Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 15h 07m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1889, the Johnstown Flood claims over 2,200 lives after a dam fails and sends a 60-foot wall of water over the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jonathan Chait writes New Transcript Shows Trump Adviser Michael Flynn Colluding With Russia in 2016:

Michael Flynn, the former Trump national security adviser, pleaded guilty in federal court to the charge of lying to FBI officials about a conversation he had with the Russian ambassador. Flynn’s defenders have insisted his lie was innocent and immaterial.

Late Friday afternoon, the Trump administration released the transcript of that conversation. The timing itself does not indicate much confidence that the transcript would support Flynn’s interpretation (late Friday afternoons not being the customary time to drop favorable news stories). And indeed, the transcript makes Flynn’s call look even less innocent

The transcripts today quote Flynn telling Kislyak, “Do not, do not uh, allow this (Obama) administration to box us in, right now, okay?” If that does not constitute “undermined the outgoing administration’s policy,” what does?

Two days later, the two men held a follow-up call, in which Kislyak made the premise more explicit. “I just wanted to tell you that we found that these actions have targeted not only against Russia, but also against the president elect.” Flynn replied, “Yeah, yeah,” accepting the premise. Kislyak then said he agreed with Flynn’s request not to retaliate. “We have decided not to act now because, it’s because people [presumably the outgoing Obama administration] are dissatisfied with the loss of elections, and it’s very deplorable.”

Flynn’s discussions with Kislyak were not part of a criminal conspiracy. They were, however, part of a secret channel of communications, the premise of which was that the two parties had a secret common interest against the United States government. One word that might describe this relationship would be “collusion.”

 Julia Davis writes Russian State Media Wonder if They Created an Orange-Haired Monster:

The sense of alarm was palpable on Russian state TV this week. Images of nuclear explosions flashed on an oversize screen as Evgeny Popov, host of the popular program 60 Minutes, talked about reports that Donald Trump may reverse a decades-long moratorium on nuclear testing.

….

The initial reaction of the Russian experts was to rejoice at the damage Trump’s nuclear adventurism would inflict upon the United States, but the potential effect on their own country is now starting to sink in.

Having helped Trump’s 2016 candidacy and supported his presidency, the Kremlin seems to have painted itself into a corner. It’s not like they could turn to Joe Biden for reassurance. Russian shills have been promoting smears and conspiracy theories about him in Ukraine, and Russian analysts recoil at the notion of a Biden victory. Russian pundits openly describe Trump as someone “stupid enough to start a war,” but roundly reject Biden’s candidacy as an even less appealing alternative.

 Historic SpaceX Demo-2 mission launches to space station:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 15h 06m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1922, the Lincoln Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C..

Recommended for reading in full —

Laurence H. Tribe and Joshua A. Geltzer write Trump is doubly wrong about Twitter:

On Tuesday, President Trump claimed — on Twitter, no less — that Twitter is “stifling FREE SPEECH,” thus suggesting that Twitter is violating the First Amendment. As usual, Trump is wrong on the law, but this time he’s even more wrong than usual. There is someone violating the First Amendment on Twitter, but it’s not Twitter — it’s Trump. What’s more, his threat on Wednesday to shut down Twitter altogether would mean violating the First Amendment in new ways.

Trump is utterly mistaken in claiming that Twitter is violating the First Amendment — or even that Twitter can violate the First Amendment. Prompting Trump’s outburst was the platform’s first-ever attachment of warnings to two of Trump’s tweets encouraging users to “get the facts about mail-in ballots.” Clicking the warning leads to a news story indicating that “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.” Attaching these warnings, Trump claimed, was Twitter’s First Amendment sin.

But it’s no constitutional violation. To begin with, the First Amendment applies to the government — not to private actors like Twitter. So, when the company adds warnings to tweets or even — going a step further for users other than Trump — removes tweets, it can’t possibly violate the First Amendment, because it simply isn’t a governmental entity. You can love or hate how Twitter is regulating its own private platform — but you can’t call it a First Amendment violation.

Furthermore, when Twitter attaches a warning to a tweet, that constitutes speech of Twitter’s own, which is generally protected under the First Amendment from governmental censorship. Far from violating the First Amendment by speaking on top of Trump’s own speech, Twitter was exercising its First Amendment rights.

 Oliver Darcy reports Trump says right-wing voices are being censored. The data say something else:

President Donald Trump has angrily complained this week about social media companies, repeatedly accusing them of censoring conservative voices and going as far as to sign an executive orderThursday seeking to limit their power.

But data from Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, pours cold water on the assertion that conservative voices are being silenced.

In fact, according to CrowdTangle, a data-analytics firm owned by Facebook, content from conservative news organizations dominates Facebook and often outperforms content from straightforward news organizations.

 Film: How ‘The Vast of Night’ Builds Tension With a Strange Sound:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 15h 05m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1848, Wisconsin became the 30th state to enter the Union with an area of 56,154 square miles, comprising 1/56 of the United States at the time.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Sara Morrison offers a primer on Section 230, the internet free speech law Trump wants to change:

You may have never heard of it, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is the legal backbone of the internet. The law was created almost 30 years ago to protect internet platforms from liability [under U.S. law] for many of the things third parties say or do on them. And now it’s under threat by one of its biggest beneficiaries: President Trump, who hopes to use it to fight back against the social media platforms he believes are unfairly censoring him and other conservative voices.

Section 230 says that internet platforms that host third-party content — think of tweets on Twitter, posts on Facebook, photos on Instagram, reviews on Yelp, or a news outlet’s reader comments — are not liable for what those third parties post (with a few exceptions). For instance, if a Yelp reviewer were to post something defamatory about a business, the business could sue the reviewer for libel, but it couldn’t sue Yelp. Without Section 230’s protections, the internet as we know it today would not exist. If the law were taken away, many websites driven by user-generated content would likely go dark.

The gravity of the situation might be lost on the president. Trump is using this threat to bully social media platforms like Twitter into letting him post whatever he wants after Twitter put a warning label that links to a fact-checking site on two of his recent tweets. To illustrate why there’s much more at stake than Trump’s tweets, here’s a look at how Section 230 went from an amendment to a law about internet porn to the pillar of internet free speech to Trump’s latest weapon against perceived anti-conservative bias in the media.

 Scott Nover writes Why Trump Can’t Claim Twitter Is Violating His Free Speech:

Critics have long said Trump consistently violates Twitter’s community standards by promoting misinformation and tweeting hateful statements. Naturally, Trump didn’t take the platform’s fact-check well and continued his tirade Wednesday morning, tweeting a threat to “strongly regulate, or close” down social media platforms that “silence conservative voices.” He later boastedthat he will take “big action” against Twitter.

However, Twitter is a private company and can do what it wants with speech on its platform. It can put any label on the president’s tweets or otherwise warn users that his words words may be misleading. It can even delete them.

“If there is a First Amendment issue here at all, it’s the issue of threatening the use of presidential authority to compel a private platform to speak or to refrain from speaking,” said Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida. “Nobody has a ‘free speech right’ to insist on using a non-governmental platform to convey his message.”

Twitter can also ban users who may be in violation of its code of conduct, such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars, who was banned in 2018 after he livestreamed himself insulting a CNN reporter on Twitter-owned Periscope, and former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, who got the boot in 2016 for harassing actress Leslie Jones.

What Filmmakers Lost When SXSW Was Cancelled:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 15h 04m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.

 On this day in 1892, John Muir organizes the Sierra Club.

Recommended for reading in full —

Megan McArdle writes Conservatives who refuse to wear masks undercut a central claim of their beliefs:

Even the most hard-core conservatives and libertarians have always recognized that all liberties have some limits — your right to roam ends at my property line. For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power.

Sure, this was usually a prelude to complaining that public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were neglecting this vital mission in favor of paternalistic nannying. But given the CDC’s many boneheaded errors over the past six months, conservatives were in a position to score some political points by shouting: “CDC, you had one job!”

Instead, far too many Republicans are suddenly arguing that public health efforts are not a legitimate exercise of power. The government, they complain, has no right to tell them what they can do, even if what they plan to do comes with some risk that a deadly disease will spread.

I’m not talking about the people who simply make the reasonable, indeed indisputable, argument that we cannot shut down the whole economy until a vaccine is developed. I’m talking about the ones who refuse to make even small compromises for public safety, such as wearing a mask — and especially conservatives who complain when store owners exercise their right to require them on store property.

This doesn’t just eviscerate generations’ worth of arguments about public health. It also undercuts a more central claim of conservatism: that big, coercive government programs are unnecessary because private institutions could provide many benefits that we think of as “public goods.” For that to be true, the civic culture would have to be such that individuals are willing to make serious sacrifices for the common good, and especially to protect the most vulnerable among us.

(McArdle is a libertarian, as I am, but she’s too forgiving of what pro-Trump conservatism represents. This atavistic horde isn’t pondering claims; they’re dreaming of a herrenvolk state. They’re following instincts not principles.)

 Marlow Stern interviews Soledad O’Brien on Why the New York Times Is Failing Us Under Trump:

(Stern): It seems like you’re referring to The New York Times’ headlines, which have become just a laughably poor display of false equivalence, both sides-ing, and normalizing when it comes to Trump’s aberrant behavior.

(O’Brien): Oh my god! I wish I could just go and buy a soft blanket for whoever the poor headline writer is who’s screwing it up pretty regularly, because it’s such a mess! You want to say, how did that happen? How did you get a headline like this? And then they fix it, and they’re not particularly transparent about why they’re fixing it or how they got it wrong. It’s very disheartening. And the answer is, their digital subscriptions are up, so the response is: Have you seen our numbers? Well, OK, if that’s how you’re going to judge your worth.

Accurately Counting Covid-19 Mortality:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:23 PM, for 15h 02m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach Green Bay.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Gabriel Sherman reports “This Is So Unfair to Me”: Trump Whines About His COVID-19 Victimhood as Campaign Flails:

As he headed into Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump complained that he was COVID-19’s biggest victim. “He was just in a fucking rage,” said a person who spoke with Trump late last week. “He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to reelection!” Even as the death toll neared 100,000 and unemployment ranks swelled to over 38 million, Trump couldn’t see the pandemic as anything other than something that had happened to him. “The problem is he has no empathy,” the adviser said. Trump complained that he should have been warned about the virus sooner. “The intelligence community let me down!” he said.

The White House declined to comment.

Trump’s outburst reflected his growing frustration that, at this stage of the race, he is losing to Joe Biden. According to a Republican briefed on the campaign’s internal polls, Trump is trailing Biden by double digits among women over 50 in six swing states. “Trump knows the numbers are bad. It’s why he’s thrashing about,” the Republican said.

Even those closest to Trump have been privately worried the election is slipping away.

Peter Wehner writes The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump:

A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham Jr., Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

Some people will argue that Trump’s promotion of this conspiracy theory is just his latest distraction, a shiny object to pull our focus away from the human and economic cost of COVID-19. Maybe. But I’m not at all convinced that this will help Trump politically.

Remember, Trump’s approval rating was often well under 50 percent even when the economy was doing well and America was at relative peace abroad. There’s plenty of evidence, including the 2018 midterm elections, that Trump’s dehumanizing tactics erode his support, especially among white suburban women. And I rather doubt that people will have forgotten Trump’s reckless handling of the pandemic by November; defaming the memory of a woman who died nearly two decades ago and causing renewed grief for her family isn’t likely to help him with most voters, either.

(No one should be surprised when a jackal acts like a jackal.)

 What Happens to Unspent Gift Cards?:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 15h 01m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School District’s board meets via audiovisual conferencing in closed session at 6 PM and in open session at 7 PM, and Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker‘s Dracula is published.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Sarah Kliff report Wealthiest Hospitals Got Billions in Coronavirus Bailout:

A multibillion-dollar institution in the Seattle area invests in hedge funds, runs a pair of venture capital funds and works with elite private equity firms like the Carlyle Group.

But it is not just another deep-pocketed investor hunting for high returns. It is the Providence Health System, one of the country’s largest and richest hospital chains. It is sitting on nearly $12 billion in cash, which it invests, Wall Street-style, in a good year generating more than $1 billion in profits.<

And this spring, Providence received at least $509 million in government funds, one of many wealthy beneficiaries of a federal program that is supposed to prevent health care providers from capsizing during the coronavirus pandemic.

With states restricting hospitals from performing elective surgery and other nonessential services, their revenue has shriveled. The Department of Health and Human Services has disbursed $72 billion in grants since April to hospitals and other health care providers through the bailout program, which was part of the CARES Act economic stimulus package. The department plans to eventually distribute more than $100 billion more.

Ed Kilgore writes There’s Only One Way the ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ Matters:

That is, an unexcited Biden vote counts exactly as much as an excited Trump vote. Yes, enthusiasm matters up to the point that it exists sufficiently to get the voter to the polls. But unenthusiastic voters trudge to presidential elections every year – the bar for whether one will cast a vote for a candidate is considerably lower than whether someone will profess to be enthusiastic about said candidate in a poll.

In downballot or even presidential nomination races, “enthusiasm” is valuable in producing campaign contributions and volunteer signups. “Enthusiasm” is legal tender in the Iowa Caucuses, but not so much in a presidential general election in which money is largely not that significant and both candidates have near-universal name ID and vast armies of partisans at their disposal.

 The power of plants when producing vaccines: