Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 28.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Black Hawk War militia encamp in Palmyra:

During the Black Hawk War, General Atkinson led his entire militia, which included future presidents Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor, to a camp just south of Palmyra.

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky report Jeffrey Epstein taken into custody in New York on new charges related to sex crimes involving minors:

Jeffrey Epstein, the well-connected multimillionaire who was sentenced to just more than a year in jail to resolve allegations that he molested dozens of young girls, has been taken into custody in New York on new charges having to do with sex crimes involving minors, a person familiar with the matter said.

….

The latest charges add a significant new wrinkle to the considerable political and legal saga surrounding Epstein. The wealthy financier — who counted among his friends President Trump and former president Bill Clinton — pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida of soliciting prostitution in a controversial arrangement that allowed him to resolve far more serious federal allegations of molesting young girls.

His case was the subject of an investigation by the Miami Herald, which detailed how then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, now Trump’s labor secretary, shelved a 53-page federal indictment that could have put Epstein behind bars for life. The arrangement is now being investigated by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is seeking to determine whether the attorneys involved committed “professional misconduct” in bringing about its close.

See also How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime @ the Miami Herald.

William Frey writes Less than half of US children under 15 are white, census shows:

For the first time, non-Hispanic white residents now make up less than half (49.9%) of the nation’s under age 15 population, newly released 2018 U.S. Census Bureau estimates show. The new data highlight the increasing racial diversity of the nation’s overall population, for which non-Hispanic whites now comprise only slightly more than three-fifths (60.4%) of all residents. But the fact that white children under 15 have already become a minority in their age group puts an exclamation point on the fact that the nation’s diversity is percolating from the “bottom up” as the white population ages. This phenomenon, which is projected to continue, emphasizes the need for institutions that focus on children and young families to proactively accommodate the interests of more racially diverse populations, as the latter will be key players in the country’s demographic and economic future.

Answers to Five Whys:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with scattered morning thundershowers, and a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 12m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 18% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress issues the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.

Recommended for reading in full:

Jeremy Raff reports What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse (‘Dolly Lucio Sevier evaluated dozens of sick children at a facility in South Texas. She found evidence of infection, malnutrition, and psychological trauma’):

MCALLEN, Texas—Inside the Border Patrol warehouse on Ursula Avenue, Dolly Lucio Sevier saw a baby who’d been fed from the same unwashed bottle for days; children showing signs of malnutrition and dehydration; and several kids who, in her medical opinion, were exhibiting clear evidence of psychological trauma. More than 1,000 migrant children sat in the detention facility here, and Sevier, a local pediatrician, had been examining as many as she could, one at a time. But she wasn’t permitted to enter the area where they were being held, many of them in cages, and find the sickest kids to examine. Instead, in a nearby room, she manually reviewed a 50-page printout of that day’s detainees, and highlighted the names of children with a 2019 birth date—the babies—before moving on to the toddlers.

When it was almost time to leave, Sevier asked to see a 3-year-old girl, and then two other children. But by that point, the friendly and accommodating Border Patrol agent assisting her earlier in the day had been replaced by a dour guard, wearing a surgical mask, who claimed that he couldn’t find the toddler. “We can wait,” Sevier said, as she recalled to me in an interview. Her tone was polite but firm; she knew that she had the right under a federal court settlement to examine whomever she liked.

Paul Fahri reports Whatever happened to Breitbart? The insurgent star of the right is in a long, slow fade:

In January 2017, Breitbart.com was flying high. Donald Trump, the candidate it had backed during the 2016 campaign, was sworn in as president. Its former executive chairman, Stephen K. Bannon, was named chief White House strategist, seemingly auguring an era of unparalleled access and influence for the far-right, anti-establishment news and commentary site.

In hindsight, it looks like it was Breitbart’s high-water mark.

The site Bannon once described as “the platform for the alt-right” has steadily tumbled from the commanding heights it occupied just 30 months ago.

Since Trump became president, monthly traffic has virtually collapsed, plummeting nearly 75 percent. Aggressive conservative competitors have zoomed past it. At the same time, it faces a double financial whammy: the loss of its biggest donor and an ad boycott launched by a liberal group that continues to erode its revenue.

How Nathan’s Hot Dog Contest Became A Fourth Of July Favorite:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with scattered thundershowers, and a high of eighty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Atkinson enters the Trembling Lands:

The area was some 10 square miles and contained a large bog. Although the land appeared safe, it would undulate or tremble for yards when pressure was applied. Many of the militiamen were on horses, which plunged to their bellies in the swamp. The “trembling lands” forced Atkinson to retrace his steps back toward the Rock River, in the process losing days in his pursuit of Black Hawk.

Recommended for reading in full:

Steve Karnowski and Balint Szalai report In Trump aid package to farmers buckled by trade war, many find ways to skirt caps:

When President Donald Trump’s administration announced a $12 billion aid package for farmers struggling under the financial strain of his trade dispute with China, the payments were capped. But many large farming operations had no trouble finding legal ways around them, records provided to the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act show.

The government paid nearly $2.8 million to a Missouri soybean operation registered as three entities at the same address. More than $900,000 went to five other farm businesses, in Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee and two in Texas. Three other farming operations collected more than $800,000, and 16 others collected more than $700,000.

….

The numerous ways around the caps mean that millions of subsidy dollars flow to “city slickers who are stretching the limits of the law,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president of government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, which has criticized federal farm subsidy programs as biased toward big producers and promoting environmentally damaging farming practices.

Urban dwellers might play only a small role in an operation without ever setting foot on the farm because of the loose definitions for who qualifies, he said.

Alex Isenstadt reports NRA meltdown has Trump campaign sweating:

The National Rifle Association aired an avalanche of TV ads and pushed its 5 million-plus members to the polls for Donald Trump in 2016, propelling him in the Rust Belt states that delivered him the presidency.

Now, the gun rights group is in total meltdown — and senior Republicans and Trump 2020 officials are alarmed.

In recent weeks, the NRA has seen everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing tales of self-dealing by top leaders. The turmoil is fueling fears that the organization will be profoundly diminished heading into the election, leaving the Republican Party with a gaping hole in its political machinery.

With the Chamber of Commerce and Koch political network withdrawing from their once-dominant roles in electing conservatives, Republicans worry that three organizations that have long formed the core of their electoral infrastructure will be effectively on the sidelines.

Total Solar Eclipse 2019:

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: