Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 05m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred twenty-eighth day.
Whitewater’s University Technology Park Board meets at 8 AM.
On this day in 1901, Morris Pratt incorporates his institute for spiritualism (Pratt had built the institute in Whitewater thirteen years earlier, in 1888).
Recommended for reading in full:
David Corn writes William Barr’s War on Reality, Truth, and the Law:
This is how it works. The big lie. The endless spin. The outright denial of facts. Again and again and again. The complete destruction and devaluation of truth for political gain. Overwhelm reality with fiction, concoctions, and false narratives. Embrace deceit and duplicity.
For rogues, scoundrels, tyrants, princes and princesses of corruption—and their henchmen—the truth is a threat. It must be crushed. It must be vanquished. Abuse of power cannot exist alongside accountability. Malefactors cannot survive within an atmosphere of truth. It is a suffocating poison for them. So they must deceive, and they must dissemble. That is what the United States’ top law enforcement officer demonstrated this week.
Following the release of the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the origins and management of the Trump-Russia investigation, Attorney General William Barr went into full Oceania war-is-peace mode to erase truth in order to protect and soothe his dear leader, Donald Trump. Moments after the report appeared—it concludes the FBI had been right to open an investigation of interactions between Trump associates and Russia in 2016, as Moscow was attacking the US election to help Trump win the White House—Barr challenged the findings. He declared that he knew better than the IG and that the FBI had launched the probe “on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.” Barr noted that his own hand-picked federal prosecutor, John Durham, would be conducting a separate review and have the final word. And the next day, Barr continued his brazen campaign of disinformation. In an interview with NBC News, he called the FBI investigation “completely baseless.” Barr depicted the probe as a “danger” to civil liberties and the American political system. He was twisting up into down.
Jared Bernstein writes Trump’s China Trade War Is Failing. Democrats Should Campaign Against It:
The trade deficit has remained essentially constant as a share of GDP at minus 3 percent over Trump’s presidency.
The trade war is slowing overall growth and clearly hurting the workers and communities it should be helping, particularly in manufacturing, where both real production and the pace of job gains are down this year (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan have lost manufacturing jobs in recent months). For an example of the futility of Trump’s approach, consider that Alcoa, an American aluminum manufacturer, sought an exemption from tariffs designed to protect it because it imports aluminum from Canada.