Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 14m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable. (Three justices—Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Reed and Wiley B. Rutledge—recused themselves from the case because they owned property subject to restrictive covenants.)

Recommended for reading in full —

Tom Hamburger and Juliet Eilperin report Maryland cancels $12.5 million PPE contract with firm started by GOP operatives:

The state of Maryland on Saturday terminated a $12.5 million contract for personal protective equipment with a firm started this spring by two well-connected Republican operatives.

State officials said the company, Blue Flame Medical, failed to deliver masks and ventilators as promised and that the matter has been referred to Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) for review.

Blue Flame received a down payment of nearly $6.3 million from Maryland in early April — after promising to provide within weeks desperately needed PPE for front-line medical personnel dealing with the novel coronavirus.

….

Blue Flame was started in late March by Michael Gula, a Republican fundraising and lobbying consultant in Washington, and John Thomas, a California political consultant.

Before moving in to the medical supply business, Gula was known in GOP circles for his political fundraising prowess. His firm has raised campaign funds for Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and dozens of other influential Republicans. He startled some longtime clients in March when he announced he was quitting the fundraising world during an election year to start the medical supply business with Thomas.

Derek Willis reports A Conservative Legal Group Significantly Miscalculated Data in a Report on Mail-In Voting:

In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.

However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.

The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”

This Voice Actor Can Mimic Any Animal:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 14h 12m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1957, Sen. Joseph McCarthy dies of liver failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

Recommended for reading in full —

 John Cassidy asks Who’s Right About the Economy—Jared Kushner or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve?:

Jared Kushner was up early on Wednesday to offer his opinions about the coronavirus crisisto the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” his father-in-law’s favorite morning show. Kushner virtually crashed the Internet with his claim that the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic “is a great success story.” He also made some rosy predictions about the reopening of the economy, saying that by June “a lot of the country should be back to normal,” and adding, “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”

….

Amid all this upbeat feeling, the policymakers at the Federal Reserve completed a two-day meeting, at which they reviewed the state of the economy and the impact of the emergency measures that they and Congress have introduced during the past six weeks. A Fed statement released after the meeting evinced none of the sunny optimism displayed elsewhere. “The coronavirus outbreak is causing tremendous human and economic hardship across the United States and around the world,” it said. “The ongoing public health crisis will weigh heavily on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term.”

At a video press conference, the Fed’s chairman, Jerome (Jay) Powell, said that “economic activity will likely drop at an unprecedented rate” in the second quarter of the year, and he said the jobless rate could leap to double figures when the April employment figures are released, next week. Even as Powell noted that the Fed’s emergency actions, which have involved pumping more than $2.3 trillion into the financial system, have “helped market conditions substantially,” he deferred from making any specific longer-term predictions about a broader economic rebound. The depth and duration of the current slump, he said, are “extraordinarily uncertain.”

Julio Vincent Gambuto writes Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting* (‘You are not crazy, my friends):

*Gaslighting, if you don’t know the word, is defined as: manipulation into doubting your own sanity. As in, Carl made Mary think she was crazy, even though she clearly caught him cheating. He gaslit her.

Pretty soon, as the country begins to figure out how we “open back up” and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. That never happened. What are you talking about? Billions of dollars will be spent in advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. It will come in the traditional forms — a billboard here, a hundred commercials there — and in new-media forms — a 2020–2021 generation of memes to remind you that what you want again is normalcy. In truth, you want the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.

8 People On Every Conference Call:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 14h 09m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1956, the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.

Recommended for reading in full —

John J. Pitney writes Donald Trump, Un-American  (‘Again and again, the president has rejected America’s founding principles’):

For all his “America First” sloganeering, the term that applies best to Donald J. Trump is “Un-American.” He has repudiated the oath of office and the documents at the core of our national identity: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Consider how he describes presidential authority. At a recent press briefing, he suggested that he could order states to reopen businesses. “The federal government has absolute power … I have the absolute right to do if I want to.” He has often made similar claims, including his assertion that he has an “absolute right” to seek foreign investigations of American political figures–an offense that triggered the first article of his impeachment.

Absolute power was precisely what the Founders sought to avoid. The word “absolute” appears three times in the Declaration, always to proclaim what the patriots were fighting against: “absolute Despotism,” “absolute Tyranny,” and “absolute rule.”

Trump’s threat to adjourn Congress calls to mind the Declaration’s charge that George III had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”

To prevent anyone from gaining absolute power, the Constitution included elaborate checks on the government and provided that all officials would be accountable for their actions. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a British monarch “is the absolute master of his own conduct in the exercise of his office,” whereas in a republic, “every magistrate ought to be personally responsible for his behavior in office.”

Margaret Sullivan writes Trump has played the media like a puppet. We’re getting better — but history will not judge us kindly:

Even if you get past the objectionable notions of “winning” and “losing,” I very much doubt that history will judge mainstream journalism to have done a terrific job covering this president — including in this difficult moment.

On the contrary, the coverage, overall, has been deeply flawed.

Those flaws were on full display over the past few days, just as they have been every day since a real estate mogul/reality TV star grandly descended a goldtone escalator into the marble atrium of Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential campaign.

For nearly five years, the story has been Trump. And, in all that time, the press is still — mostly — covering him on the terms he dictates.<

We remain mesmerized, providing far too much attention to the daily circus he provides.

We normalize far too much, offering deference to the office he occupies and a benefit of the doubt that is a vestige of the dignified norms of presidencies past.

Tonight’s Sky for May:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see morning rain give way to partly sunny skies, with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1973, President Richard Nixon announces that White House Counsel John Dean has been fired and that other top aides, most notably H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, have resigned.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jayme Fraser, Daveen Rae Kurutz, Jessica Priest, and Kevin Crowe report Spike in US deaths and cases flagged as pneumonia suggest even greater COVID-19 impact:

Federal data released this week shows that the number of deaths recorded in the U.S. this year is higher than normal, outpacing deaths attributed to COVID-19 in states that have been hit hardest by the virus.

The data provides the first look at death trends this year across the country and offers more evidence that the official tally of coronavirus deaths is low.

The phenomenon is pronounced in states with some of the worst COVID-19 outbreaks. From March 22 to April 11, New York saw 14,403 more deaths than the average of the previous six years, according to data maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. New Jersey saw an additional 4,439 deaths and Michigan an additional 1,572.

The “excess deaths” surpassed COVID-19 fatalities in those states by a combined 4,563 people.  Experts suspect that unconfirmed coronavirus cases could be responsible for some of those deaths, but it might also be related to a shift in other causes of death. For example, some doctors speculate people might be dying from illnesses from which they would normally recover because the pandemic has changed access to health care.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of Milwaukee’s Voces de la Frontera Action, writes in the New York Times that There Is a Better Way for Democrats to Win in Wisconsin:

We need the Democrats to run a new kind of campaign this year. Not just one that aggressively adapts to social distancing. But a campaign fueled by a different theory. For years, including in 2016, Democrats have relied heavily on expensive TV ads and traditional canvassing where paid staff members from out-of-state use out-of-date voter lists to contact people they don’t know and will never see again. This year, paid canvassers will likely shift to texting and phone calls.<

But this stranger-to-stranger approach won’t work for many Latinos who don’t appear on the voter rolls because they move often or vote infrequently. Or for those of us who would never open a door to a stranger who might turn out to be an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

My organization tried a different approach in 2018, one that works in the coronavirus era and gets better results. It’s based on leveraging relationships among people who already know one another, which data shows increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.

(One does not have to be a Democrat, as I am not, to see that Neumann-Ortiz’s electoral strategy is practical.)

 A swimming dinosaur: The tail of Spinosaurus: 

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 04m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

 On this day in 1945, the Dachau concentration camp is liberated by American troops.

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis report Sen. Richard Burr Is Not Just a Friend to the Health Care Industry. He’s Also a Stockholder:

In his 15 years in the Senate, Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, has been one of the health care industry’s staunchest friends.

Serving on the health care and finance committees, Burr advocated to end the tax on medical device makers, one of the industry’s most-detested aspects of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. He pushed the Food and Drug Administration to speed up its approval process. As one of the most prominent Republican health care policy thinkers, he has sponsored or co-sponsored dozens of health-related bills, including a proposal to replace “Obamacare.” He oversaw the implementation of major legislation to pump taxpayer money into private sector initiatives to address public health threats. “The industry feels very positive about Sen. Burr,” the president of North Carolina’s bioscience trade group said during Burr’s last reelection campaign. “He’s done a stellar job.”

Burr also trades in and out of the industry’s stocks.

Since 2013, Burr and his wife bought and sold between $639,500 and $1.1 million of stock in companies that make medical devices, equipment, supplies and drugs, according to a ProPublica analysis of his financial disclosures.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, David Enrich, Jesse Drucker, and Stacy Cowley report Large, Troubled Companies Got Bailout Money in Small-Business Loan Program:

A company in Georgia paid $6.5 million to resolve a Justice Department investigation — and, two weeks later, received a $10 million federally backed loan to help it survive the coronavirus crisis.

Another company, AutoWeb, disclosed last week that it had paid its chief executive $1.7 million in 2019 — a week after it received $1.4 million from the same loan program.

And Intellinetics, a software company in Ohio, got $838,700 from the government program — and then agreed, the following week, to spend at least $300,000 to purchase a rival firm.

The vast economic rescue package that President Trump signed into law last month included $349 billion in low-interest loans for small businesses. The so-called Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help prevent small companies — generally those with fewer than 500 employees in the United States — from capsizing as the economy sinks into what looks like a severe recession.

The loan program was meant for companies that could no longer finance themselves through traditional means, like raising money in the markets or borrowing from banks under existing credit lines. The law required that the federal money — which comes at a low 1 percent interest rate and in some cases doesn’t need to be paid back — be spent on things like payroll or rent.

 Astronaut Nicole Stott offers advice on social distancing: