Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 07m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 9.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1832, construction of Fort Koshkonong begins:

On this date General Henry Atkinson and his troops built Fort Koshkonong after being forced backwards from the bog area of the “trembling lands” in their pursuit of Black Hawk. The Fort, later known as Fort Atkinson, was described by Atkinson as “a stockade work flanked by four block houses for the security of our supplies and the accommodation of the sick.” It was also on this date that Atkinson discharged a large number of Volunteers from his army in order to decrease stress on a dwindling food supply and to make his force less cumbersome. One of the dismissed volunteers was future president, Abraham Lincoln, whose horse was stolen in Cold Spring, Wisconsin, and was forced to return to New Salem, Illinois by foot and canoe. [Sources: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride and Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Emily Tamkin reports US Republican Delegation Met With Sanctioned Russians In Moscow (“Russian state media portrayed the meetings, coming days before President Trump’s planned summit with Putin next week, as good news for Russia”):

In their Moscow meetings with members of Russia’s parliament last week, an all-Republican delegation of US members of Congress met with at least two individuals currently sanctioned by the United States.

In a meeting with the Duma, parliament’s lower house, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama reportedly told Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, “I’m not here today to accuse Russia of this or that or so forth. I’m saying that we should all strive for a better relationship.” Volodin has been sanctioned since 2014 for Russia’s “illegitimate and unlawful” activities in Ukraine.

In their meeting with the Federation Council, parliament’s upper house, the group listened as Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Konstantin Kosachev complained about the latest round of sanctions against Russian individuals. Kosachev was sanctioned in April over alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and “malign activity.”

In addition to Shelby, the delegation consisted of Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, and Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, all of whom voted in favor of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act in the summer of 2017 — the legislation intended in part to make it more difficult for the president to lift sanctions on Russia.

(Emphasis added.  Of course, Russian state media sees the visit of GOP senators as good news for Putin: their willful ignorance of Putin’s crimes against others is the supine position Russia expects.)

  Jeremy Shapiro describes Trump’s meaningless NATO spending debate:

The European response to Trump’s histrionics over spending is nearly irrelevant to how his administration will treat the alliance. In fact, we have already seen a fair degree of effort to respond to Trump’s critique. European defense spending is creeping up—27 of 28 members of NATO are now increasing their defense spending, eight will meet the 2 percent target this year, and 16 countries are on track to meet it by the agreed date of 2024.

….

It seems clear at this point that Trump does not want to solve the burden-sharing problem. On the contrary, he wants to use Europeans’ collective sense of guilt over their lack of spending, as well as the European fear of American abandonment, to gain concessions on what really matters to him: reducing the American trade deficit. Indeed, at the summit, he may explicitly link a continued American security guarantee with economic concessions from Europe.

Trump’s focus on trade means that Europe cannot conceivably meet his demands on defense spending. If the Europeans parked a brand-new aircraft carrier off the coast of Mar-a-Lago and tossed the keys onto the 18th green, Trump would simply charge them greens fees. In the end, he doesn’t believe in the idea that America should defend Europe, so why should the United States pay anything at all? He is only interested in it if it brings in a profit.

(Putin, himself, could never have hoped for more than Trump, an American who does not want to defend democratic Europe from authoritarian Russia.)

Josh Dawsey, Tom Hamburger and Ashley Parker report Giuliani works for foreign clients while serving as Trump’s attorney:

Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to work on behalf of foreign clients both personally and through his namesake security firm while serving as President Trump’s personal attorney — an arrangement experts say raises conflict of interest concerns and could run afoul of federal ethics laws.

Giuliani said in recent interviews with The Washington Post that he is working with clients in Brazil and Colombia, among other countries, as well as delivering paid speeches for a controversial Iranian dissident group. He has never registered with the Justice Department on behalf of his overseas clients, asserting it is not necessary because he does not directly lobby the U.S. government and is not charging Trump for his services.

His decision to continue representing foreign entities also departs from standard practice for presidential attorneys, who in the past have generally sought to sever any ties that could create conflicts with their client in the White House.

(This is the standard defense to conflicts of interest from every self-dealing and self-promoting man, nationally, statewide, and locally: it’s not a conflict if I don’t admit it is, and it’s not a conflict because I’m wearing a different hat for each role.  All these hats, of course, sit on the same self-dealing and self-promoting head.)

  Natasha Lennard reports A Year Later, the Fascists of Charlottesville Are Back for More — This Time Outside the White House:

THE “UNITE THE RIGHT” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year ripped away the last shred of plausible deniability about the white supremacist fascism of the so-called alt-right. A neo-Nazi plowed his Dodge Charger into a crowd of anti-fascist counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring others. A young black man was beaten bloody by racists with metal poles in a parking lot near a police station. White supremacists marched Klan-like, with burning torches and Nazi salutes, around a Confederate statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee while chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” It was a gruesome pastiche of 19th-century American and 20th-century European race hate, newly emboldened under Donald Trump. The president later declared that there were some “very fine people on both sides” — a remark that winked at the side with swastikas and “Sieg Heils.”

The tragic events of that day make it all the more vile that the white nationalist organizer of “Unite the Right,” Jason Kessler, is planning an event to mark the deadly demonstration. The approval for the “anniversary” rally outside the White House was granted by the National Park Service. The application offered plans for an estimated 400 demonstrators in Washington’s Lafayette Park who would be “protesting civil rights abuse in Charlottesville, Va / white civil rights.” Kessler initially applied to hold “Unite the Right 2” in Charlottesville, and is now suing the city because it denied him a permit due to safety concerns. The lawsuit seeks to allow the demonstration to go ahead in Charlottesville, as well as in Washington, D.C., on August 12 — exactly a year after Heyer’s brutal death. The false victimhood of Kessler’s aims were on full display as news of approval for him to both assemble and speak in Washington came in: He told a local CBS affiliate, “We’re not able to peacefully assemble. We’re not able to speak.”

(They can assemble and speak – they shouldn’t be doing so without counterprotests.)

  Whatever Happened to the Creator of Calvin and Hobbes?:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 08m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 18.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board convenes in open session at 7 PM.

On this day in 1877, the Wimbledon Championships begin:

The inaugural 1877 Wimbledon Championship started on 9 July 1877 and the Gentlemen’s Singles was the only event held. It was won by Spencer Gore, an old Harrovian rackets player, from a field of 22. About 200 spectators paid one shilling each to watch the final.^[13]

The lawns at the ground were arranged so that the principal court was in the middle with the others arranged around it, hence the title “Centre Court“.^[c] The name was retained when the Club moved in 1922 to the present site in Church Road, although no longer a true description of its location.^[15] However, in 1980 four new courts were brought into commission on the north side of the ground, which meant the Centre Court was once more correctly described. The opening of the new No. 1 Court in 1997 emphasised the description.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Jeffrey Rosen writes Happy 150th Birthday, 14th Amendment:

On July 9, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution turns 150. On the same day, President Donald Trump will nominate a new Supreme Court justice to replace Anthony Kennedy, who, more than anyone else in America, has defined the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment for the past three decades.

The convergence of these momentous events is appropriate. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was originally intended to allow Congress and the courts to protect three fundamental values: racial equality, individual rights, and economic liberty. But the amendment was quickly eviscerated by the Court, and for nearly a century it protected economic liberty alone.

….

After the Civil War, many of the former Confederate states passed laws known as the “Black Codes,” which sharply limited the rights of former enslaved people. In response, on July 9, 1868, Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection under the law and also denies any state the right to deprive people of liberty without due process.

Only five years later, the Supreme Court eviscerated the amendment in the 5–4 Slaughterhouse Cases decision. As drafted by the Ohio congressman John Bingham, the amendment was intended to require states as well as the federal government to respect the fundamental liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

A decade later, in a lopsided 8–1 decision, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which banned discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. Finally, in 1896, the Court upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, standing aside as the South constructed the Jim Crow regime. Justice John Marshall Harlan provided the only dissent. In one of the most famous passages in the history of Supreme Court opinions, he wrote: “There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.”

 William H. Frey writes US white population declines and Generation ‘Z-Plus’ is minority white, census shows:

The U.S. Census Bureau’s release of race and age statistics for 2017points to two noteworthy milestones about the nation’s increasingly aging white and growing diverse population. First, for the first time since the Census Bureau has released these annual statistics, they show an absolute decline in the nation’s white non-Hispanic population—accelerating a phenomenon that was not projected to occur until the next decade.

Second, the new numbers show that for the first time there are more children who are minorities than who are white, at every age from zero to nine. This means we are on the cusp of seeing the first minority white generation, born in 2007 and later, which perhaps we can dub Generation “Z-Plus.”

….

The good news for the nation is that white aging and potential future declines will be countered by gains in racial minorities. These populations increased by 4.7 million in the two years that the white population declined, including gains of 2.4 million among Hispanics, 1.1 million among Asians, and 1.2 million among all other races, according to the new estimates. Moreover, these gains are especially important in offsetting white declines that are occurring among the nation’s youth.

(America doesn’t need to be white, she needs to be free; the former doesn’t – as no race could – assure the latter.)

  Jonathan Lemire, Catherine Lucey, and Zeke Miller describe Life in Trump’s Cabinet: Perks, pestering, power, putdowns:

The Cabinet members are lashed to a mercurial president who has been known to quickly sour on those working for him and who doesn’t shy from subjecting subordinates — many of them formerly powerful figures in their own rights — to withering public humiliation. Think Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator who was labeled “beleaguered” early on by presidential tweet and who has since been repeatedly subjected to public criticism.

For all his bad press, Pruitt managed to last longer than many in Washington had expected. But on Thursday, Trump tweeted that Pruitt had resigned, adding that the EPA chief had done an outstanding job — “within the agency.” A senior administration official not authorized to discuss the situation publicly later said that Pruitt had been pushed by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly to tender his resignation Thursday amid the mounting scandals.

Trump’s Cabinet, a collection of corporate heavyweights, decorated generals and influential conservatives, has been beset by regular bouts of turnover and scandal. A Cabinet member’s standing with Trump — who’s up, who’s down; who’s relevant, who’s not —is closely tied to how that person or their issue is playing in the press, especially on cable TV.

  Dan Merica reports How soybeans — yes, soybeans — could impact the midterm elections:

“This isn’t just numbers on a sheet or percentage of trade or dollar value,” said Michael Petefish, a 33-year old Trump supporter and fifth generation farmer in southern Minnesota.

Standing on the farm he will likely run for the next 40 years, he added, “This is multi-generational American families, your base, that you are now squarely putting into financial peril.”

Petefish is one of the thousands of farmers who have seen the price of their crops tank in the face of escalating trade rhetoric between the United States and China. Growers in the area talk of their farms losing over $200,000 in value as commodity prices slump, all while the back and forth between the two countries has played out like a game of chicken, with each side trying to one up each other by raising the size of tariffs they plan to implement on each other.

(Petefish’s candidate has put far more than soybean farmers in peril; he and others selfishly thought they deserved more, only to find they’ll get less.)

  Here’s Why World Cup Balls Look So Weird Every Tournament:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 09m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 26.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1850, James Jesse Strang is crowned king:

On this date James Jesse Strang, leader of the estranged Mormon faction, the Strangites, was crowned king; the only man to achieve such a title in America. When founder Joseph Smith was assassinated, Strang forged a letter from Smith dictating he was to be the heir. The Mormon movement split into followers of Strang and followers of Brigham Young. As he gained more followers (but never nearly as many as Brigham Young), Strang became comparable to a Saint, and in 1850 was crowned King Jamesin a ceremony in which he wore a discarded red robe of a Shakespearean actor, and a metal crown studded with a cluster of stars as his followers sang him hosannas. Soon after his crowning, he announced that Mormonism embraced and supported polygamy. (Young’s faction was known to have practiced polygamy, but had not at this time announced it publicly.) A number of followers lived in Walworth County, including Strang at a home in Burlington. In 1856 Strang was himself assassinated, leaving five wives. Without Strang’s leadership, his movement disintegrated. [Source: Wisconsin Saints and Sinners, by Fred L. Holmes, p. 106-121]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Anne Applebaum asks Trump is hinting at concessions to Putin. So what do we get back?:

But all these [possible] deals, just like the original Yalta agreement, have at their heart a fatal flaw: They rely on promises from a Russian leader who has never, in Syria, Ukraine or anywhere else, kept his word. In Ukraine he has continued to bankroll the “rebels” who continue to prosecute an illegal war in the east. In Syria he has repeatedly reneged on commitments to lift sieges, allow the delivery of humanitarian aid and deescalate conflict, yet he has paid no price. Even if he wanted to, the idea that he can somehow control Iran is peculiar: The Russian foreign minister has already said that it is “absolutely unrealistic” to expect Iran to remove itself from the conflict. The Russian military doesn’t have the troops for that anyway.

In both Ukraine and Syria, the situation is extremely odd: The United States — still, in theory, the stronger power — appears to be negotiating to give up quite a lot in exchange for very little. The only explanation for U.S. determination to make a lopsided deal is Trump himself. Perhaps he has learned from his experience negotiating with North Korea: In Singapore he endorsed a dictator, got nothing except unenforceable promises and then came home to a hero’s welcome from Fox News. Or perhaps he still feels he owes something, after all, to the man who helped him win the presidency.

 Hope Kirwan reports New Chinese Tariffs Mean Lower Prices For Wisconsin Farmers (“Prices For Soybeans, Pork, Dairy Products Already Down As New Tariffs Take Effect”):

As a trade war between China and the United States continues, Wisconsin farmers are feeling the effects.

New U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect early Friday morning. In response, China released their own taxes on many U.S. products, including soybeans, pork and dairy products.

The two countries began trading tariffs after the Trump administration announced in May that it would impose new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

  Paul Krugman contends Big Business Reaps Trump’s Whirlwind:

When organizations like the Chamber of Commerce or the Heritage Foundation declare that Trump’s tariffs are a bad idea, they are on solid intellectual ground: All, and I mean all, economic experts agree. But they don’t have any credibility, because these same conservative institutions have spent decades making war on expertise.

….

But a trade war may be only the start of big business’s self-inflicted punishment. Much worse and scarier things may lie ahead, because Trump isn’t just a protectionist, he’s an authoritarian. Trade wars are nasty; unchecked power is much worse, and not just for those who are poor and powerless.

Consider the fact that Trump is already in the habit of threatening businesses that have crossed him. After Harley-Davidson announced that it was shifting some production overseas because of trade conflicts, he warned that the company would be “taxed like never before” — which certainly sounds as if he wants to politicize the I.R.S. and use it to punish individual businesses.

For the moment, he probably can’t do anything like that. But suppose Republicans retain control of Congress this November. If they do, does anyone think they’ll stand up against abuses of presidential power? G.O.P. victory in the midterms would put a lot of people and institutions at the mercy of Trump’s authoritarian instincts, big business very much included.

(When liberal Nobel laureate Krugman contends no expert – left, center, or right – supports Trump’s trade war tariffs, he’s correct, but Trumpism isn’t a sound economics, or in the end even any economics – it’s a bigoted authoritarianism.)

  Gregory Krieg contends The ‘civility debate’ isn’t about manners. It’s an old-school power play:

The so-called “civility debate” is the newest front in a wider conflict that has less to do with manners, or ensuring a polite discourse, than in protecting the powerful from being forced to engage with politics on someone else’s terms.

At its heart is a unique form of cultural illiteracy and status anxiety. The ability to hand-pick when and in what context to face the consequences of your work is a privilege, deep-seated and treasured by those who possess it. Dinnertime interlopers who challenge this expectation are protesting more than a government official or policy — they are fundamentally rejecting it.

  Mutilated Money? This Place Will Give You a Fresh Stack:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 10m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 37.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Black Hawk War soldiers begin an encampment in Palmyra:

On this date during the Black Hawk War, General Atkinson led his entire militia, which included future President’s Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor, to a camp just south of Palmyra. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  The Committee to Investigate Russia reports Trump declares “Putin’s Fine”:

President Trump held a campaign rally in Montana Thursday and made fun of national security concerns regarding his July 16th summit with Vladimir Putin:

“You know President Putin is KGB. This and that. You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.” (Video)

Read more about What Putin Wants, How Russia Operates, and the Putin regime’s Human Rights Abuses – none of which is “fine.”

(‘Putin’s fine’ – so speaks the monkey of the organ grinder.)

  Greg Jaffe, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig report Ahead of NATO and Putin summits, Trump’s unorthodox diplomacy rattles allies:

In November and again in March, Trump invited Putin to the White House for a summit against the advice of aides, who argued that the chances of progress on substantive issues was slim.

For Trump, the meeting was the point. In an interview with Fox News last month, Trump speculated that he and Putin could potentially hash out solutions to Syria and Ukraine over dinner.

“I could say: ‘Would you do me a favor? Would you get out of ­Syria,’?” Trump said. “?‘Would you do me a favor? Would you get out of Ukraine.’?”

Some White House officials worry that Putin, who has held several calls with Trump, plays on the president’s inexperience and lack of detailed knowledge about issues while stoking Trump’s grievances.

The Russian president complains to Trump about “fake news” and laments that the U.S. foreign policy establishment — the “deep state,” in Putin’s words — is conspiring against them, the first senior U.S. official said.

“It’s not us,” Putin has told Trump, the official summarized. “It’s the subordinates fighting against our friendship.”

In conversations with Trudeau, May and Merkel, Trump is sometimes assertive, brash and even bullying on issues he feels strongly about, such as trade, according to senior U.S. officials. He drives the conversation and isn’t shy about cutting off the allies mid-sentence to make his point, the officials said.

With Putin, Trump takes a more conciliatory approach, often treating the Russian leader as a confidant.

  Lee Bergquist reports Dairy group uses behind-the-scenes influence with Gov. Scott Walker to shift regulation of large livestock farms:

Agriculture interests are working behind the scenes with the administration of Gov. Scott Walker as he mounts a major change in the way large livestock farms are regulated in Wisconsin.

The Republican governor introduced a wide-ranging rural agenda on Oct. 26 that included a proposal to shift oversight of large dairy farms and other livestock operations to the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

Moving those powers from the Department of Natural Resources — the state’s chief environmental enforcement agency — has sparked controversy. Environmentalists are concerned about less emphasis on conservation, but farm groups say the agriculture department is the rightful place to enforce permitting and manure handling of big farms.

While the public has yet been able to weigh in on promised hearings, farms groups have had Walker’s ear.

State records show that one day before Walker’s speech in Trego, in northwestern Wisconsin, the governor’s office received detailed plans from the Dairy Business Association on legal requirements and strategic options to move the program.

According to the documents, the association also emailed talking points to the governor, describing the agriculture department as a “natural regulator of farms,” housed with experts who understand farming practices.

“As a state, we need to double-down on policies to help our farmers, and this change is certainly consistent with doing just that,” the group advised Walker.

Late last year, emails show the dairy group and its representatives provided draft legislation to guide the transition.

  Peniel E. Joseph writes America’s nonviolent civil rights movement was considered uncivil by critics at the time:

Black college students who engaged in peaceful sit-ins at lunch counters that denied them service because of the color of their skin were criticized for behavior that, however passive, appeared provocative to defenders of the status quo. What movement activists  proudly characterized as “putting your body on the line” in promotion of racial justice and radical democracy was, in certain quarters, demonized as the unpatriotic behavior of communist-inspired subversives.

Fannie Lou Hamer, the legendary Mississippi sharecropper turned voting rights activist, certainly fit the picture of simmering rage against racism during her now-famous August 1964 testimony before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. “I question America!” she passionately declared, raising her voice as she recounted a sorrow song of racial violence, economic exploitation, and raw terror personally experienced for simply wanting to live in peace as a human being.  Mrs. Hamer’s blunt description of the systemic nature of white supremacy in the Deep South made her a hero to millions of Americans who recognized her candid testimony as an act of faith based on her love of freedom, democracy and black folk everywhere.

King, the prince of nonviolence, received steady streams of criticism from politicians, journalists and clergy for engaging in peaceful demonstrations that, by stoking the anger of white supremacists, threatened to turn violent at any moment.  At the height of his global popularity, between 1963-1965, King defended himself from right-wing attacks that smeared him as a communist, as well as liberal hand-wringing over the accelerating pace of civil rights demonstrations.  His famous “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” represents perhaps his most eloquent response to critics who charged that even peaceful demonstrations could stir political chaos.  King played defense by going on the offensive, memorializing the young black demonstrators who risked their lives by filling up the city’s jail cells protesting against racial segregation. Their quest for black dignity, citizenship and humanity, King argued, transcended quaint notions of civility.  King predicted, correctly it turns out, that in the not-too-distant future this nation would celebrate civil rights protesters for “carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy” that formed the bedrock of America’s political faith.

King’s steadfast belief that achieving racial justice represented the beating heart of democracy made him, in the eyes of certain critics, an extremist.

A young blue whale swims nearby:

Stunning drone footage shows a massive baby blue whale swimming right under and around a whale-watcher’s boat. https://t.co/pXFnUwPBp5 pic.twitter.com/ydSij1gioB

— ABC News (@ABC) July 6, 2018

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 48.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1934, seven are injured in a riot at the Horlick plant:

On this day three policemen and five office employees of the Horlick Malted Milk Corp. were injured when a crowd of strike sympathizers stormed a motorcade of employees entering the plant’s main gate. Emerging from a crowd of 500 striking employees, the rioters overpowered police escorts, shattered windshields and windows, and pelted officers with rocks. Police blamed Communist influence for the incident, and former Communist congressional candidate John Sekat was arrested in the incident. Employees of the plant were demanding wage increases and recognition of the Racine County Workers Committee as their collective bargaining agent.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Victoria Ochoa writes I’m from the border. The news is getting it wrong:

I am from la frontera, meaning “frontier” in Spanish but translated in English as “border.” The news over the past few weeks might make you think that places such as my hometown — McAllen, Tex., in the Rio Grande Valley — are under siege from waves of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, a crisis of lawlessness so extreme that drastic measures are needed. Tearing children from their parents, or, when that proves too unpopular, corralling families in tent cities. Then there’s the $25 billion wall that’s needed to safeguard the United States from the threat of being overrun.

The view from down here is different. In a 2018 rating of the 100 most dangerous cities in the United States based on FBI data, no border cities — not San Diego, not Texas cities such as Brownsville, Laredo or El Paso — appeared even in the top 60. McAllen’s crime rate was lower than Houston’s or Dallas’s, according to Texas Monthly in 2015. The Cato Institute’s research consistently shows that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are markedly less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

In the U.S. borderlands with Mexico, our inherent duality is what helps our communities thrive. We work hard, attend school and worship just as Americans do all across the nation. Yet we are overwhelmingly Latino, and a quarter of us are foreign-born. We are here and there. Some of us were born here, and some of us were not. But it doesn’t matter — pero ni modo — all are welcome.

  Jeremy Raff reports Kids Describe the Fear of Separation at the Border (“Children who experienced the “icebox” say they didn’t know if they would see their parents again”):

Paulina is one of the lucky ones. The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy separated roughly 2,500 children from their parents in recent weeks, but not all families were split up. In the absence of an official explanation, advocates speculated that border agents left some families intact for lack of detention space, instead releasing them with GPS ankle trackers and a court date. After release, Border Patrol sends some of them via bus to the Catholic Charities Respite Center, where they can get a hot meal, new clothes, diapers, and even new shoelaces, which authorities confiscate during incarceration as a precaution against suicide. Then, the immigrants board Greyhound buses for points north while they wait to see an immigration judge. Most will plead for asylum protection to stay in the country, a process Trump has derided as a “loophole” that his administration has sought to curtail even before migrants reach the U.S.

Before arriving at the respite center, Paulina and the other children spent days in a detention center like the one where an activist captured audio of children crying—a recording that quickly crystallized outrage against the separations. “They caught us,” a 5-year-old Honduran girl named Ashley told me. “They took us to a hielera,” an icebox, which is how migrants widely refer to chilly government processing centers. Ashley said agents held her in a different room from her mom. “I missed her and I cried for her,” she said, “I love her.”

  Will Wilkinson asks How Did We Get to the Savagery of ‘Tender Age’ Shelters?:

Perhaps you’ve come to wonder how tearing babies away from their mothers over a victimless misdemeanor came be the official policy of the United States government. It’s a question on a lot of our minds. Most of us are outraged and livid with shame that the savagery of “tender age” shelters was undertaken by our government, on our behalf.

If we’re ready to say “never again,” we need to be willing to expose the roots of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy. We need to be willing to cut them out.

Blame Donald Trump’s ruthless bigotry, sure. But when the president walked into the Oval Office, he walked into a ready-made, bipartisan immigration policy framework poised for brutality. Militarized borders, deportation squads, an archipelago of internment facilities, hypertrophied executive power, a lurid body of national security and anti-trafficking law sprung from the rich manure of panic — none of this is Mr. Trump’s handiwork. It was an inheritance.

And now Mr. Trump has deployed this machinery of repression, bristling with Bush- and Obama-era upgrades, to take terrified innocents hostage. The administration sees the moral horror and basic decency of the American people as weakness it can exploit to extort concessions to its unpopular, hard-right agenda of ethnocultural population control. The president’s fresh executive order, falsely advertised as a reversal on family separation, is nothing but a ransom note. It amounts to a promise to continue ripping families apart unless settled legal protections for Mr. Trump’s child hostages are removed. Stephen Miller, the president’s trusted adviser, is enthusiastic about the possibility that scarring toddlers for life might rally the embattled president’s base and drive favorable midterm turnout.

  Victoria Clark writes Where the Heck Did the Term “Collusion” Come From?:

The term caught on, I think, because it captured the general suspicion that the campaign was somehow in on the hack or knowingly benefiting from it while carefully eliding the fact that no tangible evidence had yet emerged tying the Trump campaign to the Kremlin. (Remember that news of the Trump Tower meeting and other contacts between the campaign and Russian actors had not yet become public.)

….

The popularity of the term continued to wax and wane throughout the final months of 2016. When a big story would break about Trump, the campaign, or Clinton’s emails, the word “collusion” would appear in headlines. Not every story described the relationship as collusion. Some referred to it as “ties” with Russia. Others questioned whether Trump was “coordinating” with Putin. Collusion had not yet become the de facto term to describe the Russia connection. But it was very much in the mix.

On Dec. 9, 2016, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had concluded that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in order to aid the Trump campaign. Although the Post did not mention the word “collusion” in its article, other media outlets such as the Economist, the Guardian, and CNN included the term when they picked up the story. After that day, the use of the word “collusion” spiked dramatically. It became the universally accepted term to describe any potential relationship between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Even the individuals under investigation bought into the use of the word. In July of 2017, for example, Jared Kushner told reporters “Let me be very clear: I did not collude with Russia.” And in September of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. testified before Senate investigators “I did not collude with any foreign government.”

How ’bout some rabbit acrobatics:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 12m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 58.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.

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

On this date, General Atkinson and his troops entered the area known by the Native Americans as “trembling lands” in their pursuit of Black Hawk. 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. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William G. Stark]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Coral Davenport and Ana Swanson write How Trump’s Policy Decisions Undermine the Industries He Pledged to Help:

If nothing else, experts say, the unpredictability of many of Mr. Trump’s proposals — the lack of clarity on when or how Nafta might be renegotiated; the risk of potential litigation over his rollback of auto-pollution rules; the ways in which other countries might retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs — seeds confusion across the American economy, making it tough for businesses to plan effectively for the future.

“That just wreaks havoc with American farmers and businesses with the investments they have to make,” said Matthew Slaughter, a professor of international business at Dartmouth College. “It creates massive uncertainty for these industries.”

Automakers, for instance, had sought looser emissions rules. However, Mr. Trump’s proposed rollback goes further than expected, and now automakers say it could ultimately spawn years of legal battles and perhaps even subject the industry to more regulations, not fewer, if individual states start enforcing their own, separate rules. They also fear that Mr. Trump’s recent threats to impose tariffs on imports of European autos could trigger a trade war, raising prices for all vehicles.

  Jack Ewing contends Trump Voters May Be the Biggest Losers From Trump’s Auto Tariffs:

BRUSSELS — President Trump has complained about seeing too many German cars on Fifth Avenue, and threatened heavy tariffs on the companies that produce them. There is a good chance, though, that those Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs were not only made in the United States, but made by workers who voted for Mr. Trump.

European companies have turned Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee into auto manufacturing powerhouses in recent years, churning out cars not just for American buyers but also for export to China and Europe. Germany’s three biggest carmakers all have facilities there, and Volvo Cars, which is owned by a Chinese company but based in Sweden, began producing at a new plant in South Carolina just last month.

….

Mr. Trump won 63 percent of the vote in Spartanburg, S.C., home of BMW’s biggest factory anywhere in the world. But Allen Smith, president of the Spartanburg Area Chamber of Commerce, said the president’s tariffs would threaten the region’s livelihood.

“For BMW and its many, many suppliers scattered across the state and region, you’re talking tens of thousands of jobs,” Mr. Smith said. “We would all agree with the president’s overall aim to improve trade with America’s interests top of mind. But getting to that end by inflicting so much pain on American business is the wrong approach.”

  Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton describes What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism:

I have devoted a substantial part of my intellectual life to defining and defending conservatism, as a social philosophy and a political program. Each time I think I have hit the nail on the head, the nail slips to one side and the hammer blow falls on my fingers.

Like many others, both conservative and liberal, I did not foresee the political career of Donald Trump, nor did I imagine that such a man could occupy the highest office of state, in the name of a party that specifically makes appeal to conservative voters. Is this simply an aberration, or are there some deep links that tie the president to the great tradition of thought that I describe in my recent book, “Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition”?

….

In another of conservatism’s founding documents, “The Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith argued that trade barriers and protections offered to dying industries will not, in the long run, serve the interests of the people. On the contrary, they will lead to an ossified economy that will splinter in the face of competition. President Trump seems not to have grasped this point. His protectionist policies resemble those of postwar socialist governments in Europe, which insulated dysfunctional industries from competition and led not merely to economic stagnation but also to a kind of cultural pessimism that surely goes entirely against the American grain.

Conservative thinkers have on the whole praised the free market, but they do not think that market values are the only values there are. Their primary concern is with the aspects of society in which markets have little or no part to play: education, culture, religion, marriage and the family. Such spheres of social endeavor arise not through buying and selling but through cherishing what cannot be bought and sold: things like love, loyalty, art and knowledge, which are not means to an end but ends in themselves.

About such things it is fair to say that Mr. Trump has at best only a distorted vision. He is a product of the cultural decline that is rapidly consigning our artistic and philosophical inheritance to oblivion. And perhaps the principal reason for doubting Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials is that being a creation of social media, he has lost the sense that there is a civilization out there that stands above his deals and his tweets in a posture of disinterested judgment.

Conor Friedersdorf describes Abraham Lincoln’s Warning (“The 16th president of the United States knew what the 45th does not. The Declaration of Independence is at the core of our political inheritance”):

An American can always benefit from rereading the Declaration of Independence. But I suspect that this Fourth of July is better spent with that document’s best interpreter, Abraham Lincoln, beginning with words he uttered after worrying that his countrymen were losing touch with the core ideals of their political inheritance.

“Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines in conflict with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence,” he declared in 1858, “if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated in our charter of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the revolution. Think nothing of me—take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever—but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles.”

Said Lincoln to the Illinois crowd:

This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures.

Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows.

They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. The erected a beacon to guide their children and their children’s children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began — so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built.

….

And the United States is now led by a man––bereft of Christian virtues, his own Twitter account a testament to his dearth of self-mastery or prudence––who extols the supposed strength of the Communists who suppressed lovers of liberty at Tiananmen Square, the authoritarian tyrant who leads Russia, and the thug who leads the Philippines. His political ideals would be a cancer to any body politic. It festers within ours and spreads daily.

Soar above a Lighthouse in Gerona:

Good morning.

Independence Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s 4th of July festival today features a car show at 8 AM, the Whippet City Mile at 9:50 AM, a parade at 10 AM, with the festival opening at 11 AM, a carnival opening at noon, live music beginning at 2 PM, and fireworks at 10 PM.

On this day in 1776, Congress votes for the Declaration of Independence:

The Declaration became official when Congress voted for it on July 4; signatures of the delegates were not needed to make it official. The handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence that was signed by Congress is dated July 4, 1776. The signatures of fifty-six delegates are affixed; however, the exact date when each person signed it has long been the subject of debate. Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams all wrote that the Declaration had been signed by Congress on July 4.^[101] But in 1796, signer Thomas McKean disputed that the Declaration had been signed on July 4, pointing out that some signers were not then present, including several who were not even elected to Congress until after that date.^[102]

The Declaration was transposed on paper, adopted by the Continental Congress, and signed by John Hancock, President of the Congress, on July 4, 1776, according to the 1911 record of events by the U.S. State Department under Secretary Philander C. Knox.^[103] On August 2, 1776, a parchment paper copy of the Declaration was signed by 56 persons.^[103] Many of these signers were not present when the original Declaration was adopted on July 4.^[103] Signer Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire was seated in the Continental Congress in November; he asked for and received the privilege of adding his signature at that time, and signed on November 4, 1776.^[103

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bruce Murphy asks Is Foxconn Double Crossing Walker? (“Latest admission by company gives the game away”):

As Arthur Thomas reported for the Biz Times on June 20th: “The first LCD fabrication facility on the Foxconn Technology Group campus in Mount Pleasant will be a Gen 6 plant, not a Gen 10.5 plant as originally planned.”

This is not a small change. Bob O’Brien, a partner at Display Supply Chain Consultants, told the publication a Gen 6 plant produces roughly 5 foot by 6 foot glass panels “while a Gen 10.5 plant produces 10 foot by 11 foot panels. He also said a $10 billion investment makes sense for a Gen 10.5 plant, but a Gen 6 plant would require a $2 billion to $3 billion investment.”

….

The implications of this change are enormous. For starters it means Foxconn will not be building the kind of factory it first promised to the delegation lead by Gov. Walker last year and which helped sell the huge taxpayer subsidy: Walker was shown the plant run by Foxconn subsidiary Sharp in Japan, which manufactures the large screens.

It could also mean Foxconn never gets close to a $10 billion investment or 13,000 employees. Foxconn officials now say the Racine plant will be built in “phases” and it could eventually add a facility to manufacture the larger screens. But this is the same company that promised to invest $5 billion and create 50,000 jobs in India, only to cut it to a fraction of that. “Similar results were seen in Vietnam, where Foxconn committed to a $5 billion investment in 2007, and in Brazil, where Foxconn spoke of a $10 billion plan in 2011,” and the plans were never realized, the Washington Post reported. And then there is Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where Foxconn’s promise to invest $30 million and hire 500 workers never happened.

True, the state subsidy is set up to reward the company in increments, so Foxconn would only get a portion of the promised $3 billion from the state if it falls short of the 13,000 jobs. But all the other subsidies, worth more than $1 billion, will happen regardless of how many jobs are created.That includes $764 million in local subsidies, $164 million in new state and local roads to serve Foxconn, a $120 million electric power line paid for by utility customers, and some $7 million on a state-paid ad campaign to attract workers for Foxconn. On a per-job basis, a smaller, $3 billion plant would actually cost taxpayers even more.

The reality is that Foxconn has the state over a barrel. If Walker gets reelected, that gives the company four more years to squeeze him for ever more money. It can push for a subsidy for Corning (surely Foxconn knew all along Corning would want a subsidy), and for other giveaways, or refuse to go beyond the smaller plant. As the business publication Bloomberg predicted in an editorial lambasting the deal, Foxconn could “come back again and again, as blackmailers tend to, seeking yet more blandishments.”

(Hat tip to Joe for pointing to this story.  For more about Foxconn, see 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, and Foxconn’s Bait & Switch.)

  Anne Applebaum writes Trump hates the international organizations that are the basis of U.S. wealth, prosperity and military power:

Ever since it ended, a steady drip of gossip has circulated about last month’s disastrous Group of Seven summit. By all accounts, President Trump behaved far worse behind the scenes than he did in public. There was the gratuitous rudeness, including the moment he threw two Starburst candies onto a table and said, to the German chancellor, “Here Angela. Don’t say I never gave you anything.” There was aggression, as well as ignorance: “NATO is as bad as NAFTA, it’s much too costly for the U.S.,” he said at one point; to others present, he mentioned NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization and the European Union collectively, throwing them together as organizations he dislikes. Later, he added a twist: “The European Union was set up to take advantage of the United States.” Those comments have just inspiredthe resignation of the U.S. ambassador to Estonia, a career diplomat, who has called them “factually wrong,” as well as proof that “it’s time to go.”

This is the background that you need to understand the emotions around the next NATO summit on July 11-12, as well as the Trump-Vladimir Putin meeting on July 16. For the first time since 1945, Europe is grappling with an American president who has a fundamentally different view of America’s international role. Trump no longer wants the United States to be the West’s central organizing force. He no longer cares about the benefits that role has brought, if he even understands them.

But although Trump’s dislike of U.S. allies has been clear for decades, only now is that dislike shaping into a clear policy: Europeans are bracing for a United States that no longer considers security and defense organizations to be special and inviolable. Instead, Trump sees the American commitments to all of the institutions he despises as bargaining chips, and he is prepared to use U.S. troops in Europe to force Europeans to make concessions on trade and other things. He may use his meeting with Putin for the same purpose: To intimidate the British, the Germans and others worried by aggressive Russian behavior, and to force them to do what he wants, in whatever sphere he happens to care about. Everything is up for grabs.

(Putin could not have reasonably hoped for a better policy for Russia, or a worse one for America, than Trump’s.)

Maria Danilova reports In Moscow, US senator hopes for “new day” in US-Russia ties:

The head of a U.S. congressional delegation visiting Russia said Tuesday he hopes for “a new day” in repairing relations between Russia and the U.S.

Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow two weeks before the countries’ presidents are to meet in Helsinki.

“We come here realizing that we have a strained relationship, but we could have a better relationship between the U.S. and Russia, because we have some common interests around the world that we could hopefully work together on,” Shelby told Lavrov at the start of their meeting. “We could be competitors — we are competitors — but we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries.”

(Shelby chooses the path of the fellow traveler.  Russia is America’s adversary because she is a political and military threat to her neighbors and America. If Shelby thinks we don’t necessarily need to be adversaries, then he should remind Putin that Russia doesn’t necessarily need to occupy other countries, foment war abroad, and interfere in America’s electoral system.  Putin chose this, and in doing so his regime makes itself an adversary of America and our democratic allies.  If Shelby’s grown tired of Alabama, perhaps he’ll consider something in the Rublyovka district.)

Julia Davis translates how Russia television describes the visit of these United States senators to Russia:

#Russia‘s state TV:
Igor Korotchenko, member of the Defense Ministry’s public advisory council, talks about GOP Senators coming to Russia and the Trump-Putin summit:
“The Russians should look down upon the Americans, like the USSR did… You came to us, because YOU need it.” pic.twitter.com/a5mrPf7lIg

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) July 4, 2018

(Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson is among this delegation.)

Meet The 12-Year-Old Scientist Taking On Flint’s Water Crisis:

When Gitanjali Rao first heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, she wanted to help in any way she could. Now, at only 12 years old, Gitanjali is the proud inventor of “Tethys,” a portable device that detects lead in water. Named “America’s Top Young Scientist,” Gitanjali hopes to inspire other kids to get moving and make a difference in their own communities.