Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 09m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1947, broadcast reports that a UFO crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico become known as the Roswell UFO incident.

Recommended for reading in full —

The AP reports Trump donors among early recipients of coronavirus loans:

WASHINGTON (AP) — As much as $273 million in federal coronavirus aid was awarded to more than 100 companies that are owned or operated by major donors to President Donald Trump’s election efforts, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data.

Many were among the first to be approved for a loan in early April, when the administration was struggling to launch the lending program. And only eight businesses had to wait until early May before securing the aid, according to the AP’s review of data released Monday.

Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes write Trump Is Campaigning on a Platform of Abject Failure:

Trump’s case has obvious problems, both moral and intellectual. But, more pragmatically, the argument is flawed from an electoral standpoint. For example, even voters who believe that Trump deserves credit for the pre-coronavirus economy may worry that his disastrous response to the virus has contributed to the economic devastation the country now faces. Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the pandemic is not good; a solid and growing majority disapproves of it, and a whopping 85 percent of the country is either somewhat or extremely worried about the economy. Those aren’t good numbers against which to ask for a vote as an incumbent.

Moreover, the human costs of the pandemic beg for an electoral reckoning, one that Biden is likely to demand of Trump and to which the current president is extremely vulnerable. His propensity to wish the matter away only exacerbates this problem. And the United States’s performance cannot convincingly be portrayed as admirable in the face of rising COVID-19 case numbers not seen anywhere else in the developed world.

The attempt to tag Biden with the excesses of every anarchist protester is also unpersuasive. Whatever Biden is, he’s no leftist firebrand, and his rhetoric has not given aid or comfort to demonstrators engaged in illegal activity—who are not obviously part of his political camp in any event. Painting him as responsible for controlling the supposed mob Trump warns about will be tricky, particularly because Trump himself is the incumbent, and many Democratic primary voters supported Biden as a moderate alternative to more radical choices—as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no moderate herself, pointed outrecently. Finally, despite hopeful noises from his campaign that Trump’s culture-war shtick will ingratiate him with frightened suburban white women, the polls don’t bear this out. Rather, the attempt to stand behind law enforcement against protesters is actually unpopular, given the current public horror at police behavior, and sympathy with the large majority of protesters who have remained peaceful.

So Trump is swimming upriver with this case.

Artificial Feathers Let This Robotic Bird Fly With Incredible Agility:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 11m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1981, President Reagan appoints Sandra Day O’Connor to become the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full —

Ken Ward Jr. reports Companies Owned by This Billionaire Governor Received up to $24 Million in Bailout Loans:

Companies owned by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and his family received up to $24 million from one of the federal government’s key coronavirus economic relief programs, according to data made public Monday.

At least six companies from Justice’s empire showed up on the list of Paycheck Protection Program aid recipients released by the Small Business Administration.

The Greenbrier Hotel Corporation, Justice’s firm that owns and operates the iconic luxury resort, received a loan of between $5 million and $10 million.

That made it one of only nine companies in West Virginia to receive a loan of that size. Treasury Department officials did not specify the exact amount of the loans, and made public only the identities of companies that received more than $150,000.

In all, Justice companies received between $11.2 million and $24.4 million in PPP money. The Greenbrier Sporting Club, a Justice company that runs an upscale residential development adjacent to the hotel, received between $1 million and $2 million.

Blackstone Energy LTD and Bluestone Coke LLC, two coal companies owned by Justice’s family, each received $2 million to $5 million. Ranger Fuel Coal Corp. received $1 million to $2 million. Justice Energy Company Inc. received $150,000 to $350,000.

Justice’s companies received PPP money from a mixture of small local banks and regional financial institutions. Previous reporting has shown banks were favoring their existing, regular customers when processing PPP applications.

Justice is ranked by Forbes as a billionaire and West Virginia’s richest man.

Ryan Tracy, Chad Day and Heather Haddon report Small Business Loans Helped the Well-Heeled and Connected, Too:

Congress designed the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses weather fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, but the program’s $521 billion in loans also went to well-heeled and politically connected firms across the economy, including law offices, charities, restaurant chains and wealth managers.

….

On the list: Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, the law firm headed by antitrust litigator David Boies; Newsmax Media Inc., the media company run by Trump donor Christopher Ruddy; and an Indianapolis service provider to charities part-owned by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Max Rivlin-Nadler reports Drive-Through Naturalizations Make New U.S. Citizens In The COVID-19 Era:

Immigration officers in El Cajon held drive-through ceremonies every weekday since early June to play catch-up for the three months that there were no ceremonies in Golden Hall.

“Golden Hall is a great ceremony, but this makes it a lot more personal almost,” said Madeline Kristoff, the USCIS field officer for San Diego. “The officers get to participate in ways they normally don’t get to in Golden Hall. And it’s really fun to talk to people who are driving through and get to hear a little of their stories.”

 ‘I Can Barely Keep Track’: Inside a Texas Hospital Battling Coronavirus:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1885, Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.

Recommended for reading in full —
Shawn Boburg and Dalton Bennett writes Militias flocked to Gettysburg to foil a supposed antifa flag burning, an apparent hoax created on social media:

For weeks, a mysterious figure on social media talked up plans for antifa protesters to converge on this historical site on Independence Day to burn American flags, an event that seemed at times to border on the farcical.

“Let’s get together and burn flags in protest of thugs and animals in blue,” the anonymous person behind a Facebook page called Left Behind USA wrote in mid-June. There would be antifa face paint, the person wrote, and organizers would “be giving away free small flags to children to safely throw into the fire.”

As word spread, self-proclaimed militias, bikers, skinheads and far-right groups from outside the state issued a call to action, pledging in online videos and posts to come to Gettysburg to protect the Civil War monuments and the nation’s flag from desecration. Some said they would bring firearms and use force if necessary.

On Saturday afternoon, in the hours before the flag burning was to start, they flooded in by the hundreds — heavily armed and unaware, it seemed, that the mysterious Internet poster was not who the person claimed to be.

Biographical details — some from the person’s Facebook page and others provided to The Washington Post in a series of messages — did not match official records. An image the person once posted on a profile page was a picture of a man taken by a German photographer for a stock photo service.

Jennifer A. Kingson reports The impending retail apocalypse:

Why it matters: Malls are going belly up. Familiar names like J.C. Penney, Neiman Marcus and J. Crew have filed for bankruptcy. Increasingly, Americans’ shopping choices will boil down to a handful of internet Everything Stores and survival-of-the-fittest national chains.

Driving the news: A research report from UBS predicts that 100,000 brick-and-mortar U.S. retail stores will close by 2025, in a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated amid coronavirus-related shutdowns.

Indoor malls — which were turning into ghost towns even before the pandemic — are being converted into apartment complexes.

E-commerce has surged, even as stores reopen, as people are afraid of catching the virus in crowds and public spaces.

Ahn Do reports ‘You started the corona!’ As anti-Asian hate incidents explode, climbing past 800, activists push for aid:

Hate incidents directed at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are exploding this year, according to advocates pushing for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to boost funding for programs fighting bias and add a cultural representative to his new COVID-19 task force. 

Supporters and organizers of Stop AAPI Hate have documented 832 incidents across the Golden State in the last three months, with assaults and verbal tirades “becoming the norm” since the pandemic started, instigated by people following the inflammatory rhetoric of the nation’s highest-profile leader, they say. 

What Does The Future Of Air Travel Look Like?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of ninety-one. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 12m 24s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress adopts the Olive Branch Petition.

Recommended for reading in full —

Mariana Atencio writes The America of Hamilton, not Trump, is the one I chose to become a citizen of this year:

My country of origin [Venezuela] was torn apart by corruption, division and lack of leadership. We cannot let that happen — let alone encourage it — here. You could say I come from the future and know what pandering and misleading tactics can do to a prosperous, democratic nation, like Venezuela used to be.

We don’t need a president who tosses paper towels and poses with a Bible, but one that provides precise information and solutions and promotes empathy. During my reporting trips, I’ve seen Trump be insensitive, like on his visit to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, but I’ve also seen him be comforting, as he did in going to the Florida Panhandle after Hurricane Michael.

Now more than ever, we need that comfort — and a message of unity. That means not referring to COVID-19 as a “Chinese virus” or “kung flu,” since that term could encourage hate crimes against Asian Americans; surreptitiously enacting rules that will hurt refugees and immigrants; and calling protesters “thugs,” which literally means “ruffian” or “criminal” and is considered code for a racial slur.

Despite all of these actions and the crises this country is going through, I still decided to become an American because I know this nation is bigger than any of these ills. I am choosing to live under Trump, even though he’s so disparaging of immigrants, because we are more than four or eight years of turmoil. America is still very young!

 Anne Applebaum writes Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Sh-thole Country’ He Fears (‘The president’s mindless nationalism has come to this: Americans are not welcome in Europe or Mexico’):

The numbers of American sick and dead are a source of wonder and marvel all over the world. They also inspire fear and anxiety. The European Union has decided to allow some foreigners to cross its borders now, but not Americans. Uruguayans and Rwandans can go to Italy and Spain, but not Americans. Moroccans and Tunisians can go to Germany and Greece, but not Americans. For the first time in living memory, Canada has kept its border closed with the United States. On July 3, the governor of the Mexican state of Sonora delivered the coup de grace: She announced the temporary closure of the border with Arizona and banned Americans from Sonoran beaches.

How will American nationalists cope with this new situation? I’m guessing many will pretend, like the president, that this isn’t happening: Months into the crisis, he has once again expressed the belief that the virus will magically “disappear.” But for some, it will be difficult to prevent the intrusion of reality: The stupid and pointless competition among nations continues in their heads—and they are losing. A major reckoning is coming. It can’t arrive too soon.

5 Canine Heroes:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 It’s the 244th year since America declared independence.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jonathan O’Connell reports Treasury, SBA appear to miss deadline to disclose small business loan data:

The Treasury Department and Small Businesses Administration appear unlikely to release information on hundreds of thousands of Paycheck Protection Program loans this week as planned, a setback in the Trump administration’s promises to be transparent about one of the largest economic stimulus packages ever created by the federal government.

After offering contradictory statements on how much information they would release about more than 4.8 million forgivable loans issued from the $660 billion program, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza announced last week that they would release the names of borrowers who received at least $150,000 in funds before the holiday weekend.

But as of Friday afternoon — a government holiday — the Treasury Department and SBA did not indicate any plans to release the data. Congressional aides, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief the press, said they don’t expect the data to be released before Monday

David Rothkopf asks ‘The Most Ignorant and Unfit’: What Made America’s Worst Ever Leader?:

The worst among American presidents prior to Trump—Buchanan, Johnson, and Pierce, for example—were all produced by the Democratic Party of the nineteenth century—a party that sought to defend or forgive slavery, and that tolerated and promoted a divided nation. Since President Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the modern Republican Party increasingly taken on that mantle. Trump is often said to have commandeered the GOP. But properly viewed in historical terms, the reverse is also true: President Trump could not exist without the post-Nixonian GOP that has Mitch McConnell patrolling the Senate and Bill Barr providing legal cover for the virtually unlimited power of the “unitary executive.”

….

Ending Trump’s misrule and restoring confidence in the presidency demands the undoing of impediments to free and fair elections. That will entail root-and-branch campaign finance reform, an end to voter suppression, new defenses against foreign interference in elections, and reining in the digital disinformation engines. These are perhaps only the minimum demands for restoring American democracy.

Trump is a sign that we as a nation have lost our way. Just as Hamilton warned, a confusion of celebrity for leadership, fame for accomplishment, and popularity for genius has given us “a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune.” Seizing the opportunity, unscrupulous “insolent men” have pandered to the lowest common denominators of fear and greed to win power and exploit it for a small elite. November’s election is a judgment day for this nation’s form of republican government. Or else, only “civil commotion” awaits us.

How ‘Hamilton’ Started Movement to Diversify Broadway: