Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thunderstorms and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 06m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1940, the Battle of Britain begins. On this day in 1832, construction of Fort Koshkonong during the Black Hawk War begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

The New York Times editorial board considers Combating a Real Threat to Election Integrity:

The question is this: Can the system be strengthened against cyberattacks in time for the 2018 midterms and the 2020 presidential race? The answer, encouragingly, is that there are concrete steps state and local governments can take right now to improve the security and integrity of their elections. A new study by the Brennan Center for Justice identifies two critical pieces of election infrastructure — aging voting machines and voter registration databases relying on outdated software — that present appealing targets for hackers and yet can be shored up at a reasonable cost.

Last year, Russian hackers tried to break into voter databases in at least 39 states, aiming to alter or delete voter data, and also attempted to take over the computers of more than 100 local election officials before Election Day. There is no evidence that they infiltrated voting machines, but they have succeeded in doing so in other countries, and it’s only a matter of time before they figure it out here. R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, wrote in an introduction to the Brennan Center report, “I am confident the Russians will be back, and that they will take what they have learned last year to attempt to inflict even more damage in future elections.”

The report identifies three immediate steps states and localities can take to counter the threat [lists of three steps follows]….

The White House ethics lawyer for George W. Bush, Richard Painter, describes the conduct of Trump operatives’ meeting with a Russian apparatchik as conduct that borders on treason:

Bush 43 WH ethics lawyer on NYT story/Donald Trump Jr. and Kushner meeting with Russian lawyer: “This borders on treason” via @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/Ceu5xLYgnB

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) July 9, 2017

Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian politician committed to democracy, testified to Congress in June on How the West should deal with the Putin regime:

Pema Levy writes that These Three Lawyers Are Quietly Purging Voter Rolls Across the Country:

Republican-backed laws requiring a photo ID to cast a ballot have attracted attention in recent years for impedingthe ability of minority, poor, and elderly people to vote. But increasingly, the focus of the voting rights battle is over who gets to be on the list of registered voters. Democrats have successfully pushed for automatic voter registration in eight states and the District of Columbia, while Republicans have begun putting up roadblocks to registration. In Kansas, Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican with a national reputation for crafting anti-immigrant laws and pushing the myth of widespread voter fraud, is locked in a legal battle with the ACLU over his decision to require Kansans to show a birth certificate or passport in order to register to vote. (Kobach and Adams are working together on a case to determine whether states can require people to show proof of citizenship in order to register.) Kobach was recently appointed vice chair of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, a perch from which he may recommend more stringent registration requirements nationwide.

Adrenaline Rush asks Have you ever wanted to fly like an eagle?:

Have you ever wanted to fly like an eagle? ?? pic.twitter.com/8Gi06eIjlv

— Adrenaline Rush (@Amazing_Iife) May 22, 2017

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 08m 13s of daytime. The moon is full today. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1755, Frenchman Charles de Langlade leads an ambush: “a group of Wisconsin Native Americans (including Ottawa and Ojibway) against the British General Braddock during the French and Indian War. Langlade, acting as “commander” of the Northwestern Indians, ambushed the British troops. The battle is depicted in the oil painting by Edward W. Deming which hangs on the 4th floor of the Wisconsin Historical Society. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes, 1939; pg 25]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Joby Warrick considers The secret to Kim’s success? Some experts see Russian echoes in North Korea’s missile advances:

Four months before its July 4 missile test, North Korea offered the world a rare technical preview of its latest missile engine, one said to be capable of lobbing nuclear warheads at U.S. cities. A video on state-run TV depicted a machine with thickets of tubes and vents, and a shape that struck some U.S. experts as familiar — in a distinctly Soviet way.

“It shocked me,” said Michael Elleman, one weapons expert who noticed jarring similarities between the engine tested by North Korea in March and one he frequently encountered in Russia at the end of the Cold War. “It seemed to come out of nowhere.”

After intensive study, Elleman, a former consultant at the Pentagon, and other specialists would report that they had detected multiple design features in the new North Korean missile engine that echo those of a 1960s-era Soviet workhorse called the RD-250.

Jo Becker, Matt Apuzzo, and Adam Goldman report that Trump Team Met With Lawyer Linked to Kremlin During Campaign:

Two weeks after Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination last year, his eldest son arranged a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan with a Russian lawyer who has connections to the Kremlin, according to confidential government records described to The New York Times.

The previously unreported meeting was also attended by Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, according to interviews and the documents, which were outlined by people familiar with them.

While President Trump has been dogged by revelations of undisclosed meetings between his associates and Russians, this episode at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, is the first confirmed private meeting between a Russian national and members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle during the campaign. It is also the first time that his son Donald Trump Jr. is known to have been involved in such a meeting.

(Hallie Jackson reports that “spox for POTUS outside legal team casts mtg as part of oppo effort. Source close to team calls it ‘poss. setup by Russian operatives’.” Bill Kristol correctly observes that Trump’s own private lawyers see the significance of this revelation, and that the “legal team must be worried. If you’re suggesting the meeting is a setup, you’re acknowledging the meeting is on its face problematic.”)

Jonathan Freedland writes that No wonder Trump is Putin’s favourite: he’s making America weak again:

In every respect, Putin now faces a US leadership feebler than at any time in the 17 years he has ruled Russia – or for many decades, for that matter. It’s not just that both the president and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, are foreign policy novices. Or that the State Department is depleted, with hundreds of key posts unfilled. The problem goes much deeper….

Even if Trump had more skill and was surrounded by more able people, he’d still be in a shaky position. His administration is as distracted as he is by the cloud that hangs over them permanently: the gathering investigation into the Russia affair. From Hamburg, Trump tweeted the laughable claim that: “Everyone here is talking about why John Podesta refused to give the [Democratic National Committee] server to the FBI and the CIA”, proof that he obsesses over the details of that saga even when he is meant to be engaged in high diplomacy.

It often used to be said that in the US, foreign policy is domestic policy. That maxim referred to the way US diaspora communities could shape decisions on the countries they had left behind. In the age of Trump, it has new meaning. Thanks to his domestic situation, he can barely move on the world stage. No wonder Putin was smiling in Hamburg. He knows he has succeeded in his chief objective: he has made America weak again.

Chris Uhlmann, political editor of the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation, describes what a disaster Trump’s G20 appearance was:

What did we learn about @realDonaldTrump at this #G20? @CUhlmann explains. #Insiders pic.twitter.com/TGOXdiFWhB

— Insiders ABC (@InsidersABC) July 8, 2017

Michael Tunick describes Why Swiss cheese has those mysterious, giant holes:

See, also, Tunick’s The Science of Cheese.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 09m 26s of daytime. We’ve nearly a full moon, with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1776, John Nixon makes the first public proclamation of the Declaration of Independence from the steps of the Pennsylvania State House (now know as Independence Hall).

On this day in 1850, Walworth County resident James Jesse Strang, leader of a Mormon faction, declares himself a 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 James in 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 — 

Molly McKew accurately observes that Trump Handed Putin a Stunning Victory:

In very concrete terms, through speech and action, the president signaled a willingness to align the United States with Vladimir Putin’s worldview, and took steps to advance this realignment. He endorsed, nearly in its totality, the narrative the Russian leader has worked so meticulously to construct.

The readout of Trump’s lengthy meeting with Putin included several key points. First, the United States will “move on” from election hacking issues with no accountability or consequences for Russia; in fact, the U.S. will form a “framework” with Russia to cooperate on cybersecurity issues, evaluating weaknesses and assessing potential responses jointly. Second, the two presidents agreed not to meddle in “each other’s” domestic affairs—equating American activities to promote democracy with Russian aggression aimed at undermining it, in an incalculable PR victory for the Kremlin. Third, the announced, limited cease-fire in Syria will be a new basis for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson went so far as to say that the Russian approach in Syria—yielding mass civilian casualties, catastrophic displacement, untold destruction and erased borders—may be “more right” than that of the United States.

Each of these points represents a significant victory for Putin. Each of them will weaken U.S. tools for defending its interests and security from the country that defines itself as America’s “primary adversary.” Trump has ceded the battle space—physical, virtual, moral—to the Kremlin. And the president is going to tell us this is a “win”….

Jason Easley writes that Adam Schiff Devastates Trump’s Version Of The Putin Meeting With A Point By Point Destruction:

In a statement provided to PoliticusUSA, Schiff said:

According to Secretary of State Tillerson, the President repeatedly pressed Putin on Russia’s interference in the election. The American people can be forgiven for a healthy skepticism about just how hard Mr. Trump could have pressed the Russian autocrat, given that the President publicly cast doubt on Russian responsibility and the probity of our intelligence agencies only the day before. Can we really expect the President to be more forthcoming with the Russian President if he is not willing to fully level with our own people on the same subject?

Moreover, the establishment of a working group as reported by Foreign Minister Lavrov to study how to curb cyber interference in elections in which the Russians would play any role, would be akin to inviting the North Koreans to participate in a commission on nonproliferation — it tacitly adopts the fiction that the Russians are a constructive partner on the subject instead of the worst actor on the world stage.

With respect to the ceasefire in southwest Syria, if such an agreement can truly bring about a pause in the violence and lead to a transition away from Bashar al Assad, this could be an important start. The Russians have very different interests than we do in Syria, however, and we would be wise to treat any Russian commitments with a jaundiced eye. Other ceasefires have been poorly enforced and Russia will need to live up to any commitments that it has made.

Finally, the Secretary’s readout included no mention on pushing back against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need to maintain sanctions until they withdraw and end their destabilization. If this topic was ignored by the President, that would send a message of tacit acceptance to the Kremlin. It also underscores the need for Congress to maintain all sanctions on Russia over Ukraine and its hacking of our elections. Congress should pass such legislation without further delay.

Alexander Baunov describes How Putin Made Political Corruption Great Again:

For many Russians, there is a blatant contradiction between the patriotic consensus Putin seeks and the immiseration they face at home. The economic growth of his early years in office has been replaced with the idea of suffering—the hardship of stagnation and sanctions that are the apparent price for assertive foreign policy. But the wages of privation do not seem to extend to the new generation of oligarchs he has surrounded himself with—his old friends, including Gennady Timchenko, the Rotenberg brothers, and Igor Sechin, all of whom became billionaires during his rule, and even receive support from the state. (Parliament passed a special law with huge tax privileges for those touched by Western sanctions.)

This is what corruption in the Putin era means. While much has been done in recent years to combat low-level corruption between citizens and authorities, his style of rule implies a “controlled corruption,” when his cronies can reckon for the reward.

Jordan Pearson reports that The Same Twitter Bots That Helped Trump Tried to Sink Macron, Researcher Says:

New research from Emilio Ferrara, the University of Southern California academic who exposed the role of bots in the 2016 US election, shows that many Trump bots went dark and later turned into MacronLeaks bots. This, Ferrara wrote in a new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week (which is currently being peer-reviewed), suggests that there may be a “black market” for right-wing political bots that can lay dormant for months before being activated to promote the next conservative demagogue.

“There are way too many coincidences here to keep us from thinking that there are venues where organizations with enough resources can access these botnets,” Ferrara said over the phone….

Ferrara collected 17 million tweets from roughly two weeks leading up to the French election and designed a custom machine learning algorithm (based on the Botometer, a public tool that looks for the defining marks of a robot controlling a given Twitter account), to parse the massive trove and pick out bot accounts. Of the nearly 100,000 users in the sample who participated in the MacronLeaks discussion on Twitter, 18,000 were bots, Ferrara said. According to the paper, some of the accounts that targeted Macron were actually created in the lead-up to the 2016 US election.

“These accounts were tweeting their support for Trump for about a week in the run-up to the 2016 election and then they went dark for a very long time,” Ferrara said. “These same accounts picked up again and some even started tweeting in French—but the alt-right narrative was the same.”

We can be sure that at least one Finnish man will brook no intrusions from a foraging bear:

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 10m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Joint Review Board meets today at 9 AM.

On this day in 1981, Pres. Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to become a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson leads his men (among them future presidents Zachary Taylor & Abraham Lincoln) to an encampment in Palmyra during the Black Hawk War.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rep. Adam Schiff writes that Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him:

If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement today—that no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton’s emails—more than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.

On the agenda should also be Russia’s continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia’s propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.

There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.

Michael Riley , Jennifer A. Dlouhy, and Bryan Gruley report that Russians Are Suspects in Nuclear Site Hackings, Sources Say:

Hackers working for a foreign government recently breached at least a dozen U.S. power plants, including the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas, according to current and former U.S. officials, sparking concerns the attackers were searching for vulnerabilities in the electrical grid.

The intruders could be positioning themselves to eventually disrupt the nation’s power supply, warned the officials, who noted that a general alert was distributed to utilities a week ago. Adding to those concerns, hackers recently infiltrated an unidentified company that makes control systems for equipment used in the power industry, an attack that officials believe may be related.

The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks. One of those networks belongs to an aging nuclear generating facility known as Wolf Creek — owned by Westar Energy Inc., Great Plains Energy Inc. and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative Inc. — on a lake shore near Burlington, Kansas.

The possibility of a Russia connection is particularly worrisome, former and current officials say, because Russian hackers have previously taken down parts of the electrical grid in Ukraine and appear to be testing increasingly advanced tools to disrupt power supplies.

Pamela Brown, Shimon Prokupecz, and Evan Perez report that Russia steps up spying efforts after election:

Russian spies are ramping up their intelligence-gathering efforts in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials who say they have noticed an increase since the election.

The officials say they believe one of the biggest US adversaries feels emboldened by the lack of a significant retaliatory response from both the Trump and Obama administrations.

“Russians have maintained an aggressive collection posture in the US, and their success in election meddling has not deterred them,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with Trump administration efforts….

Since the November election, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have detected an increase in suspected Russian intelligence officers entering the US under the guise of other business, according to multiple current and former senior US intelligence officials. The Russians are believed to now have nearly 150 suspected intelligence operatives in the US, these sources said. Officials who spoke to CNN say the Russians are replenishing their ranks after the US in December expelled 35 Russian diplomats suspected of spying in retaliation for election-meddling.

“The concerning point with Russia is the volume of people that are coming to the US. They have a lot more intelligence officers in the US” compared to what they have in other countries, one of the former intelligence officials says.

The FBI, which is responsible for counterintelligence efforts in the US, would not comment for the story.

Fueling law enforcement officials’ concern is that the Russians are targeting people in the US who can provide access to classified information, in addition to ongoing efforts to hack the US government for intelligence, according to several of the officials. In some cases, Russian spies have tried to gain employment at places with sensitive information as part of their intelligence-gathering efforts, the sources say.

Peter Beinart describes The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech:

The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.

Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.

Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.

(It’s worth noting that many are white and Christian and yet opposed to Trump’s tribalism. I’m white, of a Lutheran & Catholic family, and yet Trump and his lumpen band hold no attraction for me. Indeed, it would more appealing to sit among a troop of screenching, scratching, howling baboons than any of Trump’s officials and surrogates. More enlightening, too: one can learn much about the created order from the beauty of nature.)

UW-Madison’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences rooftop camera recorded a recent, and beautiful, thunderstorm:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 11m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM this evening, and the Fire Department has a business meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1934, eight are injured during a riot at a Wisconsin malted milk 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. [Source: Capital Times 7/6/1934, p. 1]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Foxconn considering bringing 10,000 jobs to southeastern Wisconsin, Assembly speaker says:

MADISON – Foxconn Technology Group is considering bringing 10,000 jobs to southeastern Wisconsin, leaders of the state Assembly said Wednesday.

With their passing reference to the proposed project in a memo, the leaders became the first high-ranking state officials to acknowledge the Taiwanese company is considering a massive presence here.

The firm also is considering putting the development in Michigan or other states.

They referred to the possible project as they sought to revive stalled talks over the state budget. Disputes over transportation funding have kept Republicans, who control the Legislature, from reaching a budget deal.

“Recently, technology company, Foxconn, has indicated its desire to locate in southeastern Wisconsin with up to 10,000 jobs, and yet the (funding) of I-94 North-South through Racine and Kenosha counties continues to be delayed,” wrote Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Assembly Majority Leader Jim Steineke (R-Kaukauna) and Rep. John Nygren (R-Marinette), the co-chairman of the Legislature’s budget committee.

(Obvious points: Foxconn is considering other states, they’re sure to ask for huge public incentives to locate here, and Vos has an incentive of a different kind to tout Foxconn’s interest as a point in favor of the additional road-construction money that he wants.)

Andrew Kaczynski, Chris Massie, and Nathan McDermott report on the 80 times Trump talked about Putin:

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump consistently broke from political orthodoxy in his effusive praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

His glowing statements on Putin have become central in stoking the suspicion that he and his campaign were somehow connected to Russian interference in the election.

A CNN KFile review of Trump’s public statements — from the years immediately before his presidential campaign to present — reveal that Trump has contradicted himself over the years about the nature of his relationship with Putin.

Since 2013 — when Trump’s Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow — Trump has at least nine times claimed to have spoken to, met, or made contact with Putin. But as the 2016 campaign wore on and his statements on Putin began to attract more scrutiny, Trump changed course, denying having ever met the Russian president….

Brian Bennett observes that the Stakes are high for Trump’s meeting with Putin. Here’s what to expect:

Should Trump prove unprepared, that won’t be for lack of effort on the Americans’ side.

Leading up to his first face-to-face meeting with Putin, U.S. intelligence officials have prepared a detailed psychological profile of the long-serving Russian strongman, a former KGB officer who spent decades recruiting spies for the Soviet Union and mastered the art of bending people to his will.

The profile, according to two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the preparations, is part of a thick binder prepared for Trump. The president often doesn’t read the usual briefing books and relies on in-person briefings, the officials said, so aides also have written a list of tweet-length sentences that summarize the main points Trump could bring up with Putin.

(There’s Trump, the great leader: after a tweet-length sentence of 140 characters, he’s spent.)

Lydia Wheeler and Mike Lillis report that Trump’s supposed Voter fraud commission may have violated law:

President Trump’s voter fraud commission may have violated the law by ignoring federal requirements governing requests for information from states, several experts on the regulatory process told The Hill.

Experts say the failure to submit the request to states through the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) violates a 1980 law known as the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA). They also say the failure could be significant, since states could argue it means they are under no obligation to respond.

“If the commission gets heavy-handed with them, it seems to me that the states are within their right to say, ‘No, we don’t have to respond because you didn’t go through [OIRA],’” said Susan Dudley, a former OIRA administrator who is now director of the GW Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity asked all 50 states and the District of Columbia for extensive information last week on their voters, including full names and addresses, political party registration and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

Great Big Story presents If You Build It, They Will Come: A Juke Joint’s Field of Dreams:

A Juke Joint’s Field of Dreams from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

Robert “Bilbo” Walker has been playing blues music for over 60 years. Hailing from the same area of the Mississippi Delta as Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, B.B. King and others, Walker has become a legend of the genre in his own right. And for the past seven years, he’s been working on opening his own live music venue, known locally as a “juke joint.” Juke joints—or quasi-legal drinking establishments with live music—are a relic of blues music that were popular until about 50 years ago. Today, they’re nearly extinct. But Walker just celebrated the grand opening of Wonderlight City—a classic-style juke joint located in a remote rural area 20 miles from Clarksdale, Mississippi. With nothing but fields surrounding the establishment, this is one venue you’ll really have to go out of your way to find. But when you happen upon it, you’re in for a real treat.

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:23 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 12m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Phineas Taylor “P. T.” Barnum is born this day in 1810. On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson and his soldiers enter the Trembling Lands during the Black Hawk War: “The area was some 10 square miles and contained a large bog. Although the land appeared safe, it would undulate or tremble for yards when pressure was applied. Many of the militiamen were on horses, which plunged to their bellies in the swamp. The “trembling lands” forced Atkinson to retrace his steps back toward the Rock River, in the process losing days in his pursuit of Black Hawk.”

Recommended for reading in full —

David Rothkopf contends that The greatest threat facing the United States is its own president:

I asked Petraeus, a man I respect, if he thought the president was fit to serve. His response was, “It’s immaterial.” He argued that because the team around Trump was so good, they could offset whatever deficits he might have. I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense.

That is where we are now. The president’s tweeting hysterically at the media is just an element of this. So too is his malignant and ever-visible narcissism. The president has demonstrated himself to have zero impulse control and a tendency to damage vital international relationships with ill-considered outbursts, to trust very few of the people in his own government, and to reportedly rant and shout at staff and even at the television sets he obsessively watches.

Whether he is actually clinically ill is a matter for psychiatric professionals to consider. But when you take the above behaviors and combine them with his resistance to doing the work needed to be president, to sitting down for briefings, to reading background materials, to familiarizing himself with details enough to manage his staff, there is clearly a problem. Compound it with his deliberate reluctance to fill key positions in government and his wild flip-flopping on critical issues from relations with China to trade, and you come to a conclusion that it may be that Trump’s fitness to serve as president is our nation’s core national security issue.

Patrick Granfield explains Why Trump Should Embrace America’s Immigrant Soldiers:

The men who declared American independence 241 years ago today were largely landowners and merchants, already well established in society. Not so, however, for many of the soldiers who helped secure that independence over the course of the Revolutionary War.

From the nation’s very first days, some of its finest soldiers have been immigrants and, yes, even foreigners. As President Trump and his team celebrate their first Fourth of July in office—and as they continue shaping their immigration policies—they would do well to reflect on this tradition and its importance to the United States’ security….

Millions of immigrant soldiers would follow in their footsteps. They include 100,000 U.S. troops who arrived in Europe a century ago to fight the First World War, immigrants who did not become citizens until their naturalization after a victorious return. And they include more than 100,000 men and women from this century who have earned their citizenship through military service since the September 11 attacks.

Jim Rutenberg writes that an Independent Press Is Under Siege as Freedom Rings:

You’re old enough to know that you can’t always have a feel-good birthday. And let’s face it: This Fourth of July just isn’t going to be one of them.

How could it be when one of the pillars of our 241-year-old republic — the First Amendment — is under near-daily assault from the highest levels of the government?

When the president of the United States makes viciously personal attacks against journalists — and then doubles down over the weekend by posting a video on Twitter showing himself tackling and beating a figure with a CNN logo superimposed on his head? (Every time you think he’s reached the limit …)

John Stoeher writes of Exposing the Fraud That Is [White Nationalist and Trump Supporter] Richard Spencer:

Richard Spencer lives on his family’s fortune. That wealth in part comes from owning, for generations, huge tracts of land used in growing cotton. That cotton is subsidized, like many farming operations, to maintain prices by the federal government.

Moreover, Spencer dropped out of graduate school and does not appear to have held down a real job before founding his “think tank.” No one knows where he got the money to found it. The National Policy Institute has lost its tax-exempt status.

What do we make of these facts?

For one thing, it’s hard to maintain the veneer of strength and purity when you are vulnerable to accusations of being a mama’s boy. (His parents are evidently mainstream Republican who dislike their son’s embrace of fascism, but not enough, apparently, to cut him off.)

For another, it’s hard to maintain an image of authenticity as the one true voice of an oppressed white people when your money comes from mommy and daddy, instead of a deep pool of contributors who might nominally represent a truly democratic yearning. White nationalism ends up taking a back seat to his carefully constructed image and in doing so risks revealing Spencer as being a fraud.

Here’s What’s Up for July 2017:

Good morning.

Independence Day in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset is 8:36 PM, for 15h 13m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, Ulysses S. Grant wins a decisive Union victory at the Siege of Vicksburg:

The Siege of Vicksburg (May 18 – July 4, 1863) was the final major military action in the Vicksburg Campaign of the American Civil War. In a series of maneuvers, UnionMaj. Gen.Ulysses S. Grant and his Army of the Tennessee crossed the Mississippi River and drove the ConfederateArmy of Mississippi, led by Lt. Gen.John C. Pemberton, into the defensive lines surrounding the fortress city of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Vicksburg was the last major Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi River; therefore, capturing it completed the second part of the Northern strategy, the Anaconda Plan. When two major assaults (May 19 and 22, 1863) against the Confederate fortifications were repulsed with heavy casualties, Grant decided to besiege the city beginning on May 25. With no reinforcement, supplies nearly gone, and after holding out for more than forty days, the garrison finally surrendered on July 4.

The successful ending of the Vicksburg Campaign significantly degraded the ability of the Confederacy to maintain its war effort, as described in the Aftermath section of the campaign article. Some historians—e.g., Ballard, p. 308—suggest that the decisive battle in the campaign was actually the Battle of Champion Hill, which, once won by Grant, made victory in the subsequent siege a foregone conclusion. This action (combined with the surrender of Port Hudson to Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks on July 9) yielded command of the Mississippi River to the Union forces, who would hold it for the rest of the conflict.

On this day in 1836, the Wisconsin Territory has its first governor:

On this date in Mineral Point, Col. Henry Dodge took the oath of office to become the first Governor of the newly created Territory of Wisconsin. The Territory, previously attached to Michigan, encompassed what is now the states of Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and portions of North and South Dakota. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Recommended for reading in full — 

James Warren ponders “Modern Day Presidential”: Has Trump’s Vulgarity Become the New Normal?:

Matthew Baum, a public policy expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School who’s good on politics and communication, said Sunday, “Well, in any other time the notion of a president so crudely and misogynistically lashing out at the hosts of a cable news show would be unthinkable. I think it’s a testament to how far we’ve fallen in the Trump era that these latest tweets are essentially par for the course for Trump”….

Says Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, “This stuff doesn’t matter to his base. What will matter is if they pass a health care bill that he signs that closes rural hospitals and jacks up premiums for those 50-plus. Unless his base gets hit in the pocketbook or loses their local hospital, none of the rhetorical stuff matters.”

“Now if Putin rolls into the Baltic states and Trump looks like Chamberlain, that’s a different story. Or if he fires Mueller and 25 GOP members go south on him, then the base turns on him. But short of a health care crisis he owns, a constitutional crisis he creates, or Russian aggression he appeases, his base is rock solid.”

(Giangreco is right. Trump’s core supporters are more ignorant, and actually less participatory in church and civic institutions, than the national average. They’re poorly acculturated, but demanding. For the most part, the principal objects of an opposition to Trump should be those at the top of his team, yet one should not doubt that when dealing with Trump’s core supporters, they should be dealt with bluntly, as they deserve no better.)

David A. Graham explains Why Trump Keeps Returning to Reddit:

As such, drawing on r/the_donald [a part of Reddit’s message boards populated by bigots, dunces, or otherwise objectionable Trump supporters] points to two of Trump’s weaknesses. The first is his intense need for affirmation. The president boasts of shutting out unflattering stories, though his tirades against CNN and Morning Joe are strong indicators that he’s bluffing, and remains obsessed with his critics. Staffers are reportedly afraid to share negative stories with Trump, preferring to slip him untrue stories. But White House aides might feel at least some obligation to the truth and the public, whereas redditors are unalloyedly loyal to Trump….

The second is that Trump can’t, or won’t, assess the provenance of the information he takes in. He has repeatedly fallen for fraudulent stories, such as a hoax Time cover. (Fake Time covers are a frequent presence in Trump’s life.) A prudent and normal politician, and his staff, might figure out whether a meme had originated with a racist, bigoted gentleman going by the name HanAssholeSolo. Then again, a normal politician wouldn’t tweet a video of himself attacking a CNN stand-in (nor would he have appeared repeatedly on WWE). Trump has decided that this doesn’t matter, or even that it helps him with his supporters.

Graham Kates reports that Facebook, for the first time, acknowledges election manipulation:

Without saying the words “Russia,” “Hillary Clinton,” or “Donald Trump,” Facebook acknowledged Thursday for the first time what others have been saying for months.

In a paper released by its security division, the company said “malicious actors” used the platform during the 2016 presidential election as part of a campaign “with the intent of harming the reputation of specific political targets.”

“Facebook is not in a position to make definitive attribution to the actors sponsoring this activity….however our data does not contradict the attribution provided by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in the report dated January 6, 2017,” the report’s authors wrote, referring to the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment that Russia waged an information campaign with the goal of harming Clinton and helping Trump.

The paper, by two members of Facebook’s threat intelligence team and its chief security officer, noted that “fake news” has been incorrectly applied as a catch-all for a variety of techniques used to influence users of the platform. The company now divides these techniques into four specific groups:

• “Information (or Influence) Operations – Actions taken by governments or organized non-state actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment.”

• “False News – News articles that purport to be factual, but which contain intentional misstatements of fact with the intention to arouse passions, attract viewership, or deceive.”

• “False Amplifiers – Coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with the intent of manipulating political discussion (e.g., by discouraging specific parties from participating in discussion, or amplifying sensationalistic voices over others).”

• “Disinformation – Inaccurate or manipulated information/content that is spread intentionally. This can include false news, or it can involve more subtle methods, such as false flag operations, feeding inaccurate quotes or stories to innocent intermediaries, or knowingly amplifying biased or misleading information.”

Eric Mack reports that SpaceX Dragon’s second splashdown is a historic first:

On Monday morning, a SpaceX Dragon capsule became the first spacecraft of its kind to return to Earth from space for a second time. The robotic Dragon’s mission was a fairly routine cargo ferrying assignment to and from the International Space Station, but making the relatively mundane trip twice is historic.

Until now, no single cargo capsule has visited the ISS and returned to Earth more than once. In fact, all other non-SpaceX vehicles that visit the space station are designed to burn up in the atmosphere after a single flight. SpaceX has been recovering its Dragon capsules via splashdowns in the ocean, but this is the first time that one of those recycled craft has completed a second re-supply mission.

NPR’s Skunk Bear explains The Science of Firework Color:

Good morning.

Monday in town will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 74% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, Union and Confederate forces fight for a third and final day at the Battle of Gettysburg:

“On the third day of battle, fighting resumed on Culp’s Hill, and cavalry battles raged to the east and south, but the main event was a dramatic infantry assault by 12,500 Confederates against the center of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge, known as Pickett’s Charge. The charge was repulsed by Union rifle and artillery fire, at great loss to the Confederate army.^[15]

Lee led his army on a torturous retreat back to Virginia. Between 46,000 and 51,000 soldiers from both armies were casualties in the three-day battle, the most costly in US history.

On November 19, President Lincoln used the dedication ceremony for the Gettysburg National Cemetery to honor the fallen Union soldiers and redefine the purpose of the war in his historic Gettysburg Address.”

Union lieutenant Frank Haskell of Madison played a key role in defeating the rebels:

July 3, 1863, is famous for Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, when 12,500 Confederate soldiers attacked the Union line. When Union generals were carried from the field wounded, their troops faltered and their line began to break. Lieutenant Frank Haskell of Madison rode into their midst, rallied them back to the fight, and then brought reinforcements that stopped the enemy attack. Iron Brigade General John Gibbon commented afterward, “I have always thought that to him, more than to any one man, are we indebted for the repulse of Lee’s assault.” It turned not only the tide of the battle but, through the Confederate defeat, the momentum of the war.

Recommended for reading in full —

Olivia Beavers reports that DOJ corporate compliance watchdog resigns citing Trump’s conduct:

A top Justice Department official who serves as a corporate compliance watchdog has left her job, saying she felt she could no longer force companies to comply with the government’s ethics laws when members of the administration she works for have conducted themselves in a manner that she claims would not be not tolerated.

Hui Chen had served in the department’s compliance counsel office until she resigned in June, breaking her silence in a LinkedIn post last week highlighted by The International Business Times, which points to the Trump administration’s behavior as the reason for her job change.

“To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic,” Chen wrote.

The former federal prosecutor pointed to the multiple lawsuits filed against President Trump questioning the legality of his ties to his family business empire.

Kelly Weill reports that, concerning one of  Trump’s lawyers, Jay Sekulow’s Son Made Close to $1 Million From Family Charity:

Poor Christians opened their wallets to a religious nonprofit run by Donald Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow. In turn, Sekulow hired one of his own teenage sons—straight out of a Nickelodeon internship—and named him a “director” of the charity, where the son subsequently earned nearly a million dollars.

Authorities in New York and North Carolina are investigating Sekulow’s charity, Christian Advocates Serving Evangelism, following reports that the nonprofit doled out millions to Sekulow and his immediate family. On Tuesday, The Guardian revealed that the so-called charity led an aggressive telemarketing campaign, asking impoverished Christians to “sacrifice” their money, or warning them that “Islamic extremists are headed in your direction, and you are most likely the main target.”

Over $886,000 of those donations from CASE and its related organizations was paid out to Logan Sekulow, Jay’s son, who was first named a CASE “director” when he was just 18.

The Sekulow family has full control of CASE, which raked in $229 million in donations from 2011 to 2015 alone, The Washington Post reported. CASE solicited donations through an aggressive phone campaign. A script for CASE telemarketers, obtained by The Guardian, instructed callers to pressure the poor for money. “Could you possibly make a small sacrificial gift of even $20 within the next three weeks?” the script instructed telemarketers to ask retirees, the unemployed, and other people who said they were too poor to give. The donations would go toward preserving “our traditional Christian values,” the script said.

Morgan Brinlee writes that Trump’s Pick To Lead A Civil Rights Office Is A Lawyer Who Fought Against Civil Rights:

President Donald Trump recently nominated Eric Dreiband to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Yet despite Dreiband having once served as general counsel of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), various civil rights groups have voiced concerns over his private-sector work. According to multiple civil rights advocates, his history of defending businesses against discrimination lawsuits stands in direct opposition to the work of the Civil Rights Division….

According to The Washington Post, Dreiband argued for Abercrombie that the woman had not informed the company that her headscarf was an expression of her religious belief. The court ruled 8-1 in favor of Drieband’s former employer, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which had sued on behalf of the Muslim teen.

As for Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Schwirtz, William K. Rashbaum, and Danny Hakim report that Trump Foot Soldier Sidelined Under Glare of Russia Inquiry:

“If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump’s benefit,” Mr. Cohen once said during an interview with ABC News. “If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck, and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.”

Since Mr. Trump became president, his need for loyal foot soldiers like Mr. Cohen has never been greater. But instead of helping his longtime employer navigate F.B.I. and congressional investigations into whether his campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, Mr. Cohen now appears to be outside the Trump inner circle, a man on the defensive.

The House Intelligence Committee has summoned him for questioning in its inquiry. (Mr. Cohen’s lawyer in Washington said his client was cooperating.) He is under scrutiny by the F.B.I., along with other Trump associates, in the Russia investigation. An unverified dossier prepared by a retired British spy and published this year said that Mr. Cohen had met overseas with Kremlin officials and other Russian operatives, which he has denied. (He once posted on Twitter, “The #RussianDossier is WRONG!”)

Macy’s will set off 60,000 fireworks this 4th of July — here’s how they set it all up: