help.
Residents and environmental justice advocates also believe that these issues persist because the town is one of the poorest in America, with a median household income of less than $15,000 a year and almost half of residents living below the poverty line. They contend that authorities at the local and state level might have addressed wastewater problems long ago if the area was wealthier and more influential.
The Louisiana Republican Party sharply denounced Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) when he surprised the state by voting Tuesday to support the constitutionality of Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial.
In an unsigned statement, the party declared itself “profoundly disappointed” that its own elected leader, the most senior Louisiana Republican in Washington, would support a “kangaroo court” that amounted to an “attack on the very foundation of American democracy.”
But Cassidy, who just started a six-year term after being reelected by a 40-point margin, did not appear bothered by the threat of grass-roots anger back home, joining a growing list of lawmakers who have decided, for politics or principle, to buck the infrastructure at the lowest rungs of the party.
“As an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job,” he said of the Democratic arguments he had heard in trial proceedings.
What, though, about smaller towns? Pizza has always come with delivery, but now one finds other restaurants and groceries moving to drive-up or delivery service. (A renovation of Whitewater’s Walmart will offer drive-up grocery service; full-service groceries outside the city already offer drive-up or third-party delivery services.) These services are a private market response to changing conditions; they come from private companies freely choosing and offering.
Not very long ago, local government in Whitewater advanced a buy local campaign. These years later, private markets are responding to immediate and enduring demand with no-contact shopping experiences that alter what local means.
Whitewater businesses with these delivery options will be able to meet local demand and perhaps expand a bit farther, but the same is true in reverse. Business outside the city will be able to reach city residents more easily. Residents in Whitewater, for example, may find that Fort Atkinson or Janesville with delivery is as convenient as in-person shopping from one side of town to the other.
Consumers will have more options, and local businesses will have to adjust or lose a part of their remaining customer base.
More delivery options will not be, ironically, equally accessible to all. Some may find delivery services hard to manage online or expensive (there are fees, and customers should tip). In places of food insecurity and hunger, like Whitewater, delivery is a convenient option for some of us but not others.
The key economic consequence of delivery is that it expands the definition of what it means to buy local both within and between nearby cities.
Debunking > prebunking. If you want someone to not believe that false or misleading headline they just read, when’s the best time to correct it? We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or “prebunking” it, but new research shows that the best time to fact-check a false headline — and have subjects remember the fact-check a week later — is after the subject has already read the headline.
Participants saw 18 true and 18 false news posts. They received “true” and “false” tags before, during, or after reading each headline and rating its accuracy; in a control condition, there were no tags. One week later, they all rated accuracy again, this time with no tags.
Presenting corrections after and during exposure to false headlines decreased belief one week later. While all three treatments increased belief in true headlines one week later, supplying corrections after exposure was most effective.
Boosterism pushes communicate, communicate, communicate but blogging replies with refute, refute,refute. Critical blogging (properly done) adopts an attrition strategy, wearing away the claims it criticizes, persistently and (through that persistence) decisively.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 11. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 5:21 PM, for 10h 24m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1861, Jefferson Davis is notified by telegraph that he has been chosen as provisional president of the Confederate States of America.
Vaccine appointments have been rescheduled or canceled this week in Madison and La Crosse, and other providers have slowed or simply stopped scheduling them, as the shortage of vaccine continues to leave people scrambling.
“Due to shortfalls in this week’s supply, we need to cancel over 2,400 appointments,” read an email from UW Health. “The supply of vaccine we have received from the state so far is just a small fraction of what we need to reach the patients we care for in our community.”
Dozens of heavily armed militiamen crowded into the Michigan Statehouse last April to protest a stay-at-home order by the Democratic governor to slow the pandemic. Chanting and stomping their feet, they halted legislative business, tried to force their way onto the floor and brandished rifles from the gallery over lawmakers below.
Initially, Republican leaders had some misgivings about their new allies. “The optics weren’t good. Next time tell them not to bring guns,” complained Mike Shirkey, the State Senate majority leader, according to one of the protest organizers. But Michigan’s highest-ranking Republican came around after the planners threatened to return with weapons and “militia guys signing autographs and passing out blow-up AR-15s to the kiddies on the Capitol lawn.”
“To his credit,” Jason Howland, the organizer, wrote in a social media post, Mr. Shirkey agreed to help the cause and “spoke at our next event.”
Following signals from President Donald J. Trump — who had tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” after an earlier show of force in Lansing — Michigan’s Republican Party last year welcomed the support of newly emboldened paramilitary groups and other vigilantes. Prominent party members formed bonds with militias or gave tacit approval to armed activists using intimidation in a series of rallies and confrontations around the state. That intrusion into the Statehouse now looks like a portent of the assault halfway across the country months later at the United States Capitol.
“Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings,” Judge Roy Ferguson, presiding over the case, begins by telling Mr. Ponton in the video.
“Augggh,” an exasperated Mr. Ponton responds, as his kitten face looks forlornly at the corner of the screen, its eyes seeming to be full of terror, shame and sadness. “Can you hear me, Judge?” he asks, although the audio was never at issue.
H. Gibbs Bauer, another lawyer on the call, puts his glasses on and leans forward to better examine the wonder on his screen. He adjusts his tie, as if subconsciously aware of his supporting role, but keeps a straight face.
As does a stone-faced man in another box, identified as Jerry L. Phillips, seemingly unfazed by the cat.
Mr. Ponton continues.
“I don’t know how to remove it,” he said. “I’ve got my assistant here and she’s trying to.”
To get the hearing moving, he offers: “I’m prepared to go forward with it.”
Then, crucially, he clarifies: “I’m here live. I’m not a cat.”
Almost every senatorial eye in the chamber was glued to the screens as lead House manager Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) played a 13-minute video depicting the events of Jan. 6 to introduce the impeachment case against Trump — with a few notable exceptions.
While the screen showed demonstrators marching on the Capitol, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) looked down at the pad of lined paper in his lap, where he had already begun doodling with a pencil. Behind him, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) studied papers in his lap, taking only the tiniest glimpses at the screen to his right. A few seats over, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) also focused most of his attention on papers in front of him instead of on the images depicting the insurrection at the Capitol, and a few seats from him, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) did the same.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 7. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 5:19 PM, for 10h 21m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.
Cannabis is in Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed 2021-23 biennial budget, with the governor pushing legalization and regulation of the plant. If approved, Wisconsin would begin taxing cannabis similar to alcohol, joining 15 other states, including all of its neighbors, in legalizing a recreational market.
“Legalizing and taxing marijuana in Wisconsin,” said Evers, “just like we do already with alcohol, ensures a controlled market and safe product are available for both recreational and medicinal users and can open the door for countless opportunities for us to reinvest in our communities and create a more equitable state.”
The governor added, “frankly, red and blue states across the country have moved forward with legalization and there is no reason Wisconsin should be left behind when we know it’s supported by a majority of Wisconsinites.”
This marks the Evers administration’s second attempt at putting cannabis in the budget. Republicans in the legislature shot down the proposal for the 2019-21 budget. Since then, some within the GOP have introduced their own proposals to legalize medicinal cannabis, or reduce existing fines for possession.
(Note well: I don’t smoke and seldom drink, but would not stop others. Regulate cannabis like wine.)
In just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology companies have achieved what years of advertising boycotts, public pressure campaigns and liberal outrage could not: curbing the flow of misinformation in right-wing media.
Fox Business canceled its highest rated show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on Friday after its host was sued as part of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit. On Tuesday, the pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax cut off a guest’s rant about rigged voting machines. Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud.
This is not the typical playbook for right-wing media, which prides itself on pugilism and delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content. But conservative outlets have rarely faced this level of direct assault on their economic lifeblood.
Facebook has banned misinformation about all vaccines following years of harmful, unfounded health claims proliferating on its platform.
As part of its policy on Covid-19-related misinformation, Facebook will now remove posts with false claims about all vaccines, the company announced in a blogpost on Monday.
These new community guidelines apply to user-generated posts as well as paid advertisements, which were already banned from including such misinformation. Instagram users will face the same restrictions.
“We will begin enforcing this policy immediately, with a particular focus on Pages, groups and accounts that violate these rules,” said Guy Rosen, who oversees content decisions. “We’ll continue to expand our enforcement over the coming weeks.”
Groups on Facebook have been known to create echo chambers of misinformation and have fueled the rise of anti-vaccine communities and rhetoric. Under the new policy, groups where users repeatedly share banned content will be shut down.
United States Senator Ron Johnson wonders if, possibly, maybe, perhaps it is Nancy Pelosi who is responsible for the Capitol riot. He doesn’t have any proof for this contention, and after all, he’s only askin’ questions, so don’t ask Johnson for substantiation:
“Is this another diversionary operation? Is this meant to deflect away from potentially what the speaker knew and when she knew it? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious.”
Johnson is suspicious in the way way that the crackpots are suspicious that Americans landed on the moon or that extraterrestrials built the pyramids. Spoiler: Americans did; extraterrestrials didn’t.
The only diversionary operation here is Johnson’s question. Like O.J. Simpson’s insistence on looking for the ‘real killer,’ Johnson would do better to look close to home to find those responsible for causing or inciting violence and loss.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 10. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 5:18 PM, for 10h 18m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 12.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4 PM.
On this day in 1922, President Warren G. Harding introduces the first radio set in the White House.
Milwaukee police are investigating the fatal shooting of a 22-year-old Milwaukee man just before 12:30 p.m. Saturday in the 2200 block of West Wisconsin Avenue.
Police identified the victim as Purcell A. Pearson, a recent UW-Whitewater graduate and nephew of Milwaukee City Attorney Tearman Spencer.
According to a profile of Pearson written by the university in June, the 22-year-old psychology major planned to earn a doctorate in clinical psychology and eventually open up a mental health practice to serve low-income, diverse neighborhoods.
Pearson was also a leader in the Black Student Union, according to the profile, and helped create a campus police officer liaison position to represent concerns of Black students. He also served as chapter president of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.
Last year, Pearson won a UW systemwide competition focused on communicating research findings to the public. His competition entry focused on the overrepresentation of Black men as criminals in the news media.
Michael S. Schmidt reports Breaking With G.O.P., Top Conservative Lawyer Says Trump Can Stand Trial (‘Charles J. Cooper, a stalwart of the conservative legal establishment, said that Republicans were wrong to assert that it is unconstitutional for a former president to be tried for impeachable offenses’):
Mr. Cooper said they were misreading the Constitution.
“The provision cuts against their interpretation,” he wrote. He argued that because the Constitution allows the Senate to bar officials convicted of impeachable offenses from holding public office again in the future, “it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders.”
Mr. Cooper’s decision to take on the argument was particularly significant because of his standing in conservative legal circles. He was a close confidant and adviser to Senate Republicans, like Ted Cruz of Texas when he ran for president, and represented House Republicans — including the minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California — in a lawsuit against Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He is also the lawyer for conservative stalwarts like John R. Bolton and Jeff Sessions, and over his career defended California’s same-sex marriage ban and had been a top outside lawyer for the National Rifle Association.
Parents for Peace, a 10-person operation of mostly volunteers,says calls to its national helpline have tripled since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, with a growing number of younger people being groomed in white supremacist ideology. After supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, the intervention groups have experienced a deluge of calls related to the attack as well as to conspiracy theories and QAnon.
The range of extremist ideas they encounter also has widened in the past year, driven by the 2020 election and the pandemic.
With the federal government sounding some of its strongest alarms yet about the threat of domestic extremism,these groups say they offer a way forward. Often staffed in part by the formerly radicalized, they are on the front lines of the fight against right-wing extremism, a growing threat that is in the spotlight but which experts argue has long been neglected.
This Tuesday, February 9th at 1 PM, there will be a showing of Mulan @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Drama/Adventure/Family)
PG-13
1 hour, 55 minutes (2020)
Mulan is a legendary folk heroine from the Chinese dynasties, AD 4th to 6th century. According to their legend, Mulan takes her aged father’s place in conscription for the army by disguising herself as a man, as invaders threaten China. Pushing herself to her limits and braving the war, Mulan digs deep to find her true inherited strength. This is the live action/actors adaptation of the 1998 animated version. It’s not your typical Disney movie, with more care given to historical authenticity and Chinese culture of the time.
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people for the time slot. No walk-ins.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 2. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 5:17 PM, for 10h 16m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1904, a the Great Baltimore Fire starts: it destroys over 1,500 buildings in 30 hours.
President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.
The total so far: $519 million.
The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.
Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.
A federal judge in South Dakota was blunt last summer when she sentenced Paul Erickson, a seasoned Republican operative who had pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.
“What comes through is that you’re a thief, and you’ve betrayed your friends, your family, pretty much everyone you know,” District Judge Karen E. Schreier told Erickson in July, before sentencing him to seven years in prison for scamming dozens of people out of $5.3 million.
But Erickson, who had advised GOP presidential campaigns and a noted conservative organization, had a way out.
He had the support of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, a member of President Donald Trump’s inner orbit. And, unrelated to his conviction, he had been caught up in the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, an inquiry much reviled by Trump.
For years, [Susan] Holden said, Erickson lied to her on a near-daily basis about the project, guaranteeing that she would not lose money. He even traveled to North Dakota to meet her and her 80-year-old mother, showing off a parcel of land he claimed had been purchased with her money.
In fact, Erickson admitted in court that he never bought any land for the project. His pardon means he no longer has to pay her or his other victims restitution.
“I was crushed,” Holden said. “All I could think of was, ‘Goddamnit, Trump, you didn’t even look into the case. Kellyanne walked into your office and said, ‘This poor guy, Russia witch hunt’ — and you did it.’?”
