Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

The City of Whitewater will hold a town hall about the COVID-19 pandemic via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1942, the Battle of Midway begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

  Charles Duan and Jeffrey Westling write Will Trump’s Executive Order Harm Online Speech? It Already Did:

The threat of the order itself, even as wrong as it is, does exactly the damage Trump wants to do: It pressures companies into giving his content preferential treatment.

Over the next few months, Twitter and other platforms must gear up to fight the administration as it tries to twist the language of Section 230. They may be hauled in to FTC investigations over whether a removal didn’t occur in good faith or whether a company acted deceptively. These investigations almost certainly will exonerate the companies, but only after they shell out massive attorney fees. At least Twitter is big enough to afford all this; smaller platforms likely cannot.

And the final catalyst for all of this? Twitter decided to fact-check the president.

This thought will undoubtedly cross the mind of Jack Dorsey and other Silicon Valley CEOs: Wouldn’t it be easier to let him be? To give more leeway to rule-breakers and purveyors of misinformation? To do nothing in the face of campaigns of mistruth that undermine democracy and trust in government? Thus far, it appears that Dorsey will stand firm. The day after Trump issued the executive order, Twitter notably hid a tweet from the president threatening protestors in Minneapolis that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” However, many other platforms may ask themselves these same questions and find the fight is not worth the risks. For his part, Mark Zuckerberg preemptively capitulated to Trump’s executive order with a statement that Facebook “shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online.”

The First Amendment allows private companies like Twitter to speak as they see fit and to fact-check leaders. But the executive order’s threats of changes to Section 230 and FTC investigations render the Constitution powerless to stop Trump from using the weight of the federal government to attack companies that criticize him.

Trump claims that he acts in the name of users’ First Amendment rights, that the platforms are the “21st-century equivalent of the public square” and as such must host all content equally. But Twitter, or even Facebook, is not so large as to squeeze out every other venue of online speech. Numerous alternatives exist. And notably, the incident that sparked Trump’s ire, the fact-checking of his vote-by-mail tweet, did not involve any suppression or censorship at all: Trump’s tweet remained up on the platform, with an additional note from Twitter. It is Trump, not Twitter, who is calling for suppression of speech.

  Testing a home antibody kit for tracking Covid-19 transmission:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 11m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1889, the first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States is completed, running 14 miles between Willamette Falls and Portland, Oregon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Kevin M. Kruse writes Law and order won’t help Trump win reelection (‘A challenger can call for law and order, but the message falls flat from an incumbent’):

In 1968, Nixon’s law-and-order campaign rested on his repeated claims that Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration was largely to blame for the nation’s lawlessness and that only replacing it with a new administration would solve them. “If we are to restore order and respect for law in this country,” Nixon vowed in his acceptance speech, “there is one place we are going to begin. We are going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America.”

As a presidential candidate, Nixon was able to run, and win, on a critique of the status quo. But once he was president, that critique no longer worked.

Nixon learned this the hard way in the 1970 midterm elections. He spent the fall campaigning across the country for GOP candidates, with the “law and order” message front and center. “From Missouri to Tennessee to North Carolina and Indiana,” a reporter noted in late October, “he urged more respect for police, plugged the virtues of Republican congressional candidates and asked ‘the silent majority of America to stand up and be counted against violence and lawlessness.’ ” The president urged Americans “in the quiet of the polling booth” to vote for Republicans and thereby strike a blow against politicians who “condoned lawlessness and violence and permissiveness.”

This time, the appeal fell flat. Republicans lost 10 seats in the House and, more significantly, lost a large number of governor’s races across the country, including almost all the Midwest. The Los Angeles Times captured the rebuke well in a headline: “Silent Majority Speaks Out, Rejects Law-And-Order Alarm, Votes Liberal.”

Erin Banco reports LISTEN FOR YOURSELF: Trump’s ‘Unhinged’ Rant to Governors on Protests:

President Trump on Monday told the nation’s governors that they needed to get “much tougher” in responding to the protests breaking out across the country. He said the lack of response has so far made state officials look weak. Trump encouraged them to mass arrest those inciting violence at protests and said if they didn’t they would “look like a bunch of jerks.” “You have to arrest people and you have to try people. And they need to go to jail for what they’ve done,” Trump said.

The president told governors that the Department of Justice was looking into how to prosecute some of those protesters engaging in violence under federal law. “We will activate Bill Barr and we will activate him strongly,” Trump said referring to the attorney general.

SpaceX Demo-2 Crew Dragon hatch opening:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of ninety-two.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM via audiovisual conferencing, and the Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1924,  Calvin Coolidge signs the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full —

Michelle Boorstein and Sarah Pulliam Bailey report Episcopal bishop on President Trump: ‘Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence’:

The Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, was seething.

President Trump had just visited St. John’s Episcopal Church, which sits across from the White House. It was a day after a fire was set in the basement of the historic building amid protests over the death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police.

Before heading to the church, where presidents have worshiped since the days of James Madison, Trump gave a speech at the White House emphasizing the importance of law and order. Federal officers then used force to clear a large crowd of peaceful demonstrators from the street between the White House and the church, apparently so Trump could make the visit.

“I am outraged,” Budde said in a telephone interview a short time later, pausing between words to emphasize her anger as her voice slightly trembled.

She said she had not been given any notice that Trump would be visiting the church and did not approve of the manner in which the area was secured for his appearance.

“I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop,” Budde said.

She excoriated the president for standing in front of the church — its windows boarded up with plywood — holding up a Bible, which Budde said “declares that God is love.”

“Everything he has said and done is to inflame violence,” Budde of the president. “We need moral leadership, and he’s done everything to divide us.”

In a written statement, Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, head of the Episcopal denomination, accused Trump of using “a church building and the Holy Bible for partisan political purposes.”

(The video, above, shows Trump awkwardly posing with a Bible. His awkwardness is unsurprising – the Bible is a series of books, and few things could be more unfamiliar to Trump than a book.)

 Jeff Stein reports Coronavirus fallout will haunt U.S. economy for years, costing it $8 trillion through 2030, CBO says:

Fallout from the coronavirus pandemic will shrink the size of the U.S. economy by roughly $8 trillion over the next decade, according to new projections released by the Congressional Budget Office on Monday.

In a letter to U.S. lawmakers, the CBO said the U.S. economy will grow by $7.9 trillion less from 2020 to 2030 than it had projected in January. That amounts to a 3 percent decline in U.S. gross domestic product compared to its initial estimate.

SpaceX Crew Dragon captured incredible view of International Space Station: 

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with occasional afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 12s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1918, the Allies, including a brigade of U.S. Marines, are victorious at the Battle of Belleau Wood.

Recommended for reading in full —

Peter Nicholas writes Trump Is Terrified of Protest:

Trump has made known his disdain for protests that target him or his record. He tends to view them through a simple lens: as provocations that must be put down with unyielding force. Less important to Trump, it seems, are the grievances that give rise to the demonstrations in the first place. He’s described himself as a “law and order” president who admires practitioners of a certain rough justice. Yesterday, he tweeted praise for two generals from history: George Patton and Douglas MacArthur (he misspelled MacArthur). Both played a role in the government’s heavy-handed quashing of a protest in 1932 by war veterans who, in the midst of the Great Depression, wanted early payment of a bonus they were due.

Past presidents have sought to play a healing role when the nation is on edge, but Trump’s instinct is to plunge into combustible circumstances in ways that rouse his base. He encourages protests that align with his interests. Eager to see an economic revival, Trump last month egged on demonstrators who pressed Democratic governors to ease stay-at-home orders despite the coronavirus threat. “LIBERATE” Michigan, Virginia, and Minnesota, he tweeted. (Some protesters showed up in the Michigan state Capitol with guns and tactical gear).

 Rick Perlstein writes Will Urban Uprisings Help Trump? Actually, They Could Be His Undoing (‘As a historian, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at the fallout from Watts and other rebellions’):

It’s simply incorrect to argue that mass political violence inevitably spurs a backlash that benefits conservatives. By 1970, Nixon sought to nationalize that year’s congressional elections as a referendum on law and order—even intentionally spurring crowd violence against himself for the cameras to capture. A columnist reported, “Nixon’s advance men this fall have carefully organized with local police to allow enough dissenters into the staging areas so the president will have his theme well illustrated.”

….

Once, in San Jose, disappointed that no one heckled Nixon during a speech, his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, gave protesters time to mass outside afterward, then had the president leap up on the hood of his limousine in their midst. He was obliged with the expected  hail of rocks while jutting out his chin and making his trademark two-handed V-salute, providing footage that made all the evening newscasts. “That’s what they hate to see!” he exulted.

But Republicans that year underperformed expectations. When disorder is all around them, voters tend to blame the person in charge for the disorder—and, sometimes, punish those who exploit it for political gain.

Tonight’s Sky for June: