Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-one. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 5:31 PM, for 10h 46m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 15.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred ninety-eighth day.
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1868, photographer Edward S. Curtis is born near Whitewater.
Recommended for reading in full —
Eli Stokols and Del Quentin Wilber report Trump grants clemency to 11, including former junk bond king Michael Milken:
President Trump issued a pardon Tuesday to Michael Milken, the disgraced former junk bond king who later became a prominent Los Angeles philanthropist, in a mass clemency to 11 convicted felons that marked a dramatic expansion of the president’s intervention in judicial matters since his Senate impeachment acquittal.
Among those whose sentences were commuted was former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who has served eight years of a 14-year prison term for trying to sell the open U.S. Senate seat that Barack Obama had held before he entered the White House.
Trump also granted clemency to Bernard Kerik, who led the New York Police Department after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and was nominated by President George W. Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security, although his name ultimately was removed from consideration. Kerik was sentenced to four years in prison in 2010 for tax fraud and lying to investigators.
The president made clear he had not ruled out pardoning his longtime friend and informal advisor Roger Stone, who is scheduled to be sentenced in federal court Thursday despite Trump’s demand on Twitter earlier Tuesday that the case should be “thrown out.”
Jeffrey Toobin writes of The Trouble with Donald Trump’s Clemencies and Pardons:
Authoritarianism is usually associated with a punitive spirit—a leader who prosecutes and incarcerates his enemies. But there is another side to this leadership style. Authoritarians also dispense largesse, but they do it by their own whims, rather than pursuant to any system or legal rule. The point of authoritarianism is to concentrate power in the ruler, so the world knows that all actions, good and bad, harsh and generous, come from a single source. That’s the real lesson—a story of creeping authoritarianism—of today’s commutations and pardons by President Trump.
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The pardons were entirely personal in origin, and so the granting of them was exclusively an exercise of Trump’s own power. That was their point. A benevolent leader dispensed favors. The world will not change much because of these actions; of the four, only Blagojevich was still incarcerated. Some of the others may receive a few minor benefits, such as a restored right to purchase guns legally. The only cost is the further degradation of the government, moving our system closer to a cult of personality. In this era of mass incarceration, many people deserve pardons and commutations, but this is not the way to go about it. All Trump has done is to prove that he can reward his friends and his friends’ friends. The chilling corollary is that he knows he can punish his enemies, too.
Philadelphia comic book shop fosters inclusive “geek space”:
Ariell Johnson is known to be the first black female owner of a comic book shop in the East Coast. After studying accounting in college, she decided to channel her entrepreneurial spirit into building Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, an inclusive space for her community in North Philadelphia.