Good morning.

Independence Day in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with afternoon thundershowers, and a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 04s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Independence Holiday events begin just before 10 AM this morning with the Whippet City Mile, a parade, food vendors and carnival, a car show, a ski show, and music along the Cravath Lakefront.

On the night of July 4, 1776, John Dunlap prints the first broadsides of the Declaration of Independence.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Donna Cassata reports Rep. Amash, lone GOP critic of Trump, leaves Republican Party:

Rep. Justin Amash, the only Republican in Congress to have accused President Trump of impeachable acts, said Thursday he is leaving the Republican Party and becoming an independent, bemoaning that “modern politics is trapped in a partisan death spiral, but there is an escape.”

In an op-ed in The Washington Post, the Michigan congressman described himself as a lifelong Republican who has grown disenchanted with party politics and frightened by a two-party system that has “evolved into an existential threat to American principles and institutions.”

(Amash is as close to a credibly right-of-center libertarian as anyone in the  GOP.  He’s much, much closer to a traditional conservative-libertarian view than either Ron or Rand Paul.  Where he goes from here one cannot say.  One can be sure, however, that opposition to Trumpism requires a Coalition of All Democratic Forces, and that coalition’s electoral success depends on supporting a major-party alternative to Trump.)

Ted Hesson and Cristiano Lima report Border agency knew about secret Facebook group for years:

Customs and Border Protection officials have been aware for up to three years that a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents was posting offensive messages — far longer than previously reported.

Border Patrol leadership knew about photos posted to the group as far back as 2016, when agents reported them, according to a current Homeland Security official. The images — several of which were provided to POLITICO — show agents engaging in conduct that includes simulating sex acts and taking selfies while defecating. A former DHS official said he was aware of the Facebook group during the past year.

Neither official knew of any serious punishment ever leveled at members of the Facebook group.

ProPublica reported Monday that comments in the “I’m 10-15” Facebook group posted as recently as last week mocked the death of a 16-year-old detained Guatemalan migrant, made bigoted remarks about throwing a burrito at two Latina congresswomen, and posted obscene and misogynistic illustrations of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The group’s name refers to the code used to signal “aliens in custody.”

(See also Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes.)

How a former FBI agent took down a Russian spy:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with occasional thundershowers, and a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 57s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Independence Holiday events begin at 4 PM this afternoon along the Cravath Lakefront (this evening there will be a pageant, carnival, live music, and food vendors).

On this day in 1863, the Union Army is victorious at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Recommended for reading in full:

Elaine Godfrey writes ‘Nothing Prepares You for the Inhumanity of It’:

Congresswoman Madeleine Dean: The women were worried about their own health. Two of the women have epilepsy. We talked about toothbrushes. One said, As a result of the medication I take for epilepsy, my teeth are harmed and I have very little access to toothbrushes. She revealed her teeth in terrible condition.

Another woman said, Feel my back, and on the upper portion of her back was a large lump. [The guards] said, Yeah, that’s something that needs a biopsy, but we can’t take care of that here.

Everybody was crying. One woman, 58 years old, clearly the eldest in this grouping, kept sobbing and sobbing, saying, I don’t know where my daughter is; she’s 23 years old; we were separated. Another woman seated next to her said,Two days ago, my 18-year-old daughter and I were separated from the tents; I don’t know where my daughter is. I asked the guard if they could guarantee me that they would find out exactly where these daughters are and if they would facilitate communication. He said, I know exactly where they are; I already told her—just that kind of flippant information.

I said to the women, You’re being detained here like criminals; what is your crime? The one who could speak the best English said, The crime is, I crossed the damn river. I wanted to come to America. I’m fleeing Cuba and political problems there. My family is not sure where I am. That’s the crime for which they’ve been detained 56 days.

The other thing they were worried about was retribution. They whispered to those [lawmakers] who could speak Spanish and said, We’re worried they’ll take this out on us, since we’ve spoken to you and told you about these conditions.

Adam Serwer writes A Crime by Any Name:

Detainees described overcrowding so severe that “it was difficult to move in any direction without jostling and being jostled.” The water provided them was foul, “of a dark color, and an ordinary glass would collect a thick sediment.” The “authorities never removed any fifth.” A detainee wrote that the “only shelter from the sun and rain and night dews, was what we could make by stretching over us our coats or scraps of blanket.” As for the food, “our ration was in quality a starving one, it being either too foul to be touched or too raw to be digested.”

Arctic fox makes 2,176-mile, 76 day journey:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 15m 45s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress votes for independence.

Recommended for reading in full:

A.C. Thompson reports Inside the Secret Border Patrol Facebook Group Where Agents Joke About Migrant Deaths and Post Sexist Memes:

Members of a secret Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents joked about the deaths of migrants, discussed throwing burritos at Latino members of Congress visiting a detention facility in Texas on Monday and posted a vulgar illustration depicting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engaged in oral sex with a detained migrant, according to screenshots of their postings.

In one exchange, group members responded with indifference and wisecracks to the post of a news story about a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant who died in May while in custody at a Border Patrol station in Weslaco, Texas. One member posted a GIF of Elmo with the quote, “Oh well.” Another responded with an image and the words “If he dies, he dies.”

Created in August 2016, the Facebook group is called “I’m 10-15” and boasts roughly 9,500 members from across the country. (10-15 is Border Patrol code for “aliens in custody.”) The group described itself, in an online introduction, as a forum for “funny” and “serious” discussion about work with the patrol. “Remember you are never alone in this family,” the introduction said.

….

ProPublica received images of several recent discussions in the 10-15 Facebook group and was able to link the participants in those online conversations to apparently legitimate Facebook profiles belonging to Border Patrol agents, including a supervisor based in El Paso, Texas, and an agent in Eagle Pass, Texas. ProPublica has so far been unable to reach the group members who made the postings.

ProPublica contacted three spokespeople for CBP in regard to the Facebook group and provided the names of three agents who appear to have participated in the online chats. CBP hasn’t yet responded.

“These comments and memes are extremely troubling,” said Daniel Martinez, a sociologist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who studies the border. “They’re clearly xenophobic and sexist.”

The postings, in his view, reflect what “seems to be a pervasive culture of cruelty aimed at immigrants within CBP. This isn’t just a few rogue agents or ‘bad apples.’”

….

Perhaps the most disturbing posts target Ocasio-Cortez. One includes a photo illustration of her engaged in oral sex at an immigrant detention center. Text accompanying the image reads, “Lucky Illegal Immigrant Glory Hole Special Starring AOC.”

Another is a photo illustration of a smiling President Donald Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez’s head toward his crotch. The agent who posted the image commented: “That’s right bitches. The masses have spoken and today democracy won.”

(Parts of the federal government’s law enforce divisions are now littered with lumpen employees: unacculturated and perverse.)

How Plant-Based Milk Flooded The Market:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sun, with scattered thundershowers, and a high of eighty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1967, the sale of oleo becomes legal:

Recommended for reading in full:

Anne Applebaum writes Putin’s attack on Western values was familiar. The American reaction was not:

Russian scorn for liberal democracy has a long history, and a certain kind of Russian disdain for the West is nothing new. As far back as 1920, Lenin declared that parliaments were “historically obsolete” and predicted that it was just a matter of time before they disappeared. In 1956, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously said that “history is on our side.” The Soviet Union was winning, he said, and the West was dying: “We will bury you.”

That’s the historical background for the interview that the Financial Times conducted with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, on the eve of this weekend’s Group of 20 summit. The conversation ranged over many issues, with the curious exception of Ukraine, which the newspaper chose not to bring up. But in the course of the conversation, Putin returned more than once to a theme that Lenin and Khrushchev would have found familiar. The “so-called liberal idea,” he told his interlocutors, “has outlived its purpose.” A few minutes later he repeated himself: “The liberal idea has become obsolete.”

….

The liberal idea, to Putin, has nothing to do with rights, or freedoms, or separation of powers; nothing to do with judicial independence, the rule of law, private property, or any of the other things that make liberal societies prosperous and free. The comments were telling: Putin’s understanding of the Western liberal world and of Western liberal values is not, it seems, any more sophisticated than that of the Internet trolls whose wages he pays. Nor is it much more sophisticated than Lenin’s or Khrushchev’s.

The Financial Times interview appeared Friday morning. On Friday afternoon, President Trump appeared with Putin, laughing and joking. He waved away a group of journalists: “Get rid of them. Fake news is a great term, isn’t it? You don’t have this problem in Russia, but we do.”

(Emphasis added.)

Uri Friedman and Yara Bayoumy write The Coming Reset in the U.S.-Saudi Alliance: 

Fed up with the catastrophic human cost of Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen’s civil war and appalled by the murder of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Congress seemingly attempts some sort of measure to censure the kingdom every week. Yet at every turn, the White House has blocked or circumvented those moves, standing staunchly by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MbS, while escalating its confrontation with his archenemy, Iran.

The real reckoning in the U.S.-Saudi partnership could come if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, though early warning signs are already visible.

Tonight’s Sky: July 2019:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered thunderstorms with a high of eighty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 17m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1859, daredevil Jean François Gravelet (professionally known as Charles Blondin) becomes the first person to walk a tightrope across Niagara Falls.

Recommended for reading in full:

Sophie Carson reports Wisconsin gun manufacturer shipped unmarked rifles, pistols to Australian arms dealer illegally, plea deal says:

[Andy] Huebschmann owns Germantown-based Thureon Defense LLC and is licensed to manufacture and deal guns, according to the plea agreement. He met Paul Munro of Australia at a Las Vegas gun trade show about seven years ago, and Munro persuaded him to ship him Thureon guns under the radar.

….

To carry out the scheme, Munro and others constructed a shipping crate with a secret compartment under the floor in which to pack the guns and rifle parts and delivered it to the Thureon offices, according to the plea agreement.

Between 2013 and 2016 Huebschmann shipped Munro rifle kits with parts for semi-automatic or fully automatic triggers, frames and slides that could be assembled into full pistols and other weapons. He did not have export licenses for the shipments.

….

The maximum sentence for his charge — violating the Arms Export Control Act— is 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

(No portion of rights under the Second Amendment includes concealing gun shipments to Australia.)

Elaina Plott reports Another Allegation—And Trump’s Allies Just Don’t Care (‘Inside the president’s orbit, the gravity of sexual-assault accusations against him no longer seems to register’):

“What was she, like, the 28th or something?” one former White House official pondered to me. In a separate conversation, another offered a different guess: “Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

They were talking about E. Jean Carroll, the longtime Elle advice columnist who, for the first time last week, publicly accused Donald Trump of assaulting her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room more than 20 years ago. And what they were trying to do was locate the latest number of women who have accused the president of sexual misconduct. (The answer: at least 22.)

For these former officials, the apparently incalculable magnitude of this number did not cause them to reconsider Trump’s every denial of the varied allegations—to wonder, for example, about the likelihood that 22 or 23 or 28 women were all lying in their stories of harassment, groping, unwanted kissing, and, in Carroll’s case, sexual assault.

Rather, for them, the increase in the number of women seemed to mirror the increase in their indifference. Another accusation, they seemed to say, was like another dollop of numbing cream. “I didn’t read it,” the second former official told me, referring to Carroll’s written account in New York, which was an excerpt from her forthcoming book. “We’re just kind of numb to it all at this point.”

Surfing the Amazon River’s Endless Wave:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 17m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 13% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, 5th Wisconsin Infantry and Co. G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters take part in the Battle of Savage’s Station during the Peninsular Campaign in Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full:

Josh Lederman and Kristen Welker report Trump defends Biden after Democratic debate, says Harris got ‘too much credit’:

Speaking to reporters at a news conference after the G-20 summit in Japan, Trump said that the line of attack by Harris was “so out of the can,” suggesting it was rehearsed ahead of time.

“It wasn’t that outstanding, and I think probably he was hit harder than he should have been hit,” Trump said.

(It’s notable that Trump feels the need to address Harris‘s performance.  If she’s the nominee, Trump will find himself facing a tenacious opponent who will overmatch him in every way.  My own views on Harris are here.)

Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report Wisconsin’s GOP speaker says he wants to consider legalizing medical marijuana, just after rejecting governor’s plan:

MADISON – Days after rejecting a medical marijuana plan, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said Friday he wants to debate the issue this fall even though it would be extremely difficult to pass.

Vos, of Rochester, in recent years has shown support for legalizing medical marijuana, but other Republicans who control the Legislature have expressed deep skepticism toward the idea.

“I’d like to have at least a discussion about medical marijuana,” Vos said Friday when asked about his top priorities for lawmakers when they return to the Capitol in the fall.

He acknowledged that the idea is unlikely to go anywhere even if he finds enough support for it among the five dozen Republicans in his house. That’s because of staunch opposition to the idea from Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau.

(Joe, commenting here, was spot on about this as a political issue.)

 Surviving the Worst Skydiving Accident in History:

The professional skydiver Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld was poised to achieve his dreams. He was training with his team for the World Championships—a life goal since he started practicing the sport at age 5, jumping off his bunk bed with a blanket for a parachute.

Then, on April 23, 1992, Brodsky-Chenfeld lived a nightmare. Along with 22 others, he boarded a plane for a routine training jump. Two months later, he awoke from a coma to discover that a horrific plane crash—one of the worst in skydiving history—had crippled his body and claimed the lives of 16 of his skydiving teammates. The doctors told him that he was lucky to be alive, but he would never skydive again.

In Yali Sharon’s short documentary Above All Else, Brodsky-Chenfeld describes his traumatic near-death experience, the inspiring vision he had before waking from his coma, and his miraculous recovery.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see occasional thunderstorms with a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 22s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 21.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson starts up the Rock River in the Black Hawk War.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Dan Balz reports Harris upstages Biden and Sanders with dominating performance:

Harris delivered a dominating performance through much of the two hours, attacking Biden on civil rights, showing passion on race and other issues and silencing her fellow candidates when their crosstalk early in the debate threatened to show Democrats as a squabbling and disagreeable family.

It was when, as others talked about racial issues, that she broke in and changed the flow of the evening by reminding voters of the attributes that help define her candidacy. “As the only black person on this stage, I would like to speak on the issue of race,” she declared.

Biden asserted that Harris’s criticisms on race were a “mischaracterization of my position across the board.” But her attacks, delivered at close range and with forcefulness and personal references, left a mark on the former vice president and established her as a candidate to be reckoned with.

Harris has often struggled to match the promise of her candidacy, but in her first opportunity arrayed as one of 10 candidates, she made the most of the opportunities she was given — and took some on her own to announce her arrival on the big stage.

Thursday’s debate may not change the polls much but it will probably reorder how Democrats begin to think about the choices before them.

(Some points and disclosures. I’m not a Democrat but a Never Trump libertarian. That places my views, along with many others, into an opposition that Benjamin Wittes has called a Coalition of All Democratic Forces, a vast group of particular views united in the defense of a traditional liberal democratic political order.  A third party would prove useless against Trump; it’s a grand coalition in support of a major party – in this case the Democratic Party – that will end his political career.  Harris’s particular views often diverge from libertarian lines, needless to say.  She is, however, unquestionably intelligent, knowledgeable, and in temperament well-suited to face Trump.  I am a Harris donor, and although I would support any major-party opponent to Trump, it seems to me impossible for a discerning person to doubt her strengths and the promise of her candidacy.)

The New York Times podcast The Daily offers corroboration of E. Jean Carroll’s accusations against Donald Trump:

The writer E. Jean Carroll came forward last week with explosive accusations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s. Today, the two women she confided in after the alleged attack discuss it publicly for the first time.

How IOT – an Internet of Things – Gives Rise To Smart Stores: