Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-seven.  Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 04m 37s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s municipal government will hold a public meeting on a Lakes drawdown project at 5 PM.

On this day in 1995, a deadly heatwave begins:

From July 12-15, 1995, the Midwest was subjected to a deadly outbreak of hot and humid weather responsible for 141 deaths in Wisconsin. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, this was the “greatest single event of weather-related deaths in Wisconsin history.” Most of the fatalities happened in the urban southeast counties of the state, and at one point several Milwaukee-area hospitals were unable to admit more patients.

Milwaukee Temperatures (from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel): July 12: Hi=91, Lo=65 July 13: Hi=103*, Lo=78 July 14: Hi=102, Lo=84 July 15: Hi=92, Lo=69 July 16: Hi=88, Lo=68 *Some communities reported highs as high as 108. Heat Index values were 120-130 degrees.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  David Corn offers While America Sleeps (“With a summit ahead, Trump works with Putin to cover up Moscow’s attack on the US”):

In 1938, Winston Churchill published a collection of his speeches warning that his homeland was not adequately contending with the threat posed by Nazi Germany. The title: “While England Slept.” Eighty years later, a similar observation can be rendered concerning the United States. Much of the political and media elite and the citizenry seem to be sleepwalking past a horrific and fundamental fact: The current president of the United States has helped to cover up a serious attack on the nation. This profound act of betrayal has gone unpunished and, in many quarters, unnoticed, even as it continues. With Donald Trump about to meet Vladimir Putin on Monday—rewarding the thuggish authoritarian Russian leader with a grand summit in Helsinki—this is an appropriate moment to remember that their dark bromance involves a mutual stonewalling of wrongdoing.

Though the US intelligence community, most of Trump’s top national security aides, and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders have all agreed with the assessment that Putin’s regime mounted information warfare against the United States in 2016 to cause discord during the election and help Trump win the White House, Trump has continued to assist Putin’s brazen campaign of denial. Two weeks ago, Trump, in a tweet, gave credence to Putin’s claim that Moscow did not intervene in the election. “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” Trump maintained. Instead, Trump insisted, the real scandal was that the Democratic National Committee in 2016 did not hand over to the FBI its servers, which were hacked by Russian intelligence. This server business is a phony Fox News-fueled scandal; the DNC provided copies of its servers to the bureau. And even if there were anything untoward about the server matter, it still would pale in comparison to a foreign adversary assaulting an American election with hacks and the dissemination of stolen material.

….

The aim of Trump’s tweet was to legitimize Putin’s disinformation and to divert attention from Putin’s operation to a distraction. In doing so, the president was stunningly serving Putin’s interests rather than those of the United States.

  Eliot A. Cohen writes Meet the Trumpverstehers (“We know about the president’s most vocal supporters. But what about his more discreet following?”):

A few years ago, the Germans created one of the compound nouns in which their language excels. The Russlandverstehers—literally, “Russia understanders”—were those who while not openly supporting Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea expressed sympathetic acceptance of it. They would never openly endorse the stealing of elections or the assassination of journalists, of course, but they understood the circumstances that lead to such unfortunate things, and the larger impulse to rough behavior to restore Russian national pride and enhance Russian prestige.

I propose the term Trumpverstehers in a similar spirit. These are not the mass of his supporters who fear the loss of jobs to global trade or automation; they are not the rural white Americans who feel threatened by immigration, ravaged by the opioid epidemic, and treated contemptuously by a bicoastal elite. In fact, by background, income, and employment, they are actually members of that elite.

….

The Trumpverstehers have given up on character in politics. None of them likes Trump, although they will use words such as vulgarian to characterize him, not liar, or bully, or scoundrel. They disregard his cruelty, too. When pressed, they claim that he may be an ignoramus and a rascal, but that that does not matter: only his policies do. In some ways, this reflects their belief in the strength of institutional constraints on the presidency, and in others their view that Trump is a blowhard who lacks the nerve to actually try, for example, to shut down hostile news media or incite large-scale violence. As long as the lines of his policy are reasonable in their eyes, they will ignore behavior that 20 years ago would have outraged them. They now consider qualities such as probity, thrift, magnanimity, and fidelity to be private virtues: From public figures, we cannot and should not expect them.

(There are, to be sure, local versions of these same Trumpverstehers in small towns across America – boosters and brazen men, mostly, convinced they’ve ‘arrived,’ and more than happy to tout Trumpism without mentioning Trump more than necessary.  They expect deference for inferior policy positions, mistaking their own sense of entitlement for worthy competency or insight.)

Don Behm reports Candidates for Milwaukee County sheriff promise changes after David Clarke:

Three Democratic candidates for Milwaukee County sheriff are sparring over which of them would move the department the greatest distance from former Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s legacy of mistreatment of jail inmates, inadequate staff and budget deficits.

Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt promotes the dozen or more changes he has made since Clarke’s abrupt resignation in August 2017 — such as going after reckless drivers on freeways and reforming jail operations after several custody deaths during Clarke’s tenure — as the central theme of his campaign.

Earnell Lucas, a Major League Baseball security official and former Milwaukee Police Department captain, and Deputy Robert Ostrowski do not criticize any of Schmidt’s initiatives even as they attempt to link him to the troubles of the Clarke administration that he was a part of.

  Rich Kremer reports Researchers Find Promising Results In Frac Sand Mine Reclamation Test Plot (“5-Year Collaboration Studied How Well Soils And Wild Prairie Rebound After Mining”):

A five-year study in Chippewa County has transformed a reclaimed frac sand mine into a successful wild prairie. Researchers are hopeful that lessons learned can be used at other mining operations around the state beginning to fill in their pits.

In a rare collaboration, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls worked with industrial sand mining firm Superior Silica Sands and Chippewa County’s Department of Land Conservation and Forest Management to learn how sand mining impacts soil that is stripped away, stored and replaced after mining operations wrap up.

Since 2013, students led by UW-River Falls geology and soil science professor Holly Dolliver have been taking hundreds of samples from land owned by Superior Silica Sands in the Town of Auburn.

  Meet the Scientist Searching Sewers for Cures:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 05m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 3.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1839, the first patent is issued to a Wisconsin resident:

On this day Ebenezar G. Whiting of Racine was issued patent #1232 for his improved plow, the first patent issued to someone from Wisconsin. Whiting’s improvements consisted of making the mold-board straight and flat which, when united in the center with the curvilinear part of the mold-board, would require less power to drag through the dirt. Whiting went on to serve as Vice President of the J.I. Case Plow Company and received another patent for a steel plow in 1876.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Marc Santora reports Trump Derides NATO as ‘Obsolete.’ Baltic Nations See It Much Differently:

As President Trump joins his second NATO summit meeting — having called the alliance “obsolete,” derided its members as deadbeats and suggested that American military protection is negotiable — there is deep unease on the alliance’s eastern flank. And that sense has only been heightened by Mr. Trump’s scheduled one-on-one meeting next week with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

For the nations of Latvia and Estonia, nestled between Russia and the Baltic Sea and with large ethnic Russian populations, NATO is no abstraction.

Long before the debate over the Kremlin’s interference in the American election, there was alarm in the Baltic nations over Russian attempts to influence public opinion and exploit the complicated issues of ethnic identity in a region reshaped by war and occupation. In both the annexation of Crimea and its actions in Ukraine, the Russian government has used protecting the rights of ethnic Russians as a pretext for intervention. About one-third of the populations of Latvia and Estonia are ethnic Russians.

(Putin’s American cat’s paw has never shown the slightest desire to defend democratic allies with whom we have mutual defense treaties.)

  Attorney Yoshinori H.T. Himel writes Enough with the euphemisms. They’re not ‘family residential centers.’ They’re jails:

And our government continues to use euphemisms. In response to the outcry against its enforcement of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking permission to build more “family residential centers” to detain immigrant families while their immigration cases make their way through the courts. By the benign label “family residential center,” ICE means what most of us would call a jail. ICE jails parents and children, many of whom are escaping violence and are using lawful procedures to apply for asylum.

“Tender age” shelters is another euphemism — “a chilling phrase we will not soon forget,” says Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). Those are warehouses for children — including toddlers and infants — whom our government has torn from their families.

We must seek the truth behind the Orwellian labels. We must be wary of officials using language to evade responsibility. We must not, as we have done in the past, permit official euphemisms to lull us into silent complicity. Let’s call this what it is: violating human rights.

Ema O’Connor and Nidhi Prakash report Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed:

The new ICE directive states that women are not to be held into their third trimester and that ICE is responsible for “ensuring pregnant detainees receive appropriate medical care including effectuating transfers to facilities that are able to provide appropriate medical treatment.”

But BuzzFeed News has found evidence that that directive is not being carried out. Instead, women in immigration detention are often denied adequate medical care, even when in dire need of it, are shackled around the stomach while being transported between facilities, and have been physically and psychologically mistreated.

In interviews and written affidavits, E and four other women who’ve been in ICE detention and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody while pregnant told of being ignored when they were obviously miscarrying, described their CBP and ICE-contracted jailers as unwilling or unable to respond to medical emergencies, and recounted an incident of physical abuse from CBP officers who knew they were dealing with a pregnant woman. Those descriptions were backed by interviews with five legal aid workers, four medical workers, and two advocates who work with ICE detainees.

The incidents were not limited to a single detention center. Three medical workers and five legal aid workers who spoke to BuzzFeed News all said they had seen — and some had documented — cases of pregnant women not receiving or being denied medical care in more than six different detention centers in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

  Stephanie Mencimer reports Trump Judicial Pick Who Blogged Favorably About the KKK Had to Withdraw. Now He’s at the Justice Department:

Brett Talley had already been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was on his way to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench when reporters discovered what he’d written about the Klan. Since 2005, Talley, a 36-year-old lawyer nominated for a seat on the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, appeared to have posted more than 16,000 comments on University of Alabama sports message board TideFans.com. Writing as BamainBoston, he commented on everything from race to abortion. He disparaged Muslims, joked about statutory rape, and, most notably, wrote approvingly about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He defended the “first KKK” as something entirely different than the racist, violent organization it’s known as today.

After outcry about the comments and his general lack of qualifications for the job—Talley had never tried a case—he withdrew from consideration for the judgeship in December. But the controversy didn’t send him packing to Alabama. Instead, he simply continued working as deputy associate attorney general at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, where he oversaw the judicial nominations unit that advises the president and attorney general on the selection and confirmation of federal judges and conducts the vetting, interviewing, and evaluating of nominees. This spring, he moved to a more junior position at the Justice Department, as an assistant US attorney.

President Donald Trump has submitted 95 judicial nominations since Talley withdrew his own; 22 of those nominees have been confirmed. Among the 95 nominees are controversial picks such as Wendy Vitter, wife of disgraced former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and a staunch anti-abortion activist, and Oregon prosecutor Ryan Bounds, who wrote a series of articles while at Stanford University mocking multiculturalism and advocating for leniency for alleged campus rapists. Talley headed the Justice Department unit that helped select and vet many of those nominees.

  Wrap Your Head Around the Huge Size of SpaceX’s Falcon Rockets in This Video:

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: