Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of fifty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 20m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Downtown Whitewater Inc. Board at 5 PM.

On this day in 1915, actor and filmmaker Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.

Recommended for reading in full:

Margaret Sullivan writes Mark Zuckerberg claims that, at Facebook, ‘the future is private.’ Don’t believe him:

Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual Silicon Valley confab to announce that “the future is private.”

In one of the most awkward moments I’ve ever seen captured on video, he smiled broadly as he tried to joke about the supposed change of direction.

“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he said.

No, Zuck, you don’t. Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, Wired magazine has reported — “from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.”

Zuckerberg seemed to think his lame line would get some good-natured guffaws. The audience of technophiles, though, didn’t find it amusing. The reaction was pained silence with a few cringe-induced laughs.

The “pivot to privacy” simply isn’t believable.

“On privacy, I would suggest what Facebook is doing is more about public relations,” venture capitalist Roger McNamee told Hanna Kozlowska of Quartz. “[It has] tried to put a positive spin on something that they’re doing for business reasons, and would have done anyway.”

John Cassidy writes After a Strong Jobs Report, Economic Questions Linger for 2020:

In their latest projections, [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome] Powell and his colleagues said that they expect G.D.P. growth of 2.1 per cent in 2019 and 1.9 per cent in 2020, which is about in line with the maximum rate that they think the economy can sustain over the long term. The White House claims that its tax cuts and regulatory bonfire have transformed the economy’s productive potential by supercharging business investment, but this theory lacks empirical support. The relevant measure of investment “accelerated a bit in the first half of 2018, but has since slowed significantly,” the writer Mark Whitehouse, of Bloomberg, points out. “In the first three months of 2019, it was up an annualized 2.7 percent, well short of the 5.3 percent average for the current expansion.” About the only thing that has really shot up since the tax cut is the scale of corporate stock buybacks.

Cycle Through Dubai’s Best Kept Secrets:

Good morning.

Cinco de Mayo  in Whitewater will see occasional afternoon thundershowers with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 38s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the Mexican Army defeats French occupying forces at the Battle of Puebla.

Recommended for reading in full:

Maria Perez writes A company tried to open an immigrant detention center in Wisconsin. A community that voted for Trump said no — again:

Plans to build the first privately-run immigration detention center in Wisconsin are off the table — at least for now — part of larger trend in which companies that build them are being encouraged by federal officials but resisted at the state and local level.

For at least a year, Virginia-based Immigration Centers of America wanted to build a 500-bed detention center in St. Croix County. The company said it would generate more than 200 full-time jobs and millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue.

However, earlier this month it withdrew its proposal to build in New Richmond. The city’s staff had issued a report recommending officials reject the application for rezoning and related ordinance changes, saying the project didn’t fit in the city’s development plan. In addition, public outcry over the plan was fierce, with residents opposing the detention of immigrants, and expressing concerns about property values and use of tax dollars.

David Frum writes Trump Attacks Facebook on Behalf of Racists and Grifters (“But unlike in previous eras, the social giant knows it can just ignore the president”):

President Donald Trump despises “fake news.” The Washington Post, The New York Times—these are “enemies of the people.” He has urged the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission to force Saturday Night Live off the air to punish the comedy show for making jokes about him.

What he likes are independent and honest voices who say things such as: Vaccines cause autism. President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a “carefully crafted fake.” Democratic Party insiders organized the murder of a staffer to cover up their nefarious plan to blame Russia for the hack of their emails. Sharia police are enforcing sharia law in Minneapolis. The Sandy Hook massacre never happened; the dead children were paid actors. (These are all false claims.)

One thing at least will follow from the president’s Twitter campaign: It will become even more difficult than before for the shamefaced remains of what used to be mainstream conservatism to separate themselves from these grifters, racists, and liars. According to the president, they are now martyrs, saying things that deserve to be heard. There have been times in the past few years—especially during the hoax to shift blame from the Russians for hacking the Democratic National Committee—that Fox News and Infowars blurred into each other. Those days will now return.

Perhaps this goat truly is the Greatest of All Time:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Union Army’s Overland Campaign begins:

a series of battles fought in Virginia during May and June 1864, in the American Civil War. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies, directed the actions of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, and other forces against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Although Grant suffered severe losses during the campaign, it was a strategic Union victory. It inflicted proportionately higher losses on Lee’s army and maneuvered it into a siege at Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, in just over eight weeks.

Recommended for reading in full:

John Sipher writes The Russia Investigation Will Continue:

Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is over, and although President Trump on Friday again described the probe as a “Witch Hunt,” the FBI is almost certain to continue its counterintelligence investigation into Russian espionage efforts related to the 2016 election. More important, they will continue to search for Americans working on behalf of the Kremlin.

The inability to establish that the Trump campaign conspired in a “tacit or express” agreement with the Russian government is not surprising. Most espionage investigations come up empty unless and until they get a lucky break. That does not mean there was no espionage activity in relation to the 2016 election. Every previous Russian political-warfare campaign was built on human spies. Russian “active measures”—propaganda, information warfare, cyberattacks, disinformation, use of forgeries, spreading conspiracies and rumors, funding extremist groups and deception operations—rely on human actors to support and inform their success. Counterintelligence professionals must doubt that Russia could have pulled off its election-interference effort without the support of spies burrowed into U.S. society or institutions.

Indeed, troubling patterns, unanswered questions, and tantalizing leads suggest that Russia relied on human sources to interfere in the 2016 election. Both the Mueller report and Intelligence Community assessments have identified a variety of Russian actors involved in the attack. They uncovered the activities of the Russian GRU, cyberhackers, and the Russian troll factory. However, one key player is missing: Russia’s premier espionage service, the SVR. Is it possible that the Russian espionage service played no role in Russia’s operation, and had no spies helping support what the Mueller report characterized as a “sweeping and systematic” attack of American institutions? The FBI would be professionally negligent if it assumed so.

Reuters reports State Dept. allowed foreign govts to lease luxury condos at Trump World Tower without Congress OK:

The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.

The Prosecutors Ending Mass Incarceration:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Niccolò Machiavelli is born on this day in 1469.

Recommended for reading in full:

Benjamin Wittes reports The Catastrophic Performance of Bill Barr (“The attorney general misled the public in seven key ways”):

The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

….

The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Mueller’s report in Barr’s original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savage’s side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Mueller’s meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and it’s not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney general’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.”

Barr, before the Senate yesterday, described the letter as “snitty.” Actually, it was generous. As Paul Rosenzweig summarized the situation on Lawfare, “the excerpts of the report contained in Barr’s original summary letter are at best a favorable spin on the report and at worst a rather transparent effort to mislead the public in advance of the report’s release.”

(Wittes, like many of us, at first gave Barr the benefit of the doubt, despite our opposition to Trump.  We were too generous.)

Adam Serwer writes The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr:

Barr is no flunky. He is a hardened ideologue who believes that the president he serves is largely above the law. Barr seems genuinely committed to defending the imperial prerogatives of the office against shortsighted liberals who would weaken the presidency in a delusional quest to remove a Republican from office. As he put it in his 2017 memo attacking the special counsel’s investigation, “crediting” the belief that the president could have committed obstruction by his official acts “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency.”

Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.

How Much Do NFL Draft Picks Make?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see occasional morning showers with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 14h 10m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and the Fire Department Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1933, Alex Campbell, water bailiff for Loch Ness and a part-time journalist, first describes a supposed animal sighting as a Loch Ness monster in an Inverness Courier report.

Recommended for reading in full:

Emily Holden reports the Trump EPA insists Monsanto’s Roundup is safe, despite cancer cases (“Administration to keep weedkiller on the market after landmark court rulings and concerns over food”):

The Trump administration is keeping the weedkiller Roundup on the US market, insisting it is safe for humans despite thousands of lawsuits launched by people who claim it gave them cancer.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains in a new decisionthat glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, which is made by Monsanto, does not cause cancer or other health problems if it is used according to instruction labels.

Glyphosate is used on more than 100 crops, including genetically modified corn, soy, cotton, canola and sugar beet, according to the EPA. Groups campaigning against glyphosate say it is most dangerous for farmworkers and others applying it but also poses risks for people consuming it in food.

Courts have found in favor of a school groundskeeper who is terminally ill with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and another man who used the chemical for decades and developed the same kind of cancer.

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Margaret Sullivan writes Fact-checking President Trump isn’t enough:

First off, they should stop using euphemisms, such as the New York Times did the other day when on Twitter it described one particularly brutal falsehood by Trump — that doctors and mothers collaborate to execute newborns — as a case of the president reviving “an inaccurate refrain.”

….

The Times is far from alone in this tendency to soft-pedal, as Daniel Dale, the excellent Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, told Benjamin Hart of New York magazine.

“I think our job as journalists is to call things what they are. And so if someone commits 100 crimes, you don’t say, ‘We’re gonna call the first two ‘crimes’ and the [rest]’ — I don’t know what the softer word would be — ‘non-legal behavior.’?”

….

And look for innovative ways to tell the story of the endless lies, as the Times did in a graphic, putting to rest the often-heard argument from Trump supporters that “all presidents lie, you guys are just picking on our guy.”

Tonight’s Sky for May 2019:

Good morning.

May in Whitewater begins with rain and a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 53s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 12% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

The Whitewater School Board is scheduled to meet beginning at 6 PM for a closed session, returning to open session:

4. CLOSED SESSION

A. Adjourn into closed session, pursuant to Section 19.85(1) (c), Wis. Stats., to consider employment, promotion, compensation, or performance evaluation data of any public employee over which the governmental body has jurisdiction or exercises responsibility. Specifically, to discuss administrator contracts, evaluations, and performance of duties with the District’s legal counsel. (Action Item)

5. OPEN SESSION

A. Reconvene into open session per Section 19.85(2)Wis. Stats., for potential action on any matters discussed in closed session. (Action Item)

On this day in 1931, the Empire State Building officially opens.

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report Mueller complained that Barr’s letter did not capture ‘context’ of Trump probe:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III wrote a letter in late March complaining to Attorney General William P. Barr that a four-page memo to Congress describing the principal conclusions of the investigation into President Trump “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of Mueller’s work, according to a copy of the letter reviewed Tuesday by The Washington Post.

….

At the time Mueller’s letter was sent to Barr on March 27, Barr had days prior announced that Mueller did not find a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian officials seeking to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In his memo to Congress, Barr also said that Mueller had not reached a conclusion about whether Trump had tried to obstruct justice, but that Barr reviewed the evidence and found it insufficient to support such a charge.

Days after Barr’s announcement, Mueller wrote the previously undisclosed private letter to the Justice Department, laying out his concerns in stark terms that shocked senior Justice Department officials, according to people familiar with the discussions.

“The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office’s work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote. “There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

The letter made a key request: that Barr release the 448-page report’s introductions and executive summaries, and it made initial suggested redactions for doing so, according to Justice Department officials.

Jennifer Rubin observes Rod Rosenstein is leaving as a diminished man and shamed lawyer:

“Rosenstein talks a lot about the rule of law in very eloquent ways,” former prosecutor Mimi Rocah tells me. “But his recent actions — signing on to Barr’s letter which misrepresented the Mueller report and gave a legally indefensible and unnecessary conclusion, standing behind Barr at a press conference that was more like a defense closing argument — directly threaten the rule of law, because he no longer looks like someone leading the DOJ in neutral ways.” She adds that “we can’t have faith in decisions he’s made. For him to cite Trump as a defender of the rule [of law] given the damage he has done to the DOJ and FBI as institutions is shameful.”

 Large tornado caught on camera near Sulphur, Oklahoma: