Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with an even chance of afternoon thunderstorms, and a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 14h 49m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1949, the U.S. Senate advised Pres. Truman that it favored the North Atlantic Treaty. On this day in 1921, Gen. Billy Mitchell offers confirmation of his theory that “development of military air power was not outlandish. He flew his De Havilland DH-4B fighter, leading a bombing demonstration that proved a naval ship could be sunk by air bombardment. Mitchell’s ideas for developing military air power were innovative but largely ignored by those who favored development of military sea power. Mitchell zealously advocated his views and was eventually court martialed for speaking out against the United States’ organization of its forces. [Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Division of Archives & Special Collections].”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Carol D. Leonnig, Ashley Parker, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger report that Trump team seeks to control, block Mueller’s Russia investigation:

Some of President Trump’s lawyers are exploring ways to limit or undercut special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, building a case against what they allege are his conflicts of interest and discussing the president’s authority to grant pardons, according to people familiar with the effort.

Trump has asked his advisers about his power to pardon aides, family members and even himself in connection with the probe, according to one of those people. A second person said Trump’s lawyers have been discussing the president’s pardoning powers among themselves.

(All of this is predictable, first as a futile effort to intimidate Robert Mueller, and if effectuated then as a lawless pardon of Trump, by Trump, for Trump.)

Congressmen Elijah E. Cummings & John Conyers contend that An unchecked presidency is a danger to the Republic:

In the absence of any meaningful investigation by House Republicans, Democratic members have sent requests for information on our own. Our efforts have been met with months of stonewalling. The Trump White House recently told government agencies “not to cooperate [with any oversight] requests from Democrats,” and issued a contrived Justice Department legal opinion that such queries are “not properly considered to be oversight requests.”

We will continue to press for answers because the information we seek goes to the central question of the Trump presidency: Is the administration acting in the public interest, or merely to benefit the private interests of President Trump?

….An unchecked presidency — such as that of Richard Nixon or Donald Trump — represents a clear and present danger to the Republic. We have taken this series of steps in an attempt to provide at least a measure of independent scrutiny and to mark how Republicans in Congress have repeatedly failed in this responsibility. We do not have the right to remain silent. Our investigations must continue separate from, and in addition to, the special counsel’s work.

James Fallows observes that Trump’s Latest Interview [NYT] Highlights Four of His Greatest Flaws (with details for each element):

And what makes this exposure to Trump’s mind and mood different from what we’ve seen over his past two years in political life and his previous decades in the public eye? For me it’s the accumulation of these elements:

A rare degree of deluded self-regard….

The unselfconscious display of gaping, consequential holes in his general knowledge….

The meaning of the Constitution….

Absolutes….

Emily Badger and Kevin Quealey write that Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents Than Marketing Policies:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 51m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The City of Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM.

On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon.

Recommended for reading in full —

Rosie Gray writes that A Top Rohrabacher Aide Is Ousted After Russia Revelations:

Paul Behrends, a top aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, has been ousted from his role as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that Rohrabacher chairs, after stories appeared in the press highlighting his relationships with pro-Russia lobbyists.

“Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee,” a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson said on Wednesday evening.

Behrends accompanied Rohrabacher on a 2016 trip to Moscow in which Rohrabacher said he received anti-Magnitsky Act materials from prosecutors. The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 bill that imposes sanctions on Russian officials associated with the 2009 death in prison of  lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had been investigating tax fraud. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney and lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last year, reportedly brought up the Magintsky Act during the meeting.

Rohrabacher’s meeting in Moscow was an object of concern for embassy officials, who had warned the delegation about FSB presence in Moscow—warnings Rohrabacher brushed off.

(Behrends and Rohrabacher are at the least fellow travelers with Putinism, and at the wost – and quite possibly – fifth columnists.)

The Washington Post editorial board explains Why Trump’s chat with Putin is not just a chat:

Talk isn’t bad; what’s key is the nature of the talk. To carefully calibrate messages to world leaders, presidents usually rely on an elaborate bureaucratic machine, including the interagency process and the National Security Council staff. Mr. Trump’s dinner chat showed once again his proclivity to act alone, and he undoubtedly created headaches. With no U.S. note-taker or interpreter, the U.S. national security structure was left without a record of the exchange, except for Mr. Trump’s memory. Mr. Putin will have a better record.

But the deeper problem is the epidemic of mistrust Mr. Trump has created about his ties to Russia, which sensationalizes contacts that might otherwise be unremarkable. The doubts began during the campaign with his failure to release his tax returns, which could show the origins of his income, and grew worse when Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Mr. Trump refused to accept U.S. intelligence community warnings of Russian interference during the election, and his family and his campaign associates have repeatedly been negligent or untruthful about their contacts with Russian officials — most recently, in the accounts of a meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Ms. Clinton. In his first meeting as president with Russia’s foreign minister, Mr. Trump blurted out classified information. It’s reasonable to worry about what he might have told Mr. Putin.

Mike McIntire reports that (former Trump campaign chairman) Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show:

Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.

The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.

(Emphasis added.)

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan explains Why Trump’s Base of Support May Be Smaller Than It Seems:

A new working paper by the Emory University political scientists B. Pablo Montagnes, Zachary Peskowitz and Joshua McCrain argues that people who identify as Republican may stop doing so if they disapprove of Trump, creating a false stability in his partisan approval numbers even as the absolute number of people approving him shrinks. Gallup data supports this idea, showing a four-percentage-point decline in G.O.P. identification since the 2016 election that is mirrored in other polling, though to a lesser extent….

When the Emory political scientists use the Gallup data to account for Republicans who have stopped identifying with the party since the election, they find that partisan support for Trump could be substantially lower than it appears. The lower bound is often from 70 percent to 80 percent instead of the 80-to-90 range that Gallup polls typically show. Given the decline in Republican identification since last November, they find, “the lower bound on Trump’s partisan approval rate is much lower” than partisan approval at a comparable point in the Obama presidency and is lower than it was even during Mr. Obama’s second term.

(A copy of the full working paper is online.  Whether Trump has many supporters or few, the principal objects of opposition will always be Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders. I’ve no doubt that Trump’s support is waning, and in the way that the working paper suggests, but in any event, when Trump meets political ruin – as he will – so will his movement.)
Tech Insider reports there’s a new theory that The T. Rex couldn’t actually sprint like it does in ‘Jurassic Park’:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 53m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 20% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1961, TWA was “the first American airline with movies aboard its aircraft when it showed By Love Possessed, starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in the first-class section of a Boeing 707 flying New York to Los Angeles.”  On this day in 1832, General James Henry & Colonel Henry Dodge found “the trail of the British Band and began pursuit of Black Hawk and the Sauk Indians. Before leaving camp, the troops were told to leave behind any items that would slow down the chase. The troops camped that evening at Rock River, 20 miles east of present day Madison. [Some sources place this event on July 18, 1832.]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

David A. Graham writes of The Other Putin-Trump Meeting:

When President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin went for more than two hours, well past the scheduled half-hour, it was a major news event. But it turns out that wasn’t even the end of the conversation between the two men.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, first reported the second meeting Tuesday. Other outlets also reported the news, and the White House confirmed it to Reuters. (BuzzFeed journalist Alberto Nardelli had previously reported about a meeting.) Trump reportedly met with the Russian leader for an additional hour of informal chats after a dinner of G20 leaders—though the White House in a statement reported late Tuesday by NBC’s Hallie Jackson called the encounter “brief” and denied it constituted a second meeting. While the first meeting was small—the only attendees were Trump, Putin, the Russian foreign minister, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and one interpreter from each country—this was even smaller: just Trump, Putin, and a Russian interpreter. Trump did not have his own interpreter….

It’s all the more significant because it is the second time in less than two weeks that Trump and those close to him have been less than forthcoming about meetings with Russians. As Trump returned to the country, news broke that his son Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer. Trump Jr. initially claimed the meeting had been to discuss adoptions, but he later released emails showing that he believed he was meeting with a Russian government lawyer offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. told an intermediary, though he now says it wasn’t: The lawyer didn’t deliver any dirt, he complained. Since then, the public has learned there were at least eight people present, including Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a White House senior adviser, and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort.

James Kirchick explains How the GOP Became the Party of Putin:

What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.

I should not have been surprised. I’ve been following Russia’s cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (“Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting “godless communism.”

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin – a career KGB officer who hates America – have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

Garry Kasparov writes of Donald’s Pravda: Trump and his apologists spookily echo Vladimir Putin:

There is a clear parallel here to what we have experienced in Russia for the past 17 years under Putin: the intentional conflation of the private interests of the few with the public good. When Putin talks about what’s best for Russia, he always only means what is best for him and his cronies — what keeps them wealthy and in power.

There is now a similar dynamic with Trump, especially where Russia is concerned. His Hamburg meeting with Putin was a great gift to the Russian dictator, who needs prominent photo-ops to reassure his gang back home that he’s still a big boss who can protect their investments abroad.

Meanwhile, the U.S. needs nothing from Russia. No, despite Trump claims to the contrary, we’re not really on the same side in Syria. And U.S. sanctions are locked to Russia’s exit from Crimea, which is not going to happen any time soon.

So why the meeting? It’s a case of “Ask not what Russia can do for America, ask what Putin can do for Trump — and what has he been doing for him already?”

Trump also loves photo ops and feeling like a big man on the international stage, especially with his domestic agenda of health care, tax reform, infrastructure and immigration foundering.

John Dickerson considers All the Presidents’ Dirty Tricks (describing several adminsitations):

Whatever one may think of how Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner should have behaved in accepting the June 2016 meeting, President Trump has updated its relevance to the present. It is now a moral benchmark for the president and his team. Despite the moral and national security reasons to be wary of such a meeting, by the president’s rules of politics it was still a fine thing to do.

NASA has now released the closest-ever images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 14h 55m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 5:45 PM, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1865, successful in their defense of the Union, the 3rd and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st and 6th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries muster out.

Recommended for reading in full —

The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been pro-Trump, but even that editorial board now addresses The Trumps and the Truth:

Don’t you get it, guys? Special counsel Robert Mueller and the House and Senate intelligence committees are investigating the Russia story. Everything that is potentially damaging to the Trumps will come out, one way or another. Everything. Denouncing leaks as “fake news” won’t wash as a counter-strategy beyond the President’s base, as Mr. Trump’s latest 36% approval rating shows.

Mr. Trump seems to realize he has a problem because the White House has announced the hiring of white-collar Washington lawyer Ty Cobb to manage its Russia defense. He’ll presumably supersede the White House counsel, whom Mr. Trump ignores, and New York outside counsel Marc Kasowitz, who is out of his political depth.

Mr. Cobb has an opening to change the Trump strategy to one with the best chance of saving his Presidency: radical transparency. Release everything to the public ahead of the inevitable leaks. Mr. Cobb and his team should tell every Trump family member, campaign operative and White House aide to disclose every detail that might be relevant to the Russian investigations.

That means every meeting with any Russian or any American with Russian business ties. Every phone call or email. And every Trump business relationship with Russians going back years. This should include every relevant part of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which the President will resist but Mr. Mueller is sure to seek anyway.

Then release it all to the public. Whatever short-term political damage this might cause couldn’t be worse than the death by a thousand cuts of selective leaks, often out of context, from political opponents in Congress or the special counsel’s office. If there really is nothing to the Russia collusion allegations, transparency will prove it. Americans will give Mr. Trump credit for trusting their ability to make a fair judgment. Pre-emptive disclosure is the only chance to contain the political harm from future revelations.

(This editorial position, of course, assumes that Trump’s Russia contacts are politically manageable; this will come to matter less as a political problem than as a legal and moral one. Stains of that kind, to be sure, will prove indelible. The editorial is significant mostly because it shows that even defenders of Trump see his situation as dire.)

Benjamin Wittes observes that A New Front Opens in L’Affaire Russe:

Don’t look now, but a new front has opened in L’Affaire Russe. It will be a quiet one at first, but I suspect it won’t stay quiet for long.

The new front is civil litigation.

Last week, a group called United to Protect Democracy filed suit against the Trump campaign and Roger Stone on behalf of three people whose emails and personal information were among the material stolen by the Russians and disclosed to Wikileaks. The suit alleges that the campaign and Stone conspired with the Russians to release information about the plaintiffs—who are not public figures—in a fashion that violates their privacy rights under D.C. law. and intimidates them out of political advocacy.

See, also, a copy of the complaint at Invasion of Privacy Suit Filed against Trump Campaign over Leaked Emails.

Hannah Levintova, Bryan Schatz and AJ Vicens write that Four Spy Experts on Trump Blackmail, WikiLeaks, and Putin’s Long Game:

Steven Hall, who retired in 2015 after a decorated career at the CIA, ran the agency’s Russia operations.

Mother Jones: If you were involved in the Trump-Russia investigation, who or what would you hone in on?

Steven Hall: Mike Flynn, no doubt. It’s fun to think about what I would do if I was a Russian intelligence officer in charge of running these various operations. Not just the influence operation, which it’s quite clear now was pretty successful in increasing the likelihood that Donald Trump would be elected. But if I was the SVR [Russian foreign intelligence] guy who was told, “Okay, your job is to try to find whether there are members of the campaign who would be willing to play ball with us,” No. 1 on my list would be Flynn. First of all, he’s a former chief of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]. He’s an intelligence officer, so he understands how discreet and clandestine you need to be if you’re going to cooperate on that level. And then, there’s the future: He’s probably going to land a pretty good job, assuming Trump wins. So it’s a win-win-win in terms of targeting Flynn. Furthermore, he’s come to Moscow. He’s accepted money from Russian companies, and he’s tried to conceal that. So on paper, he’s a really good-looking candidate for a spy.

MJ: Is there any parallel to this moment that you saw in your 30-plus year career with the CIA?

SH: The short answer is no. There have certainly been big spy cases in the past—Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen. But I can’t think of one that would be as senior a guy as somebody like the national security adviser, or even more unprecedented—if it turns out that the Trump camp had the go-ahead from the big dog to talk to the Russians prior to the election.

Did the Kremlin likely try to collect dirt on Trump? “I think the answer is yes.”
MJ: How likely is it that the Kremlin has collected kompromat on Trump?

SH: I can absolutely tell you that the FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] are rigged up to collect as much compromising information against any target they consider to be valuable. So when Trump was there in Russia, would they have collected against him? I think the answer is yes. I think they would have seen Trump for what he was at the time, which to the Russian lens would have just been an American oligarch—a rich guy with considerable power who you might need something on at some point…He’s a good guy to have at your beck and call.

If there was compromising material that had a shot at actually making Trump behave the way the Russians wanted him to, I would imagine it would be something financial—illegal, dirty dealings, or something with legal import.

MJ: Do you think Congress is able to investigate the Trump-Russia allegations effectively?

SH: I don’t think so, given where Congress is right now in terms of partisanship. There might have been a time historically—15, 20 years ago. Short of having an independent investigator or some other mechanism that can get rid of some of the partisanship, I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

Michael Shear and Karen Yourish report that Trump Says He Has Signed More Bills Than Any President, Ever. He Hasn’t:

In fact, as he approaches six months in office on Thursday, Mr. Trump is slightly behind the lawmaking pace for the past six presidents, who as a group signed an average of 43 bills during the same period. And an analysis of the bills Mr. Trump signed shows that about half were minor and inconsequential, passed by Congress with little debate. Among recent presidents, both the total number of bills he signed and the legislation’s substance make Mr. Trump about average.

President Jimmy Carter signed 70 bills in the first six months, according to an analysis of bills signed by previous White House occupants. Bill Clinton signed 50. George W. Bush signed 20 bills into law. Barack Obama signed 39 bills during the period, including an $800 billion stimulus program to confront an economic disaster, legislation to make it easier for women to sue for equal pay, a bill to give the Food and Drug Administration the authority to regulate tobacco and an expansion of the federal health insurance program for children.

Mr. Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both had signed more bills into law by their 100-day mark than Mr. Trump did in almost twice that time. Truman had signed 55 bills and Roosevelt had signed 76 during their first 100 days.

Sarah Kaplan writes that America’s greatest eclipse is coming, and this man wants you to see it:

Mike Kentrianakis is launched. He’s here at the Hayden Planetarium as an emissary of the American Astronomical Society, and his mission is to spread the word: On Aug. 21, the moon will pass between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow across a swath of the United States. The spectacle will be like nothing most people have ever seen….

Kentrianakis would know. He has witnessed 20 solar eclipses in his 52 years, missing work, straining relationships and spending most of his life’s savings to chase the moon’s shadow across the globe. The pursuit has taken him to a mountaintop in Argentina, a jungle in Gabon, an ice field north of the Arctic Circle — exposing him to every type of eclipse there is to see, on every continent except Antarctica. Last year he watched one from an airplane 36,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. The video of his rapturous reaction went viral, cementing his status as a “crazy eclipse guy,” as he jokingly calls himself. “Oh, my God,” Kentrianakis exclaims 21 times in the 3½ -minute clip. “Totality! Totality! Whooo, yeah!”

Chasing the dark: The man who’s spent a lifetime pursuing solar eclipses presents Kentrianakis’s fascination:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 56m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Library Board is scheduled to meet at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1918, the Bolsheviks execute Nicholas II of Russia and several members of his immediate family, after which their “bodies were then mutilated,^[1] burned and buried in a field called Porosenkov Log in the Koptyaki forest.^[3] ”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Anne Applebaum observes that It’s now clear: The most dangerous threats to the West are not external:

Just over a week has passed since President Trump offered, in Warsaw, a very particular defense of Western civilization. He praised Poland for its fight against Nazism and Soviet communism long ago, though he said little about the country’s success since 1989. He spoke of the things that hold the West together, including classical music and God, but made only glancing references to democracy. He also spoke of the threats to the West, alluding to dangers from the “South or the East” as well as from an “oppressive ideology,” radical Islam, that “seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.”

In the days since that speech, rapidly moving events in Warsaw have proved him wrong: As I write this, Poland is proving that the greatest threat to the West is not radical Islam. The greatest threat is not even external: It is internal. In Poland, a democratically elected but illiberal government has, in the past few days, escalated its attack on its own constitution, pushing new laws openly designed to create a politicized judiciary. And it feels emboldened to do so by the visit of the U.S. president….

Vann R. Newkirk writes about What The ‘Crack Baby’ Panic Reveals About The Opioid Epidemic:

….I was struck by a recent article in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids. The article is remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic in view….

The article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.

The term itself still stings. “Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after waves of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.

Of Trump, Jay Rosen writes His campaign to discredit the press is a permanent feature of Trump’s political style (article has detail around each point):

Which is to say this “war” (terrible term, clumsy and lazy) will almost certainly continue, despite the periodic discovery by journalists that Trump loves to banter with reporters, and that he lives and dies by the very media coverage that he poisonously calls fake. 

The campaign to discredit mainstream journalism is thus a permanent feature of Trump’s political style. Why? I have some ideas. But I probably missed a few. If you point them out in the comments (or by social media) I will add the best ones to this post, with credit. 

1. Because it’s a base-only presidency with a niche, not a broadcasting strategy….

2. Because this is what they have; they don’t have much else….

3. Because Trump is a creature of media— and its creation….

4. Because people in the White House think “media” warring is governing….

5. Because turning reporters into ritualized hate objects is easy to do, supporters love it, and it meets Trump’s need for public displays of dominance….

6. Because it’s the one campaign promise he can definitely keep….

7. Because with the Federal government in Republican hands there is an “enemy gap”….

8. Because it binds him to the base, which has been tutored in this resentment since 1969….

9. Because they know a lot of bad news has yet to emerge….

10. Because the sheer ugliness of the spectacle repels the uncommitted, persuading them that there’s no point in paying attention….

11. Because his fantasy claims during the campaign pre-ordained critical coverage if Trump won….

Avi Selk writes that Trump praised a woman’s body. A foreign minister wondered ‘if she could say the same of him’:

But, speaking of allies, what did they think of what Trump said in Australia, which has its own history of awkward diplomacy with the president?

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation called up the country’s foreign minister to find out.

“You’re in such good shape, such good physical shape, beautiful,” the host told Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, quoting Trump. “Would you be flattered or offended?”

This was arguably a politically sensitive question, what with alliance and all. But the foreign minister didn’t hesitate.

“I’d be taken aback,” Bishop said.

And then this zinger: “I wonder if she could say the same of him?”

(She probably couldn’t — Trump is sedentary to the point of obesity.)

Loren Grush writes that one can Feel like you’re zooming over Pluto and its moon Charon with NASA’s new 3D animations:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy six. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 58m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1945, the United States conducted the first detonation of an atomic bomb at “at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now part of White Sands Missile Range). The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer report that the Soviet Veteran Who Met With Trump Jr. Is a Master of the Dark Arts:

MOSCOW — Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, had one consistent message for the journalists who met him over the years at the luxury hotels where he stayed in Moscow, London and Paris, or at his home on a leafy street in Washington: Never use email to convey information that needed to be kept secret.

While not, he insisted, an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, a spy, Mr. Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with a counterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account.

A journalist who visited his home was given a thumb drive containing emails that had apparently been stolen by hackers working for one of his clients.

Christian Caryl explains to his Dear red-state friends: Embracing Russia is not an act of patriotism:

Some of you admire Putin because he’s a “strong leader.” But do you ever discuss the issue of his personal corruption, his alliances with Hezbollah and Iran and North Korea, his gross mismanagement of his state-dominated economy? (Given Russia’s incredible natural wealth, it should be the richest country in the world. Instead, it has a gross domestic product roughly equivalent to Italy’s.) Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders: They persuaded by argument and example. Putin operates more like Tony Soprano.

I’ve even heard some of you say that he’s a Christian leader who’s defending “Western civilization” from the threat of liberals and gays and feminists. Really? Putin makes an odd poster boy for the defense of Christianity. He started his political career in the Soviet KGB, a militantly atheistic organization. The present-day Russian Orthodox Church is basically a branch of the Kremlin, locked in a mindset of xenophobia and anti-Western paranoia. It is run by priests who worked as KGB informers in Soviet days, and who are themselves profoundly corrupt.

The kind of Russian political culture that Putin represents today, steeped in centuries of autocracy, has far more in common with places such as China or the Middle East than with any part of the West. But Putin knows what conservatives in the West like to hear, and he’s shrewd enough to give it to them. (Note to you gun fans: Russia is scamming you when it portrays itself as a paradise for gun owners. It has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world.)

Jennifer Rubin (now back from vacation) observes that The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.:

Let’s dispense with the “Democrats are just as bad” defense. First, I don’t much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. It’s that party’s inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, it’s simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem — a “woe is me” sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the opposition’s ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Indeed, for decades now, demonization — of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. — has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many “respectable” conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts’ blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. “Obama bad” or “Clinton bad” became the only credo — leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code” — and no coherent policies for governing.

Peter Beinart explains The Projection President (“Months into his tenure, Trump still responds to controversies by lobbing the same charges at his opponents”):

In Paris on Thursday, Donald Trump said, “A lot of people don’t know” that “France is America’s first and oldest ally.” That may be true. But commentators noted that when Trump uses the “a lot of people don’t know” formulation, it’s usually a sign that he didn’t know himself….

Why does Trump do this? Sigmund Freud believed people project onto others impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Erick Erickson suggested that projection may be a response to crisis or extreme stress. Others have linked it to narcissism….

The more important question is why it works, at least among Trump’s base. One answer may be that Trump supporters embrace his projection because they’re doing it themselves. Consider Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton is the real bigot. On its face it’s odd given that Clinton enjoyed overwhelming African American support. But it’s easier to understand the statement’s appeal when you realize that, according to a November 2016 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, Trump supporters were twice as likely to say whites face a “lot of discrimination” as they were to say blacks face a lot of discrimination. When it came to bigotry, in other words, Trump’s overwhelmingly white fan base may have been projecting, too.

(The simplest formation of this observation about Trump: Trump falsely accuses others of the very conduct of which he is truly guilty.)

NPR’s Skunk Bear offers A Sketchy History Of Pencil Lead:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 59m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1980, the state experiences the Western Wisconsin Derecho, “a severe weather system that moved through several western counties on July 15, 1980. It cut a 20-mile-wide swath through St Croix, Pierce, Dunn, Eau Claire, Chippewa, and Clark counties. Although much of the storm’s damage was caused by straight-line winds in excess of 100 mph, several tornadoes were also reported. The storm caused nearly $160M in damage (1980 dollars) and killed three people.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who served for three years as director of intelligence & counterintelligence at the Dept. of Energy and 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer, writes that Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation:

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election….

Paul Krugman describes The New Climate of Treason:

The radicalization of the GOP began as a top-down affair, driven by big-money interests that financed campaigns and think tanks, pushing the party to the right. But to win elections, the forces engaged in this push cynically appealed to darker impulses – racism first and foremost, but also culture war, anti-intellectualism, and so on. To make this appeal, they created a media establishment – Fox News, talk radio, and so on – which drew in many working-class whites. This meant that a large segment of the population was no longer hearing the same news – basically not experiencing the same account of reality – as the rest of us. So what had been real but not extreme differences became extreme differences in political outlook.

And political figures either adapted or were pushed out. There once were Republicans who would have reacted with horror to Trump’s embrace of Putin, but they’ve left the scene, or are no longer considered Republicans.

Ryan Reilly reports that Judge Tosses Jury’s Conviction Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions, Orders New Trial:

WASHINGTON – A D.C. judge has tossed out a jury’s conviction of a protester who laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing, finding on Friday that the government had improperly argued during the trial that her laughter was enough to merit a guilty verdict. The judge ordered a new trial in the case, setting a court date for Sept. 1.

Desiree Fairooz, 61, who was associated with the group Code Pink, had been convicted of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. Fairooz was taken into custody during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January after she laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) claimed Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (The Senate rejected Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s over concerns about his views on race.)

But Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia tossed out the guilty verdict on Friday because the government had argued that the laugh alone was enough to warrant the verdict.

Maureen C. Gilmer writes that in Indiana, a Bride-to-be calls off wedding, invites homeless to her reception:

INDIANAPOLIS — Sarah Cummins was supposed to get married this weekend. The 25-year-old Purdue University pharmacy student had been planning her dream wedding for two years, scrimping and working overtime to save for the $30,000 extravaganza.

A week ago, she called it off (she prefers not to say why) and was left with a broken heart and a nonrefundable contract for a venue and a plated dinner for 170 guests Saturday night at the Ritz Charles in Carmel….

Then she decided to bring some purpose to her pain. She worked with event planner Maddie LaDow at the Ritz Charles to re-arrange the reception area, then started contacting homeless shelters in Indianapolis and Noblesville and inviting residents to her party.

“We’re doing all the same stuff, just arranging the tables differently, so there’s no head table for the bridal party, no cake table or gift table,” she said.

Why is Take Me Out to the Ballgame is Sung During the 7th Inning Stretch? Here’s why: