Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 43.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 11h 25m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1946, Churchill uses the phrase iron curtain in his speech (The Sinews of Peace) at Westminster College, Missouri.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 David Leonhardt writes Voting rights or the filibuster? Democrats will probably have to choose:

Republican legislators in dozens of states are trying to make voting more difficult, mostly because they believe that lower voter turnout helps their party win elections. (They say it’s to stop voter fraud, but widespread fraud doesn’t exist.) The Supreme Court, with six Republican appointees among the nine justices, has generally allowed those restrictions to stand.

“I don’t say this lightly,” Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida, recently wrote. “We are witnessing the greatest roll back of voting rights in this country since the Jim Crow era.”

The only meaningful way for Democrats to respond is through federal legislation, like the voting-rights bill that the House passed on Wednesday. Among other things, it would require states to register many eligible voters automatically; allow others to register on Election Day; hold at least 15 days of early voting; expand voting by mail; and allow people with completed criminal sentences to vote. The bill also requires more disclosure of campaign donations and restricts partisan gerrymandering.

But the bill seems to have no chance of winning the 60 votes in the Senate needed to overcome a filibuster. The Senate is divided 50-50 between the two parties (including two independents, who usually vote with Democrats). The bill will pass only if all 50 Senate Democrats agree to scrap or alter the filibuster, as they have the power to do.

Maria Sacchetti, Nick Miroff, and Silvia Foster-Frau report Texas family detention centers expected to transform into rapid-processing hubs:

The Biden administration is preparing to convert its immigrant family detention centers in South Texas into Ellis Island-style rapid-processing hubs that will screen migrant parents and children with a goal of releasing them into the United States within 72 hours, according to Department of Homeland Security draft plans obtained by The Washington Post.

….

“We welcome the change, because the detention of families — we never thought that was a good system or a good policy at all,” said Edna Yang, co-executive director of American Gateways, an immigration legal aid organization in Texas. “They shouldn’t be detained, and they should be given the opportunity to go before the immigration judge and be released in the community and not held like prisoners.”

(Yes, a thousand times over: free movement of people, capital, or goods.)

Tom Haudricourt reports Brewers will open 2021 season with 25% capacity of fans at American Family Field but no tailgating:

The Milwaukee Brewers expect to have between 11,000 and 12,000 fans in the stands at American Family Field when they open their 2021 season April 1 against the Minnesota Twins.

The Brewers announced Thursday morning they had reached agreement with the City of Milwaukee Health Department to begin the season at 25% capacity. They had requested 35% capacity in a 500-page health and safety report submitted to health officials last month.

The shortened 60-game season in 2020 was played with no fans in the stands because of the spreading coronavirus pandemic. MLB teams have put strict protocols in place and have agreed to seat fans in small groups, or pods, if allowed to have a certain percentage at games this season.

Facebook takes down hundreds of fake Russian Instagram accounts:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 38.  Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 11h 25m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department holds a business meeting via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1933,  Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes the 32nd President of the United States. He was the last president to be inaugurated on March 4.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Molly Beck reports As Republicans welcome maskless crowd, Democrats say those following COVID-19 precautions are essentially shut out of government process:

We are nearly a year into this pandemic, and this is what we are seeing in the state capitol today: no masks, no social distancing, and no safety precautions for the staff who have no choice but to be in the building. This is reckless and dangerous. pic.twitter.com/Q7ic76xP2y

— Senator Melissa Agard (@senator_melissa) March 3, 2021

MADISON – Assembly leaders packed dozens of maskless adults and children into a small hearing room in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday in the latest sign that Republicans who control the legislative process do not plan to adopt COVID-19 mitigation rules.

The crowd of people gathering together without face masks is again ringing alarm bells for Democratic lawmakers who say the behavior puts Capitol workers’ health at risk and discourages people from participating in the democratic process.

“This is not allowing the public who wants to be able to engage with government to be able to engage with government in a safe way,” Sen. Melissa Agard, D-Madison, said Wednesday.

The lack of face masks pushed at least one Democratic member of the committee who is not fully vaccinated to avoid the meeting and watch the proceedings by livestream.

  Alexis Madrigal writes A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over:

“The question is not when do we eliminate the virus in the country,” said Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an expert in virology and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Rather, it’s when do we have the virus sufficiently under control? “We’ll have a much, much lower case count, hospitalization count, death count,” Offit said. “What is that number that people are comfortable with?” In his view, “the doors will open” when the country gets to fewer than 5,000 new cases a day, and fewer than 100 deaths.

That latter threshold, of 100 COVID-19 deaths a day, was repeated by other experts, following the logic that it approximates the nation’s average death toll from influenza. In most recent years, the flu has killed 20,000 to 50,000 Americans annually, which averages out to 55 to 140 deaths a day, said Joseph Eisenberg, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “This risk was largely considered acceptable by the public,” Eisenberg said. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at UC San Francisco, made a similar calculation. “The end to the emergency portion of the pandemic in the United States should be heralded completely by the curtailing of severe illness, hospitalizations, and deaths from COVID-19,” she said. “Fewer than 100 deaths a day—to mirror the typical mortality of influenza in the U.S. over a typical year—is an appropriate goal.”

See Mars, Betelgeuse, Jupiter and Saturn in March 2021:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 45.  Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 11h 22m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 77.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 2005, Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly an airplane non-stop around the world solo without refueling.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Moustafa Bayoumi writes ICE reached a new low: using utility bills to hunt undocumented immigrants:

If you had to choose between having running water at home or risking your home being raided by the authorities, which would you choose? The correct answer is: this shouldn’t even be a question.

But it’s become one. The startling truth is that signing up for even basic utilities in this country has turned into a gamble for many people, particularly undocumented immigrants. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] has paid tens of millions of dollars since 2017 for access to a private database that contains more than “400m names, addresses and service records from more than 80 utility companies covering all the staples of modern life, including water, gas and electricity, and phone, internet and cable TV”. The information has been mined by Ice, the Post reported, for immigration surveillance and enforcement operations.

Neither [ICE] nor any other federal agency should have unfettered access to this data. In fact, there are strict protocols and regulations that determine how the federal government can gather your information and when it can infringe on your privacy, much of this is codified in the Privacy Act of 1974, as the Post notes. So how are federal agencies like Ice getting around these legal safeguards, which would otherwise prevent them from scooping up such data on their own and without a court order? Simple. They just buy it. With taxpayer money.

Lisa Lerer and Reid J. Epstein report Abandon Trump? Deep in the G.O.P. Ranks, the MAGA Mind-Set Prevails:

In Cleveland County, Okla., the chairman of the local Republican Party openly wondered “why violence is unacceptable,” just hours before a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol last week. “What the crap do you think the American revolution was?” he posted on Facebook. “A game of friggin pattycake?”

….

Interviews with more than 40 Republican state and local leaders conducted after the siege at the Capitol show that a vocal wing of the party maintains an almost-religious devotion to the president, and that these supporters don’t hold him responsible for the mob violence last week. The opposition to him emerging among some Republicans has only bolstered their support of him.

And while some Republican leaders and strategists are eager to dismiss these loyalists as a fringe element of their party, many of them hold influential roles at the state and local level. These local officials are not only the conduits between voters and federal Republicans, but they also serve as the party’s next generation of higher-level elected officials, and would bring a devotion to Trumpism should they ascend to Washington.

 Apple Car: Here’s What We Know So Far:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 40.  Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 5:46 PM, for 11h 19m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.  

 On this day in 1972, the Pioneer 10 space probe is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida with a mission to explore the outer planets.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Catherine Rampell writes The Senate parliamentarian’s ruling on the minimum wage did Democrats a favor:

Firing or overruling the ref won’t help you if your own team can’t decide where the goal posts are.

This has been obvious for a while. Yet Democratic leaders chose to ignore the discord rather than adopt a compromise policy that might be acceptable to moderates — and still achieve, say, 90 percent of the left’s objectives. Which are, presumably, to raise living standards for as many of the working poor as possible.

Raising the federal hourly minimum wage from $7.25 — where it has remained since 2009 — is broadly popular among both voters and Democratic lawmakers. There’s disagreement, though, about what level it should be raised to.

The “Fight for 15” movement, launched in 2012 by fast-food workers with backing from organized labor, cultivated political support for this round-numbered, alliterative goal. The movement has had successes in places such as New York and Seattle, and the left wing of the Democratic Party has worked to expand the minimum to $15?nationwide.

But this policy’s economic and political effects might look different in areas where wages and costs of living are lower. In Mississippi, for instance, the most recent data available show that the median wage is $15 per hour. So if implemented immediately, a federal minimum at that level would apply to half of the state’s wage-earning workforce.

It’s unclear how employers might react to a large mandated increase. Maybe they’d lay off lots of employees or reduce hours, as opponents of minimum wages generally argue. This would undercut the policy’s goal of helping low-wage workers. Or maybe employers would raise prices. Or demand higher productivity. Or accept lower profits. Or some combination of all these things.

Amelia Thomson and Laura Bronner write Police Misconduct Costs Cities Millions Every Year. But That’s Where The Accountability Ends:

As the country has witnessed episode after episode of police abuse, holding police officers accountable for misconduct has become an urgent issue. But despite increased attention, it’s still rare for police officers to face criminal prosecution. That leaves civil lawsuits as victims’ primary route for seeking legal redress and financial compensation when a police encounter goes wrong. The resulting settlements can be expensive for the city, which is generally on the hook for the payouts (meaning ultimately, most are subsidized by taxpayers), and those costs can encourage cities to make broader changes.

Successful settlements are also a helpful source of information for places that are serious about police reform. If cities and police departments want to cut down on misconduct and spend less taxpayer money, they need to know how much they’re paying for police abuse, and what kinds of incidents are most frequent and most expensive.

 Everything the home cook needs to know about steak:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 29.  Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 11h 17m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4 PM. 

 On this day in 1985, Herb Kohl purchases the Milwaukee Bucks.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rachael Vasquez reports Survey: Nearly Half of Wisconsin Manufacturers Say Business Still Down:

Nearly half of Wisconsin manufacturers say their business remains down, according to new survey results released Thursday by Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership (WMEP) Manufacturing Solutions, a not-for-profit manufacturing consulting firm that caters to small and midsize manufacturers across the state.

The survey found 22 percent of manufacturers reported their business down “significantly” compared to a normal year, and 17 percent said business was still “down somewhat.”

Only 8 percent of respondents said business was “down greatly,” a marked improvement from October when 18 percent of manufacturers were still reporting large declines in revenue.

Alternatively, nearly 40 percent of manufacturers said their business was up to some degree.

George Bureau, vice president of consulting services for WMEP, said that split shows an “uneven” recovery.

“We have some manufacturers that are actually too busy that are having challenge(s) getting product out the door, and some that are OK, and … a few that aren’t doing so well,” Bureau said.

Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports Workers at firm owned by top Trump donors exposed to higher Covid rates (‘Employees at Uline, owned by billionaires Dick and Liz Uihlein, have filed numerous safety complaints, investigation finds’):

Employees at a private Wisconsin company owned by two top Republican donors in the US have faced significantly higher rates of Covid-19 infection and have filed numerous complaints about workplace safety to federal authorities, according to a Guardian investigation into Uline.

Dick and Liz Uihlein, the billionaire founders of the Uline packaging and office supply company who were once dubbed the “most powerful conservatives you never heard of”, have been critics of Wisconsin stay-at-home orders and, some employees fear, used their considerable political clout to try to challenge safety rules in the state.

An internal document seen by the Guardian shows that at least 14% of Uline’s corporate workforce has tested positive for Covid-19 since last April, compared to 8.7% of the population in Kenosha county, where the company’s corporate office is located.

Jacob Bogage and Hannah Denham report As USPS delays persist, bills, paychecks and medications are getting stuck in the mail:

The agency’s delivery times have sunk to historic lows since [Louis] DeJoy took over in June. In most states, it took at least five days for a piece of first-class mail — such as a bill or paycheck — to arrive last month, according to data provided by mail-tracking vendor GrayHair Software. Going back 90 days, into the heart of holiday shipping season, it took more than six days on average for first-class delivery nationwide. The Postal Service aims to deliver local mail in two days and nonlocal mail in three to five days.

At the end of December, the agency had an on-time rate of 38 percent for nonlocal mail, according to data it reported to a federal court. Traditionally, that number is around 90 percent. The Postal Service has not disclosed 2021 metrics.

How to build a quantum internet:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 44.  Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 5:44 PM, for 11h 14m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1935, DuPont scientist Wallace Carothers invents nylon.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton report How a rape case exposed a tangled web of dysfunction in Milwaukee (Part 1):

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel does not publish the names of people who report being sexually assaulted unless they agree. In this case, the woman did not. In a lawsuit filed against the Police Department and the city last year, she used the pseudonym Jane Doe.

In 2019, Doe reported to police that Haywood, a prominent real estate developer, had raped and possibly drugged her. He denies wrongdoing and has not been arrested or charged; her allegations remain under investigation by law enforcement and prosecutors.

Doe’s lawsuit, which argued that the Milwaukee Police Department violated her rights as a crime victim by repeatedly failing to notify her about important developments in the investigation, was settled earlier this year. As a result, the state Department of Justice has taken over the case. The settlement also creates a legal pathway for crime victims throughout Wisconsin to ensure their rights are protected.

On the surface, there appear to be several reasons why Doe’s case stalled, including the five years she waited to report the incident to police.

But a Journal Sentinel investigation uncovered problems that go far beyond a mishandled rape allegation — problems that affect the lives of Milwaukee residents who have nothing to do with Doe’s case.

The man Doe accused is influential, the beneficiary of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded city loans for development projects. One of his attorneys was a member of the powerful Fire and Police Commission, which has the final say on which police officers should be promoted and disciplined — including those in charge of investigating Doe’s case. The conflict of interest sparked infighting among commissioners and public officials that has upended Milwaukee’s search for a new police chief.

See also Parts 2, 3, and 4.

 Justin Baragona reports South Dakota AG May Have Been Reading Right-Wing Biden Conspiracies While Killing Man With His Car:

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg acknowledged during his interviews with police investigators last year that he was reading political articles—including a conspiracy theory-laden piece about Joe Biden—on his phone just before he struck and killed a pedestrian with his car.

Ravnsborg is currently facing three misdemeanor charges, calls from Gov. Kristi Noem to resign, and impeachment proceedings for killing 55-year-old Joseph Boever on the side of a highway last year.

….

“At 10:20:49, you were on the Dakota Free Press site,” one investigator told the attorney general, in a clip first flagged by Media Matters research fellow Timothy Johnson. “These are all on your work phone. A minute later, you were on the RealClearPolitics website.”

“And then, about a minute later, this article was pulled up through the Just The News,” the interrogator continued, referencing the site founded by pro-Trump columnist John Solomon.

The investigator, meanwhile, went on to note that the article in question was “about Joe Biden and something to do with China” and that Ravnsborg was on that link up to a minute before the accident, further asking the attorney general if he remembered reading this while driving.

How Books Are Handmade at the Last Printing Press of Its Kind in the US:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 42.  Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 5:42 PM, for 11h 11m 20s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1782, the British House of Commons votes against further war in America.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rich Kramer reports Data Show Wisconsinites Flocked to the Outdoors as a Respite from the Pandemic:

The number of people turning to the state’s parks, hunting and fishing amid the COVID-19 pandemic grew significantly in 2020 according to new research from the non-partisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

A new report titled “Take It Outside: Pandemic Spurs Outdoor Pursuits” shows that sales of state parks stickers jumped by more than 42 percent compared with sales in 2019. The report notes that is despite some state parks being closed in spring of 2020.

Fishing license sales grew by more than 13 percent between March 2020 and January of this year. The report notes that 93,414 individuals bought their first Wisconsin fishing license during that timeframe. That’s more than twice the number of first-time licenses sold between March 2019 and January 2020. License sales to non-residents also jumped by nearly 39 percent.

Wisconsin Policy Forum researcher Jason Stein told WPR it will take time to know if last year’s boost was an aberration or a new trend. But he said it will likely have some impact moving forward.

“It’s like anything, you know — if you can get a bunch of people to try something new, birdwatching or cross-country skiing or whatever it is,” said Stein. “For some of them, it’s really going to click with them.”

 David Smith reports Biden visits disaster-hit Texas as Cruz basks in warmth of Florida right-fest:

America’s political divide was on display on Friday as Joe Biden flew to Texas to comfort victims of a deadly winter storm while Ted Cruz, a senator from the beleaguered state, basked in Florida sunshine and joked about his recent holiday in Mexico.

The US president, who made empathy the core of his election campaign, and the first lady, Jill Biden, travelled to Houston for his first trip to a major disaster site since taking office on 20 January.

….

Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Cruz made light of a controversy last week in which he flew to Cancún, Mexico, for a family holiday even as millions of Texans shivered in unheated homes. “Orlando is awesome,” Cruz said. “It’s not as nice as Cancún, but it’s nice!”

The crowd laughed at the quip.

Matt Zapotosky and Spencer S. Hsu report FBI focuses on video of Capitol Police officer being sprayed with chemicals before he died in pro-Trump riot:

Investigators have uncovered video appearing to show someone spraying a chemical irritant at Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick and other law enforcement personnel fending off rioters in last month’s attack, though they have yet to identify the person or tie the activity directly to Sicknick’s death, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sicknick’s death has vexed investigators exploring the Jan. 6 riot, as they have struggled to figure out how precisely he died and whether someone could be held criminally accountable in connection with the death.

Investigators determined Sicknick did not die of blunt force trauma, people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. U.S. Capitol Police in a statement Jan. 8 said that Sicknick died “due to injuries sustained while on duty.” No autopsy or toxicology report has been made public, unusual seven weeks after a death.

 These pilots are landing on a runway made of ice: