Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 44m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred thirty-first day.
The Whitewater Unified School Board meets at 6 PM and Whitewater’s Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1885, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States.
Recommended for reading in full:
Conor Friedersdorf writes of The Snowflake in Chief:
To support President Trump is to be complicit in the rule of a thin-skinned authoritarian who denigrates the free-speech rights of people who criticize him.
The latest illustration: his weekend outburst against Saturday Night Live, a sketch-comedy show that has regularly poked fun at every American president for 40 years. The most powerful snowflake in America was triggered by Alec Baldwin. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”
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Trump’s SNL tweets are of a piece with a larger, disturbing pattern of behavior in which he violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by calling for First Amendment freedoms to be abridged by bureaucrats and legislators; and by calling the press a public enemy and a target of his “drain the swamp” agenda.
Stephanie Mencimer reports Trump Judicial Nominees Are Refusing to Endorse Brown v. Board of Education (“In normal times, it would be unthinkable. Under Trump, it’s become a trend”)”
There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. But this month, when Neomi Rao appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she refused to say whether she thought the case had been correctly decided.
Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.” Blumenthal asked her for a yes or no, but Rao would say only that Brown is “an incredibly important decision of the Supreme Court”—a dodge she twice repeated when pressed further.
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Rao is one of at least 10 Trump nominees to the federal courts in the past year who have refused to offer an opinion on Brown. Several of those nominees have been confirmed or approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and set for a full Senate vote.
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Both of former President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and archconservative Justice Samuel Alito, had no trouble answering the question in the affirmative during their confirmation hearings, nor did Justice Elena Kagan when she was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama.