Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 03m 48s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1945, Japanese officials sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Leonhardt writes of Trump, Unbound:

• President Trump breaks so many of the normal rules of politics that it can sometimes be hard to know when his tweets and comments are truly newsworthy. Even by his standards, though, the past several days have stood out. Consider:

• Trump said on Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” wearing “dark uniforms” had been headed to the Republican National Convention to do “big damage.” The claim is similar to a baseless conspiracy theory that spread online over the summer, well before the convention.

• He has declined to condemn the killings of two protesters in Kenosha, Wis. He instead defended the 17-year-old charged in the shootings — a Trump supporter named Kyle Rittenhouse — saying he was acting in self-defense. Trump also promoted a Twitter post that called Rittenhouse “a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”

• He defended violence committed by his supporters in Portland, Ore., who fired paintballs and pepper spray at Black Lives Matter protesters.

• He compared the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha to missing “a three-foot putt” in a golf tournament.

• He claimed that “people that you’ve never heard of” and “people that are in the dark shadows” are controlling Joe Biden.

• He claimed Democrats were trying to “destroy” suburbs with “low-income housing, and with that comes a lot of other problems, including crime.” He added that Cory Booker — one of the highest-profile Black Democrats — would be “in charge of it.”

• He predicted that the stock market would crash if Biden won.

• He said that Biden, at the Democratic National Convention, “didn’t even discuss law enforcement, the police. Those words weren’t mentioned.” In fact, Biden held a discussion at the convention on policing, with a police chief.

• Trump claimed that he “took control of” the situation in Kenosha by sending in the National Guard. In fact, Wisconsin’s governor, not the president, sent the National Guard.

• He retweeted messages asserting that the pandemic’s death toll was overstated. Evidence indicates the opposite is true.

• He said that protests against police brutality were actually a secret “coup attempt” by anarchists “trying to take down the President.”

 Ben Collins reports Trump’s ‘plane loaded with thugs’ conspiracy theory matches months-old [Facebook!] rumor:

The conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump pushed Monday that a plane “almost completely loaded with thugs” had been set to disrupt the Republican National Convention was almost identical to a rumor that went viral on Facebook three months ago.

….

The claim about the flight matches a viral Facebook post from June 1 that falsely claimed, “At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.” The post, by an Emmett, Idaho, man, warned residents to “Be ready for attacks downtown and residential areas,” and claimed one passenger had “a tattoo that said Antifa America on his arm.”

That post was shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and other pages from Idaho quickly added their own spin to it, like the Idaho branch of the far-right militia group 3 Percenters.

Apple Is Making It Harder To Track iPhone Users, Which Could Hurt Facebook:

(Segment begins @ 6:43 on video.) more >>

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see mostly cloudy skies, scattered showers, and a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 06m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany and Slovakia invade Poland, beginning the European phase of World War II.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Dana Milbank writes Cornered, Trump tries to foment a race war:

Trump botched the coronavirus pandemic, bungled the economic recovery and flubbed the handling of civil rights demonstrations. Members of his own family denounce him.

He faces a seemingly insurmountable deficit against challenger Joe Biden.

And so the president is trying to provoke a race war on the streets of America.

“We’ve arrived at a moment in this campaign,” Biden said during a visit to a rehabilitated Pittsburgh steel mill Monday, that “we all knew . . . we’d get to — the moment when Donald Trump would be so desperate, he’d do anything to hold on to power.”

After violence claimed lives on both sides of the divide between racial-justice demonstrators and Trump supporters in recent days, Biden said Trump “fans the flames” of violence. “He can’t stop the violence because, for years, he’s fomented it.”

Biden quoted from departing Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s acknowledgment that “the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is” for the president. Said Biden: “He’s rooting for chaos and violence.”

Dan Friedman reports Disgraced Republican Financier Accused of Secretly Lobbying for China:

On May 25, 2017, Elliott Broidy texted Rick Gates with a message for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee, said that China would be willing to increase its cooperation with US law enforcement if the Justice Department deported Guo Wengui, a wealthy Chinese dissident living in New York.

“Mine is legitimate back channel,” Broidy wrote to Gates, a former top Trump campaign aide who Broidy had hired as a consultant. Broidy did not mention that he was in the process of receiving millions of dollars from a shady Malaysian businessman who had sought his help convincing the US government to extradite Guo.

These details were included in an extraordinary August 17 court filing alleging that a cadre of Republican power brokers and fundraisers tried to persuade the Trump administration to hand over Guo to China. In the filing, federal prosecutors say that Broidy broke a law requiring people acting in the United States as agents for foreign principals to register with the Justice Department.

Ryan McCarthy and Jack Gillum report Hundreds of Thousands of Nursing Home Residents May Not Be Able to Vote in November Because of the Pandemic:

This year, what stumped [Walter] Hutchins, despite all his resourcefulness, was how he was going to exercise his basic constitutional right to vote during a pandemic. The Davis Community nursing home in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Hutchins has lived for two years, has barred visitors since March. Margaret, still in the retirement community nearby, can’t help him, nor can their four kids and eight grandchildren.

Neither can the nursing home staff. A 2013 state law prohibits staff at hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and rest homes from helping residents with their ballots. Some North Carolina counties, including New Hanover, where Wilmington is located, send teams into nursing homes to assist voters or bring them to polling places, but the threat of the coronavirus has limited that service as well.

Tonight’s Sky for September:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 09m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1897, Thomas Edison patents the Kinetoscope.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Tory Newmyer writes report Jobless Americans face longer layoffs as unemployment crisis deepens:

Unemployment officially stands at 10.2 percent, down significantly from its April peak but still at a level not seen since the Great Recession. And economists now worry a defining feature of the catastrophe a decade ago — long-term joblessness — is rearing its head again.

Layoffs that workers believed to be temporary back in March are turning permanent. “About 33 percent of the employees put on furlough in March were laid off for good by July, according to Gusto, a payroll and benefits firm whose clients include small businesses in all 50 states and D.C.,” Andrew Van Dam reports this morning. “Only 37 percent have been called back to their previous employer.”

The ranks of those permanently out of their previous job is expected to reach between 6.2 million and 8.7 million by the end of the year, Van Dam reports, citing a new analysis from a pair of economists, Harvard University’s Gabriel Chodorow-Reich and the Fed’s John Coglianese.

Ed Pilkington and Joanna Walters report Portland clashes: Trump accused of encouraging violence after shooting:

Portland mayor Ted Wheeler on Sunday slammed Donald Trump, accusing the president of encouraging the kind of violence that erupted in the city overnight when a reported member of a rightwing group was shot dead after a group of Trump supporters confronted Black Lives Matter protesters.

“What America needs is for you to be stopped,” Wheeler said of Trump, after the president tore into Wheeler on Twitter in the hours after the death and retweeted video footage of his supporters in trucks firing paintballs and pepper spray at protesters downtown.

His sentiments were echoed in a statement by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in which he unequivocally condemned violence on all sides, while accusing Trump of “recklessly encouraging” it.

“He may believe tweeting about law and order makes him strong — but his failure to call on his supporters to stop seeking conflict shows just how weak he is,” Biden’s statement on Sunday said.

Margaret Sullivan writes Fact-checking Trump’s lies is essential. It’s also increasingly fruitless:

Daniel Dale met President Trump’s convention speech with a tirade of truth Thursday night — a tour de force of fact-checking that left CNN anchor Anderson Cooper looking slightly stunned.

The cable network’s resident fact-checker motored through at least 21 falsehoods and misstatements he had found in Trump’s 70-minute speech, breathlessly debunking them at such a pace that when he finished, Cooper paused for a moment and then deadpanned, “Oh, that’s it?”

So, so much was simply wrong. Claims about the border wall, about drug prices, about unemployment, about his response to the pandemic, about rival Joe Biden’s supposed desire to defund the police (which Biden has said he opposes).

Dale is a national treasure, imported last year from the Toronto Star, where he won accolades for bravely tackling the Sisyphean task of fact-checking Trump. My skilled colleagues of The Washington Post Fact Checker team, who recently published a whole book on the president’s lies, have similarly done their best to hold back the tide of Trumpian falsehoods.

.@ddale8 is absolutely incredible. pic.twitter.com/DJv5T7OT8n

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) August 28, 2020

Why We Still Don’t Have Smart Contact Lenses:

  more >>

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 12m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1916, Ernest Shackleton completes the rescue of all of his men stranded on Elephant Island in Antarctica.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Dawsey and Joshua Partlow report Room rentals, resort fees and furniture removal: How Trump’s company charged the U.S. government more than $900,000:

The Secret Service had asked for a room close to the president. But Mar-a-Lago said it was too late. The room was booked. Would agents like a room across the street from the president, instead?

“I do have a Beach Cabana available,” a staff member at President Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., wrote in March 2017 to a Secret Service agent seeking rooms for the upcoming weekend. “Across the street at the Beach Club, North end of the pool.”

The next time, the Secret Service didn’t take the same risk. It paid Mar-a-Lago to book rooms for two weeks at a time — locking them up before the club could rent them to others, according to newly released records and emails.

For Trump’s club, it appeared, saying no to the Secret Service had made it a better customer. The agency was paying for rooms on nights when Trump wasn’t even visiting — to be ready just in case Trump decided to go, one former Trump administration official said.

Trump has now visited his own properties 271 times as president, according to a Washington Post tally — including a visit Thursday, when he met with GOP donors at his D.C. hotel.

Through these trips, Trump has brought the Trump Organization a stream of private revenue from federal agencies and GOP campaign groups. Federal spending records show that taxpayers have paid Trump’s businesses more than $900,000 since he took office.

Margaret Sullivan writes Kellyanne Conway undermined the truth like no other Trump official. And journalists enabled her:

Former White House aide Cliff Sims wrote in “Team of Vipers” that he once sat down in the West Wing at the personal laptop of President Trump’s senior adviser, at her direction, to compose a press statement. But because Conway’s text messages were tied to both her phone and her personal computer, Sims kept getting distracted by “a nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen,” he recalled.

“Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing ‘fake news’ … As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer,” and talked about Trump “like a child she had to set straight.”

After the book was published, Conway said the idea that she was a viciously critical leaker was a pure lie and that she was the furthest thing from a backstabber: “While it’s rare, I prefer to knife people from the front, so they see it coming.”

Leaking and lying. Lying and leaking. It’s been the Kellyanne way, and the news media has largely gone along for the ride: Giving her airtime on news shows, failing to forcefully call her out for her continued violations of the Hatch Act, and offering kid-glove treatment in exchange for her inside information.

Japan’s King of Carp Breeds Million Dollar Koi Fish:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:32 PM, for 13h 14m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1997, Netflix is launched as an internet DVD rental service.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ryan Mac reports A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees to Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times:

In a companywide meeting on Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that a militia page advocating for followers to bring weapons to an upcoming protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, remained on the platform because of “an operational mistake.” The page and an associated event inspired widespread criticism of the company after a 17-year-old suspect allegedly shot and killed two protesters Tuesday night.

The event associated with the Kenosha Guard page, however, was flagged to Facebook at least 455 times after its creation, according to an internal report viewed by BuzzFeed News, and had been cleared by four moderators, all of whom deemed it “non-violating.” The page and event were eventually removed from the platform on Wednesday — several hours after the shooting.

“To put that number into perspective, it made up 66% of all event reports that day,” one Facebook worker wrote in the internal “Violence and Incitement Working Group” to illustrate the number of complaints the company had received about the event.

BuzzFeed News could not verify the content on the militia page or its associated event because they had been removed from the platform. A previous story from the Verge noted that the page had issued a “call to arms” and hosted a number of commenters advocating for violence in Kenosha following the police shooting of 29-year-old Black man Jacob Blake.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Shirin Ghaffary reports Facebook banned violent militia groups. We still found plenty of them on its platform:

Just last week, Facebook finally banned militia groups and pages that advocate for violence on its platform. But Recode’s quick Facebook search for “militia” groups and pages on Friday surfaced over a dozen results for national and local militia groups, most of them private, with many of them openly calling for violence against protesters.

Two of these groups that Recode accessed had a combined 25,000 members and included posts where members encouraged and celebrated shooting people involved in recent Black Lives Matter protests. Some groups did not contain “militia” in the title but still encouraged members to take up arms. One page, called the “The III% Organization,” contained overtly racist and violent posts, such as a meme comparing BLM protesters to dogs and joking about running them over with a car.

After Recode flagged seven of these groups and pages to Facebook, the company took down four of them for violating its policies, and said it independently took down another.

Jason Owens reports NBA arenas across the country to be used as polling places because of player strike:

NBA owners agreed to work with local election officials to provide each league arena as a polling place for November’s elections or find an alternative if regulations don’t allow it.

From the agreement announced on Friday:

Every arena that is owned and operated by the team will work with local election officials to convert the facility into a polling place for the upcoming 2020 election. If the deadline to do that has passed, the team will work with officials to find a different use for the building to support the 2020 election.

Sun-like star and its 2 giant planets imaged for first time: