Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Vince Lombardi is born this day in 1913. On this day in 1935, Gene Wilder is born in Milwaukee.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jenna Johnson observes that Trump’s son seems to confirm Comey’s account of the president’s comments on the Flynn investigation:

…Donald Trump Jr. — the president’s eldest son — seemed to confirm Comey’s version of events in a Saturday interview on Fox News as he tried to emphasize the fact that his father did not directly order Comey to stop investigating Flynn.

“When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it, there’s no, ‘Hey, I’m hoping,'” Trump said.

Chris Buckley reports on China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt:

The Chishi Bridge is one of hundreds of dazzling bridges erected across the country in recent years. Chinese officials celebrate them as proof that they can roll out infrastructure bigger, better and higher than any other country can. China now boasts the world’s highest bridge, the longest bridge, the highest rail trestle and a host of other superlatives, often besting its own efforts….

But as the bridges and the expressways they span keep rising, critics say construction has become an end unto itself. Fueled by government-backed loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who profit from them, many of the projects are piling up debt and breeding corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits.

For all its splendor, the Chishi Bridge, in Hunan Province, exemplifies the seamy underside of China’s infrastructure boom. Its cost, $300 million, was more than 50 percent over the budget. The project struggled with delays and a serious construction accident and was tarnished by government corruption. Since it opened in October, the bridge and the expressway it serves have been underused and buried in debt.

Jeremy Peters tells of A Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story:

Jack Posobiec had his Twitter sights set on James B. Comey.

A pro-Trump activist notorious for his amateur sleuthing into red herrings like the “Pizzagate” hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a Democratic aide, Mr. Posobiec wrote on May 17 that Mr. Comey, the recently ousted F.B.I. director, had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”

….It mattered little that Mr. Comey had said no such thing. The tweet quickly ricocheted through the ecosystem of fake news and disinformation on the far right, where Trump partisans like Mr. Posobiec have intensified their efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of expanding investigations into Trump associates’ ties to Russia.

But as the journey of that one tweet shows, misinformed, distorted and false stories are gaining traction far beyond the fringes of the internet. Just 14 words from Mr. Posobiec’s Twitter account would spread far enough to provide grist for a prime-time Fox News commentary and a Rush Limbaugh monologue that reached millions of listeners, forging an alternative first draft of history in corners of the conservative media where President Trump’s troubles are often explained away as fabrications by his journalist enemies.

Ana Swanson and Max Ehrenfreund report that Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas:

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

In Atlanta, during a Braves game, a contestant gets the chance to race against a competitor called the Freeze (who’s very fast). Here’s what happens when the contestant underestimates the contest, and the mighty Freeze:

this is the funniest thing that will happen at a sporting event this year pic.twitter.com/f6Yq9lErin

— Joon Lee (@iamjoonlee) June 10, 2017

Via @iamjoonlee, Staff Writer, Bleacher Report & B/R Mag.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 14s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 99% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1978, Affirmed wins the Belmont Stakes, and becomes a Triple Crown winner. He would remain the last Triple Crown winner for 37 years, until 2015. On this day in 1837, workmen arrive to begin building what would be Wisconsin’s first capitol building.

Recommended for reading in full —

David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr. recount in Trump: A True Story how the “mogul, in a 2007 deposition, had to face up to a series of falsehoods and exaggerations. And he did. Sort of”:

It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.

Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.

For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.

The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.

Thirty times, they caught him.

Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.

Yoni Applebaum contends that Trump’s Ignorance Won’t Save Him:

(I’m sure Trump is ignorant of many things, but I doubt that when Trump cleared the room to talk to Comey he was ignorant of what he was about to attempt. In any event, Applebaum’s point holds: ignorance would not be exculpatory. Ironic, though, that so many of Trump’s hardcore supporters would insist that ignorance should not be an excuse when considering the conduct of minorities, but insist upon it when considering the conduct of the vulgar white billionaire they support.)

Alana Petroff reports that Murdoch’s Fox-Sky deal at greater risk after U.K. election shock:

Labour, which has opposed the massive media takeover, gained seats in parliament following Thursday’s election. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party saw its majority wiped out. May is now trying to form a minority government.

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom is currently reviewing whether or not to approve Fox’s purchase of Sky (SKYAY), in which it already holds a 39% stake. It is due to complete its review by June 20.

“Had the Conservatives won a large majority, we think it would have been more straightforward to approve the deal relatively quickly,” said Polo Tang, head of European telecom research at UBS. “We still see scope for the deal to be approved but the risks around an extended review have increased,” he added.

Rachel Walker explains How to plan the perfect road trip:

In 2006, my boyfriend and I drove from Colorado to Moab, Utah, for a week of desert exploration. For 300 miles, we had no problems. Then the gas light came on, 40 miles from Moab and at least an hour after we had passed the last service station. Did we panic? No. The impending calamity only fed our sense of ad­ven­ture. We drove giddily on, eventually coasting into a gas station on fumes just as the engine cut out.

Nowadays, I can’t be so cavalier. With two school-age kids, road trips require slightly more vigilance. Since my boys were born, my husband (the boyfriend from the Moab trip) and I have canvassed the country with them strapped into a succession of car seats. We drive to save money and to show them our world — and because we believe in the power of “windshield time,” the moments of intimate connection that intersperse the monotony of car travel.

Here’s what to consider before pulling out of the driveway….[list follows]

Great Big Story tells of Cultivating Japan’s Rare White Strawberry:

Cultivating Japan’s Rare White Strawberry from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

In Japan, there’s a specialty fruit craze sweeping the nation, from square watermelons to grapes the size of Ping-Pong balls. Still, the crown jewel of the luxury fruit basket is the white strawberry, bred to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot sweeter than its classic red counterpart. We took a tour of Yasuhito Teshima’s farm in Karatsu, Japan, to find out why so many people are spending a pretty penny for a taste of these famous white berries.

Good morning.

The work week ends for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 34s of daytime. The moon is full, with 100% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch, representing the U.S. Army, responds to one of the many baseless charges from Sen. Joe McCarthy, as described at the U.S. Senate website:

At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.

(When Welch mentions Mr. Cohn in the clip, he’s referring to Roy Cohn, chief counsel to McCarthy and later lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump.)

For those who would like a “bare-bones, just-the-facts version of Comey’s testimony today. It’s the 75-minute, distilled version of what we’ve all been waiting to hear,” Matthew Kahn of Lawfare has what you’re wanting in The Lawfare Podcast, Special Edition: Comey Versus the Senate Intelligence Committee with No Bull:

(For those who’d like to hear Comey’s full public testimony, along with transcript and statement for the record, see James Comey Testimony, U.S. Senate, 6.8.17.)

About that testimony, Benjamin Wittes (the editor-in-chief of Lawfare) considers Trump, in On the “Nature of the Person”: Initial Thoughts on James Comey’s Testimony:

It is a clarifying moment whenever an honorable person speaks plainly in public about a person he or she evidently regards as dishonorable on a matter of public moment. And today, a nation not normally riveted by congressional hearings got a chance to see what I was talking about. In three hours of testimony characterized by well-controlled but palpable anger, Comey attacked what he described as “lies” about the FBI and “defam[ation]” about himself; he accused the President of the United States of implicitly directing him to drop a major criminal investigation of a former senior official; he described a pattern of disrespect for the independence of the law enforcement function of the FBI; he alleged that the President made repeated misstatements of fact in his public accounts of their interactions; and he stated flatly that he believed that the President had fired him because of something related to the Russia investigation—an investigation that directly involves the President’s business, his campaign, his subordinates in the White House, and his family.

Throughout it all, the sense that he had spent four months dealing with people who were not honorable was, once again, written on every line of his face and evident in the tone he took when describing the President.

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman examine 5 Clues James Comey Just Left Behind:

Throughout the three-hour hearing, Comey dropped several breadcrumbs for legislators, FBI investigators, reporters, concerned citizens, and Tweetstormers to follow. Here are five of these enticing potential clues ….[list follows]

David Frum enumerates the The Five Lines of Defense Against Comey—and Why They Failed:

Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history.

I’ve my doubts about a Roomba for your garden, but readers may be more optimistic about it than I am:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 15m 49s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1982, in an address to the British Parliament, Reagan correctly predicted that the “march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is born this day in 1867.

Recommended for reading in full —

John Diedrich reports that a Jury awards $6.7M to inmate raped by guard in Milwaukee County Jail, shackled during childbirth:

A federal jury Wednesday awarded $6.7 million to a woman who was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was being held in the Milwaukee County Jail four years ago.

The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.

The jury also found there was “no legitimate government purpose” to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.

Kleinhaus said her client was pleased with the verdicts. The plaintiff is not being named because she was a victim of a sexual assault.

“She was raped repeatedly at the age of 19. She sought justice and she is glad the system delivered that justice,” Kleinhaus said. “She hopes to prevent other women from being sexually assaulted in the Milwaukee County Jail.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell, describes Trump succinctly as an organized crime godfather:

Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump admin. is “like a mafia family… That’s the way I view Pres. Trump now – as a godfather” https://t.co/xy52mbxGro

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 8, 2017

Paul Farhi reports that Breitbart News seems to be cleaning house after readers and advertisers drift away:

The clarion of the far right seems to be having second thoughts about how far right it wants to go.

Faced with an advertiser boycott and plummeting readership, Breitbart News has lately been trimming back some of its more extreme elements in what may be a bid for more mainstream respectability.

The site’s visitor traffic has fallen 53 percent since November, from 22.96 million unique individuals to 10.76 million last month, according to ComScore, which tracks Web trends. Other news sites have seen a falloff since the election, too — The Washington Post and the New York Times are off 24 and 26 percent during this period, respectively — but Breitbart’s losses are at roughly twice the mainstream rate.

At the same time, an advertiser blacklist of Breitbart organized by an anonymous online group called Sleeping Giants appears to be biting hard. Only 26 companies had ads on Breitbart last month, down from 242 in March, according to the marketing-news site Digiday. It said the remaining advertisers were primarily smaller direct-response companies, although Amazon.com remains one of its sponsors, despite pressure from its employees to cut ties to the site (Amazon’s chief executive is Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Post).

David Corn observes that Comey Forces Trump Defenders Into Extreme and Absurd Spin:

The release of former FBI director Jim Comey’s prepared text for his upcoming congressional testimony has created a moment of crisis for Republicans and conservatives. And many are failing the challenge. Their reactions are revealing a profound dishonesty that far exceeds the norms of usual political spin, and are demonstrating that the Trumpified quarters of the GOP and the conservative movement are intellectually bankrupt and devoid of principle. These partisans now stand naked, and it sure ain’t pretty. It’s also a bad sign for the health of our constitutional democracy….

(I’d assume that GOP politicians and core Trump supporters will hold out long into the future; they’ll not yield. This ends when Trump, himself, is politically and legally ruined, so that there’s nothing left to support. See, Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)

Tech Insider offers an Animated timeline that shows how Silicon Valley became a $2.8 trillion neighborhood:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee puts forth a motion to the Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain:

Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

On this day in 1926, Milwaukee first has airmail service: “Milwaukee’s first airmail service was flown from the Milwaukee County Airport by the Charles Dickinson Line, which operated from Chicago to St. Paul via Milwaukee and LaCrosse.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ben Guarino reports that Tyrannosaurus rex had scaly skin and wasn’t covered in feathers, a new study says:

Tyrannosaurus rex was an odd animal, a predator with teeth the size of bananas, a massive head and tiny arms. Given that many dinosaurs had feathers, could T. rex have been even weirder — a giant carnivore with a downy coat?

A new study in the journal Biology Letters crushes any tyrant chicken dreams: T. rex was covered in scales. The new research “shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin,” study author Phil R. Bell, a paleontologist at Australia’s University of New England, said in an email to The Washington Post.

When T. rex first appeared in pop culture, as in 1918 film “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain,” the dinosaur had wrinkled skin and stood upright, dragging its tail. Scientists began dismantling this reptilian misconception in the late 1960s, and in 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” a fairly accurate, horizontal T. rex menaced the silver screen.

Neil MacFarquahr and Andrew Rossback describe How Russian Propaganda Spread From a Parody Website to Fox News:

Born in the shadowy reaches of the internet, most fake news stories prove impossible to trace to their origin. But researchers at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, excavated the root of one such fake story, involving an incident in the Black Sea in which a Russian warplane repeatedly buzzed a United States Navy destroyer, the Donald Cook.

Like much fake news, the story was based on a kernel of truth. The brief, tense confrontation happened on April 12, 2014, and the Pentagon issued a statement. Then in April, three years later, the story resurfaced, completely twisted, on one of Russia’s main state-run TV news programs.

The new version gloated that the warplane had deployed an electronic weapon to disable all operating systems aboard the Cook. That was false, but it soon spread, showing that even with all the global attention on combating fake news, it could still circulate with alarming speed and ease….

FoxNews.com soon picked up The Sun’s version of the story. Refet Kaplan, the managing editor of FoxNews.com, said the story was considered “not as a serious report on Russia’s military capability, but as another example of Russian media hyperbole.” That was not set out in the headline or the article, other than an oblique reference to the original as “propaganda.”

After The New York Times asked about the article, it was deleted from the FoxNews.com website.

Spencer Ackerman reports that Michael Flynn Had a Plan to Work With Russia’s Military. It Wasn’t Exactly Legal:

Donald Trump’s first national security adviser pushed so hard for the Pentagon to cooperate with the Russian military that his initiative would likely have broken the law if it had ever been enacted.

Four current and former Pentagon officials told The Daily Beast that during Michael Flynn’s brief White House tenure, the retired general advocated for the expansion of a relatively narrow military communications channel—one meant to keep U.S. and Russian pilots safe from one another—to see if the two nations could jointly fight the so-called Islamic State.

The initiative never went anywhere, in part because of opposition from the Pentagon and from U.S. Central Command; a legal prohibition set by Congress; and, ultimately, Flynn’s firing.

Inside the Pentagon, “there was a lot of fear that we’d move to outright cooperation [with Russia] through this channel,” according to a former senior defense official.

Michael Harriot describes How Police Brutality Keeps America Poor and Uneducated:

Cops don’t pay for police brutality—you do.

There is often a large public outcry when law-enforcement officers don’t face charges or are acquitted after killing unarmed citizens. Likewise, media outlets hop on the outrage bandwagon and trumpet the statistics about brutality, illegal searches and police misconduct. But even when there are no criminal charges or prosecution, juries often find police departments liable in civil cases, resulting in large settlements to victims and their families.

When this happens, cities, counties and states don’t go to the offending police departments and pass the hat until officers come up with the compensation money. Oftentimes, the officer keeps his or her job, the department doesn’t lose funding, and the taxpayers end up paying the salary of a cop who killed an innocent victim and millions in court settlements. in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported that the 10 largest police departments spent over $1 billion on police brutality cases.

Take Chicago, for instance. Between 2004 and March 2016, the city paid over $662 million in legal fees, settlements and court costs for police misconduct, according to CBS News. After spending $147 million settling lawsuits in 2016, Los Angeles needs to borrow money to cover this year’s projected legal costs. The New York City Police Department paid $482 million in false arrest and civil rights settlements between 2009 and 2014—and that doesn’t include the $228 million it paid in 2016 alone. That’s right: New York City has paid almost three-quarters of a billion dollars because of police misconduct in less than 10 years….

 Colorado has (at least) one musical bear:

Black bear invades apartment, tickles the ivories in Colorado surveillance video. Read more: https://t.co/1bXyDRCBlX pic.twitter.com/9rBqQWJNMZ

— AP West Region (@APWestRegion) June 7, 2017

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 14m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred tenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1944, Allied forces storm the beaches of Normandy, France, in the D-Day liberation of Europe.

Ben Collins reports that Pro-Trump Canadians Throw ‘Million Deplorable March.’ Right-Wing Media Counts 5,000. Cops Say Hundreds:

Although it was dubbed the “Million Canadian Deplorables March,” both The Daily Caller and Breitbart claimed about 5,000 people showed up in Ottawa to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and to show favor for Donald Trump, whom protest organizer Mike Waine called a “smart man.”

[Ottawa Police Constable Marc] Soucy said that, while the Ottawa Police doesn’t officially provide crowd estimates, there were not 5,000 people at the rally’s “gathering point” in Ottawa’s Confederation Park.

“There were less than 100 [at the park],” he said.

A spokesperson for the Parliamentary Protection Services estimated to Canada’s iPolicy, who first reported on the discrepancy, that 300 to 400 people in total went to the rally in at the Canadian capital.

Kimberly Dozier reports that the White House Looked at Dropping Russia Sanctions—Even After Firing Michael Flynn:

The White House explored unilaterally easing sanctions on Russia’s oil industry as recently as late March, arguing that decreased Russian oil production could harm the American economy, according to former U.S. officials.

State Department officials argued successfully that easing those sanctions would actually hurt the U.S. energy sector, according to those former officials and email exchanges reviewed by The Daily Beast.

In one email exchange, a State Department official feels the need to explain that lowering punitive sanctions on the Russian oil industry would be rewarding Moscow—without getting anything from the Kremlin in return.

“Russia continues to occupy Ukraine including Crimea—conditions that led to the sanctions have not changed,” the official wrote.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee lists Every Russia story Trump said was a hoax by Democrats: A timeline:

There have been twists and turns over the past year in the saga of President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win.

Yet one thing has remained consistent: Trump blames the Democrats, not the Russians.

Trump says the latest reports of ties between his staff and Russians are the Democrats’ attempt to undermine his presidency. But a look at his comments over the past year shows Trump used the same explanation for every new development in stories involving Russia, the election and his staff.

In this timeline, we took a look at all the developments in the Trump-Russia controversy that Trump has blamed on Democrats. We will update the timeline as necessary….[timeline follows]

Charles Pierce asks Why Would Russia Stop at ‘Influence’ When They Could Hack Directly?:

So far, the only evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election has indicated that the hacking and ratfcking was one step removed from the actual balloting. The theft and release of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, and the spreading of invented news and slander over social media platforms, were both aimed at influencing people to vote a certain way. If it could be proven that the Russians actively hacked into the election process itself—which people have been warning for years is a genuine vulnerability—that would pretty much set the world on fire.

Now, though, The Intercept has a report that indicates that the National Security Agency considered this sort of sabotage very seriously in the days before the election.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light. While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

This is authentically terrifying and, at the same time, it seems horribly inevitable. If you could ratfck the election on a second-hand basis, why wouldn’t you try simply to ratfck the results as well?

Today I Found Out recounts The Story Behind the Morton’s Salt Girl:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1947, the Marshall Plan was drafted. On this day in 1883, William Horlick patents the world’s first malted milk.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jacob Carpenter reports that Milwaukee sheriff’s deputies kept an inmate shackled as she gave birth. Jurors will decide if it was legal:

The former inmate’s lawyers say the practice, authorized by Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., violates her constitutional rights and unnecessarily increases the possibility of complications during childbirth.

“The practice of shackling is dangerous and risks injury to both mother and child,” lawyers for the former inmate, who’s listed in court files as Jane Doe, wrote in a legal complaint. They declined further comment last week.

Clarke has responded that the policy protects hospital staff from potentially dangerous inmates lashing out, according to court documents. Clarke said doctors can ask for the removal of shackles if it’s medically necessary, though there’s no policy for deciding whether the doctor’s request should be followed.

….The plaintiff is also suing the Sheriff’s Office and a former deputy, Xavier Thicklen, over allegations that Thicklen sexually assaulted her five times during her incarceration. Thicklen was criminally charged with five counts of sexual assault, but those charges were dropped when Thicklen pleaded no contest to a felony count of misconduct in public office.

Lawrence Summers asks if After 75 years of progress, was last week a hinge in history?:

Even for conservative statesmen such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger, the idea of a community of nations has been a commonplace. Come now H.R McMaster, national security adviser, and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, who have been held out as the president’s most rational, globally minded advisers. They have taken to the Wall Street Journal to proclaim that “the world is not a global community” and advanced a theory of international relations not unlike the one that animated the British and French at Versailles at the end of World War I. On this view, the objective of international negotiation is not to establish a stable, peaceful system or to seek cooperation or to advance universal values through compromise, they wrote, but to strike better deals in “an arena where nations, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses compete for advantage.”

Stephen Hendrix writes of Blood in the water: Four dead, a coast terrified and the birth of modern shark mania:

The shark mania that grips the country each summer began July 1, 1916, when a young stockbroker from Philadelphia headed into the surf at Beach Haven, N.J. Before then, there wasn’t much fear about attacks from the deep among the innocents at the Jersey Shore.

That all changed when Charles Vansant, a 25-year-old taking the first swim of  his summer vacation, struck out into the mild surf. What unfolded over the next dozen days would leave five swimmers dead or maimed and the East Coast terrified, sparking a presidential intervention and “a war on sharks” that continues to this day.

“It was the Titanic of shark attacks,” said Richard Fernicola, a New Jersey physician and author of “Twelve Days of Terror,” an account of what became known as the Matawan Man-Eater.

Jonathan Blitzer explains Why Police Chiefs Oppose Texas’s  New Anti-Immigrant Law:

Last month, Greg Abbott, the Republican Governor of Texas, signed into law an anti-immigrant measure allowing local police officers to ask for the citizenship status of anyone they detain. This sort of provision—often called a “show me your papers” law—has been attempted at the state level before, most notoriously in Arizona, which passed a measure in 2010 that was subsequently blocked in federal court. In response to the new law, civil-rights groups and several Texas city governments have filed lawsuits against the measure. Earlier this week, thousands of demonstrators descended on the state capitol, in Austin, to protest on the last day of the legislative session, prompting one overwhelmed Republican representative to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), presumably so that agents could arrest and deport members of the opposition while they stood in a gallery of the statehouse.

Police chiefs have been speaking out against the bill since it was introduced in the State Senate, last fall. “It’s kind of amazing that, during the initial hearing, the senators had all these chiefs and sheriffs from across Texas speaking against the bill—and they totally ignored the people in law enforcement,” the El Paso County sheriff, Richard Wiles, told me this week. He said that his staff is overworked as it is. “My officers are too busy to waste their time doing another agency’s work,” he said. “If there is an officer who wants to do this, we can’t stop him under the new law. The only area where one of my officers could now be allowed to go out there and ignore his own bosses is on immigration. It’s crazy.”

I know that not LeBron James isn’t everyone’s favorite player, so to speak, but I think he’s been good for the game (and that going back to Cleveland was the best decision of his career). Here, he ably answers a reporter’s trite question about defending home court:

LeBron: I mean, are you a smart guy?
Reporter: I think so.
LeBron: You think so, right? So we don’t defend homecourt, what happens?
Reporter: Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m saying.
LeBron: I’m asking you.
Reporter: Well yeah, then you guys are looking at getting swept.
LeBron: All right. So, that answered your question.