Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 21.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 48m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1868, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis is born near Whitewater.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports UW campuses planning for fall semester to be ‘as close to normal as possible:

Meeting the 75% benchmark would represent a significant change from how classes are currently being delivered.

At UW-Madison, 82% of classes this spring semester are fully online, according to System data. That’s up from 64% of classes delivered remotely last fall.

In fact, every single UW campus increased its share of online classes this semester from what schools offered last fall.

 The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial board writes Ron Johnson’s whitewash of the U.S. Capitol riot shows why Wisconsin’s senior senator has to go:

To hear Ron Johnson tell it, nothing much happened on Jan. 6 inside the U.S. Capitol.

Just a few bad apples got a little rowdy.

“This didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me,” the Oshkosh Republican told talk radio show host Jay Weber.

“I mean ‘armed,’ when you hear ‘armed,’ don’t you think of firearms?  … How many firearms were confiscated? How many shots were fired?”

Johnson’s grasp on reality has been tenuous for years, but even more so since he aligned himself lockstep with former President Donald Trump.

Since Trump left office, two kinds of Republicans have emerged:

Those who want to purge Trump and his cult of white supremacists and conspiracy theorists from the party and those, like Johnson, who long for the return of their would-be king.

From the week the votes were cast last November, Johnson helped spread Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, helped perpetuate the myth that voter fraud cost the former president the election. Johnson used the levers of government to spread the lie, calling a bogus Senate hearing to “investigate” election “irregularities.”

In fact, this election, held during a deadly pandemic, was the “most secure in American history,” according the nation’s lead cybersecurity agency.

See also U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson: Ambitious, Compromised, or Crackpot? and Ron Johnson: ‘No Enemies to the Right’?

 Tariq Panja reports Fake Doctors, Fake Documents: How a Russian Doping Lie Fell Apart (‘With investigators closing in, the high jumper Danil Lysenko needed a paper trail to support his story. Top Russian track officials provided it by creating a fake hospital’):

If the cover-up was to work, the high jumper Danil Lysenko realized far too late, he had better familiarize himself with the Moscow hospital where Russian track and field officials had insisted he had undergone a battery of medical tests.

The details mattered. The tests were the centerpiece of Russia’s explanation for why antidoping officials had been unable to locate Lysenko in the spring of 2018.

….

So in September 2018, fearing investigators were closing in on the truth, a nervous Lysenko sent an email to a top Russian track official, asking if he could provide photographs of the hospital, so at least the athlete would know how to describe it if anyone asked. Then, accompanied by the same official, he drove to the address listed on the hospital’s website. When the car stopped and Lysenko looked around, he was stunned.

There was no hospital. There wasn’t even a building. All he could see was a construction site.

This was going to be harder to explain.

See exactly where Perseverance landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 25.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 5:31 PM, for 10h 45m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 38% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

 On this day in 1930, while studying photographs taken in January, Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rory Linnane reports Superintendent candidate Deborah Kerr deletes account after tweets about her experience with the N-word:

The prompt, from Madison Payton, host of the Race Through Education Podcast: “When was the first time someone called you the n- word?”

Kerr replied, “I was 16 in high school and white — my lips were bigger than most and that was the reference given to me.”

When another Twitter user asked how the experience impacted her, she replied, “It made me realize that we are all different and that is the gift we give to one another.”

(There’s dense and then there’s denser: the consequence of the racial slur directed at the alabaster Kerr would be different from the same slur directed at someone Black, and use of the slur is not a reminder of diversity but an expression of bigotry.)

 Henry Redman reports Election Commissioner Bob Spindell can vote whether or not to investigate himself for election fraud:

Republican elections commissioner Robert Spindell, who has been accused by Law Forward of fraudulently casting an Electoral College vote for former President Donald Trump, will have a say in the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) decision over whether or not he should be investigated, unless he recuses himself due to a conflict of interest. 

Spindell and nine others, including Wisconsin Republican Party chair Andrew Hitt, met on Dec. 14 to cast Wisconsin’s ten electoral votes for Trump, even though Joe Biden won Wisconsin and was awarded the state’s votes.  

Progressive legal outfit Law Forward wrote a letter to Milwaukee County District AttorneyJohn Chisholm and sent a complaint to the Elections Commission alleging that the actions of Spindell, Hitt and others was a violation of state law. 

The Milwaukee County DA has the authority to decide whether or not to file criminal charges against the group and the WEC has the authority to decide whether or not to investigate the allegations made in the complaint. 

Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper report Promotions for Female Generals Were Delayed Over Fears of Trump’s Reaction:

Last fall, the Pentagon’s most senior leaders agreed that two top generals should be promoted to elite, four-star commands.

For the defense secretary at the time, Mark T. Esper, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the tricky part was that both of the accomplished officers were women. In 2020 America under President Donald J. Trump, the two Pentagon leaders feared that any candidates other than white men for jobs mostly held by white men might run into turmoil once their nominations reached the White House.

Mr. Esper and General Milley worried that if they even raised their names — Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost of the Air Force and Lt. Gen. Laura J. Richardson of the Army — the Trump White House would replace them with its own candidates before leaving office.

So the Pentagon officials agreed on an unusual strategy: They held back their recommendations until after the November elections, betting that if Joseph R. Biden Jr. won, he and his aides would be more supportive of the Pentagon picks than Mr. Trump, who had feuded with Mr. Esper and had a history of disparaging women. They stuck to the plan even after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Esper six days after the election.

Starbucks Employee Shares ‘Secrets’ on TikTok:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 19.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 43m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 29% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM. 

 On this day in 1801, an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr is resolved when Jefferson is elected President of the United States and Burr, Vice President by the House of Representatives.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bill Glauber, Mary Spicuzza, and Alison Dirr report Milwaukee takes center stage as Joe Biden pitches $1.9 trillion COVID relief, seeks to reassure Americans:

In his first major political trip outside Washington, D.C., as president, Biden vowed that he was committed to passing the relief legislation, claiming it would create “7 million jobs this year” and that “the economy now has to be dealt with.”

“Now is the time we should be spending. Now is the time to go big,” he said during a town hall broadcast by CNN and attended by a socially distant group of Wisconsin voters.

Asked when the country will get back to normal, Biden said experts warned him to “be careful not to predict things.”

“By next Christmas I think we’ll be in a very different circumstance, God willing,” he said.

“A year from now there will be significantly fewer people having to be socially distant, having to wear a mask. But we don’t know. I don’t want to over-promise.”

A key to recovery is the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, which Biden said would be available to every American by the end of July.

“A lot will be vaccinated in the meantime,” he said.

Biden said “it matters where you continue to wear that mask, whether you continue to socially distance, whether you wash your hands with soap and hot water.”

Jon Keegan, Colin Lecher, and Corin Faife report Trump’s False Posts Were Treated with Kid Gloves by Facebook:

In August, as the election approached and misinformation about COVID-19 spread, Facebook announced it would give new fact-checking labels to posts, including more nuanced options than simply “false.” But data from The Markup’s Citizen Browser project, which tracks a nationwide panel of Facebook users’ feeds, shows how unevenly those labels were applied: Posts were rarely called “false,” even when they contained debunked conspiracy theories. And posts by Donald Trump were treated with the less direct flags, even when they contained lies.

The Markup shared the underlying data for this story with Facebook.

“We don’t comment on data that we can’t validate, but we are looking into the examples shared,” Facebook spokesperson Katie Derkits said in a statement.

Overall, we gathered Facebook feed data from more than 2,200 people and examined how often those users saw flagged posts on the platform in December and January. We found more than 330 users in the sample who saw posts that were flagged because they were false, devoid of context, or related to an especially controversial issue, like the presidential election. But Facebook and its partners used the “false” label sparingly—only 12 times.

World’s most endangered right whale spotted off Spanish island:

Divers unwittingly filmed a North Atlantic right whale calf – one of the world’s most endangered whales – as they navigated back to El Hierro in Spain’s Canary Islands. The recently born calf, who appeared to be alone, was thousands of miles from where the species is usually spotted, along the eastern seaboard of Canada and the US.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see light morning snow with a high of 17.  Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 5:28 PM, for 10h 40m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1923, Howard Carter unseals the burial chamber of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Rich Kremer reports Marquette University Laid Off 39 In January. Staff And Students Fear More Cuts Are To Come:

Marquette University laid off 39 staff members last month as part of a yearlong effort to close a $45 million budget deficit brought on by COVID-19 financial losses including a drop in enrollment.

The budget-cutting process has sparked fear on campus among some students and faculty who worry the university is moving away from its liberal arts education and Jesuit mission. 

On Sept. 28, Marquette administrators held a virtual town hall to discuss the financial state of the university. Senior Vice President and COO Joel Pogodzinski shared sobering news: university administration is expecting upwards of 300 faculty and staff reductions in the next two years. 

Marquette’s 2020 freshman class was the smallest it has been since 1997, which — along with unexpected losses from the pandemic — meant there was an immediate budget deficit of $45 million. By 2024, Pogodzinski anticipates that deficit could grow to as much as $65 million.

Shawn Boburg and Jon Swaine report A GOP donor gave $2.5 million for a voter fraud investigation. Now he wants his money back:

Like many Trump supporters, conservative donor Fred Eshelman awoke the day after the presidential election with the suspicion that something wasn’t right. His candidate’s apparent lead in key battleground states had evaporated overnight.

The next day, the North Carolina financier and his advisers reached out to a small conservative nonprofit group in Texas that was seeking to expose voter fraud. After a 20-minute talk with the group’s president, their first conversation, Eshelman was sold.

“I’m in for 2,” he told the president of True the Vote, according to court documents and interviews with Eshelman and others.

“$2 million,” Eshelman responded.

Over the next 12 days, Eshelman came to regret his donation and to doubt conspiracy theories of rampant illegal voting, according to court records and interviews.

Now, he wants his money back.

Gary Paul Nabhan and Austin Nuñez write Along the Southwest Border, Trump’s Wall Is Only One of the Insults He Left Behind:

Border towns from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast have suffered disproportionately, sacrificed to policies that ignore lives and livelihoods in favor of a dubious 450-mile-long monument to presidential hubris.

….

The insults include extreme rates of Covid-19 infection because of botched state and federal responses to the pandemic, the loss of thousands of agricultural jobs as a result of tariff wars and the intertwined catastrophes of drought, fire and flood, which the Trump administration’s hostile climate policies most likely worsened.

Most counties flanking the international boundary suffer from poverty levels double that of the U.S. average. In unincorporated settlements known as colonias, from Texas to California, border residents live without such basic services as clean water and waste removal. The Trump administration exacerbated longstanding problems by vilifying the border and those living along it and ignoring the region’s vital role in U.S. cultural, ecological, and trade relations with Latin America.

Tractor-Hacking Farmers Take on John Deere:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 4.  Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 5:27 PM, for 10h 37m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater School Board will hold a legislative breakfast via audiovisual conferencing at 7:30 AM. The Library Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1862, Confederates commanded by Brig. Gen. John B. Floyd attack General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces Fort Donelson, Tennessee. Unable to break the fort’s encirclement, Floyd surrenders the following day.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Dan Bice reports [Wisconsin] Supreme Court didn’t release study showing Black men 28% more likely to do prison time in Wisconsin:

For nearly a year, state Supreme Court officials sat on a court-authorized study that found clear racial disparities in the sentencing of felons by Wisconsin courts.

The 23-page report, completed in January 2020, concluded that Black men convicted of felonies have a 28% greater chance of ending up in prison in Wisconsin than white men. The odds of Black men receiving prison time are even higher for more serious felonies.

Called “Race and Prison Sentencing in Wisconsin,” the study found a similar bias in the sentencing of Hispanic men and an even worse one for Native American men convicted of felonies.

As for white male felons, they were 21% less likely than non-white male felons of ending up behind bars. It found no racial bias in the sentencing of women.

“Among men, a clear pattern emerges where American Indian, Black and Hispanic defendants are more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison versus another outcome like jail, probation or a fine,” concludes the study written by Michael Thompson, head of the Office of Research and Justice Statistics for the courts.

Using information from the state’s online case management system, Thompson looked at nearly 180,000 felony cases over 10 years. His work builds on that of others looking at racial disparities in Wisconsin sentencing.

David Leonhardt explains Why Senate Republicans bucked public opinion to acquit Trump:

But the modern Republican Party has found ways other than majority support to achieve its goals.

It benefits from a large built-in advantage in the Senate, which gives more power to rural and heavily white states. The filibuster also helps Republicans more than it does Democrats. In the House and state legislatures, both parties have gerrymandered, but Republicans have done more of it. In the courts, Republicans have been more aggressive about putting judges on the bench and blocking Democratic presidents from doing so. In the Electoral College, Democrats currently waste more votes than Republicans by running up large state-level victories.

All of this helps explain Trump’s second acquittal. The Republican Party is in the midst of the worst run that any party has endured — across American history — in the popular vote of presidential elections, having lost seven of the past eight. Yet the party has had a pretty good few decades, policy-wise. It has figured out how to succeed with minority support.

Dutch ice skaters take advantage of frozen canals and lakes:

Good morning.

Valentine’s Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 0.  Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 5:26 PM, for 10h 34m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Hope Kirwan reports UW-Platteville Receives Approval For What Will Be Wisconsin’s Largest State-Owned Solar Array:

The university received approval from the State Building Commission this week to build a 2.4-megawatt solar array. The array will be located on 5 acres in the campus’ Memorial Park.

Amy Seeboth-Wilson, UW-Platteville’s sustainability coordinator, said construction will begin this spring, and the project is scheduled to be operational by October.

….

The project is expected to offset campus electricity use by 17 percent, saving the university $217,000 annually and reducing carbon emissions by 2,300 tons per year.

Seeboth-Wilson said the current largest state-owned solar project is a 47.1-kilowatt array at UW-Oshkosh’s Sage Hall. The new array at UW-Platteville will be 50 times larger than that project.

Sam Levin and Lauren Gambino report Trump acquittal: Biden urges vigilance to defend ‘fragile’ democracy after impeachment trial:

US president Joe Biden has urged Americans to defend democracy following the acquittal of Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, saying: “This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile.”

In a statement on Saturday night, Biden said the substance of the charge against his predecessor over the Capitol riot on 6 January in which five people died was not in dispute, and noted the seven Republicans who voted guilty.

“Even those opposed to the conviction, like Senate minority leader McConnell, believe Donald Trump was guilty of a ‘disgraceful dereliction of duty’ and ‘practically and morally responsible for provoking’ the violence unleashed on the Capitol,” he said.

Remembering those who fought to protect democratic institutions that day, he added: “This sad chapter in our history has reminded us that democracy is fragile. That it must always be defended. That we must be ever vigilant … Each of us has a duty and responsibility as Americans, and especially as leaders, to defend the truth and to defeat the lies.”

 Waverly Long reports University reviewing Uline contract after CEO funded PAC that supported U.S. Capitol insurrection:

The University [Northwestern] is reviewing its contract with Uline and will make a decision on “how to best move forward” after connections surfaced between the company and the Capitol invasion, a University spokesperson told The Daily.

After seeing a WBEZ report that Uline CEO Dick Uihlein contributed over $4 million to the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political action committee that supported the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a Northwestern alum emailed administrators, calling on NU to end its contract with Uline.

“Northwestern competitively bids and negotiates agreements for the goods and services needed regularly by departments and schools on campus,” the University spokesperson said in a statement to The Daily. “We have a vendor screening process that we follow for each contract, and when we become aware of concerns about the social responsibility of companies we partner with, we review that information to determine what next steps may be warranted.”

Uihlein, a billionaire businessman from the Chicago area, is the single biggest donor to the Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The PAC participated in the “March to Save America” rally that preceded the violent attack at the Capitol and was also part of the “Stop the Steal” coalition, according to WBEZ.

(Northwestern is a private school.)

One Billion Flowers:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of 5.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 5:25 PM, for 10h 32m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1981, a series of sewer explosions destroys more than two miles of streets in Louisville, Kentucky.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Kelly Myerhofer reports UW System looking at consolidation between UW branch campuses, technical colleges:

[UW System Pres. Tommy] Thompson has added another item to his agenda, one that could reshape public higher education in Wisconsin: Exploring the possibility of consolidation between the System’s branch campuses and Wisconsin Technical College System institutions.

What the consolidation would entail — whether it be physical buildings, academic programs, administrative services or some other combination — isn’t clear. Thompson said all options, including declining to pursue anything, are on the table, stressing that the idea is in its infancy.

“We have a lot of buildings, lot of duplication and I want to sit down, discuss it and come up with a solution,” he said in an interview. “I’m not saying one (system) is better or one should be the only survivor. I’m saying let’s discuss it before the problem gets any worse.”

….

Thompson is pitching the possibility as the System’s branch campuses operate under existential threat because of rising costs, declining state support and tuition that has been frozen for 13 of the past 15 years.

A 2018 restructuring placing the campuses under the authority of various four-year institutions has kept the campuses afloat but done little to stem the steep decline in student enrollment. At UW-Platteville Richland last fall, total headcount was 108 students.

Mary Spicuzza reports Kenosha County says it’s cracking down on Illinois residents crossing the border for vaccine appointments:

Kenosha County says it’s cracking down to make sure out-of-state line jumpers aren’t getting shots of COVID-19 vaccine at clinics in the county, which is located along the Illinois border.

“Our vaccination clinics are for Kenosha County residents 65+ and in the 1A category, or people in those categories who work in Kenosha County,” Kenosha Health Officer Jen Freiheit said in a statement. “We are trying our best to discourage non-residents and some might have slipped through, but we are working to crack down on that going forward.”

Freiheit added: “While we want to get as many shots in arms as possible, Kenosha County residents are our priority.”

Freiheit’s comments come after a woman contacted the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to report some family members, including a couple in their 50s who live in the Chicago suburbs — and don’t work in Wisconsin — were able to book appointments with the Kenosha County Division of Health and get doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in Kenosha.

Philip Bump reports Once impeachment is over, the threat to Trump shifts to real courtrooms:

For example, we learned this week that investigators in Georgia were beginning the process of potentially bringing charges against Trump for another facet of his impeachment: his effort to get Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes in the state to give Trump a victory there in the 2020 presidential contest. (Secretary Brad Raffensperger declined to do so.)

It’s unlikely that this will result in charges, but it’s not a casual investigation. Speaking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) explained that her office’s probe extends beyond the recorded call with Raffensperger first obtained by The Washington Post last month. The investigation being led by Willis is also separate from a similar one initiated at the state level.

 Mars arrivals, ‘Farfarout’ object and more this week:

Martian moon projected into night sky over UAE, China enters Mars orbit and captures footage, ‘Farfarout’ is now the farthest observed object in our solar system, and a collection of black holes is discovered by Hubble.