Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 11h 32m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred fourteenth day.
On this day in 1967, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to the United States.
Recommended for reading in full —
Casey Michel reports It Looks Like a News App in the Apple Store. It’s Really Russian Propaganda:
Over the past few years, Russian-funded propagandists have tried a number of ways to reach American audiences without revealing their links to the Kremlin, from claiming to be “grassroots” start-ups to cycling their funding through cut-outs that obscure their Russian origins.
Now, Russian propagandists have a new trick: Pushing a “news” app that poses as a “free streaming service,” but which is linked directly to the Russian propaganda outlet RT. Of course, the app doesn’t bother to disclose this.
Dubbed “Portable.TV,” the new app went live a few months ago, according to its Apple Store history. Billing itself as a “one-of-a-kind free streaming service & TV library of news programs, talk shows, business updates, professional sports highlights and comedy,” the app claims to allow users to “stay informed & up to date” via Portable.TV’s “uniquely global perspective [that] foregrounds marginalized or dissident viewpoints to give you a clearer picture of the world.” As the app says, “Truth shouldn’t have limits: You can take Portable.TV wherever you go.”
One problem, though: The only shows available on Portable.TV are produced by RT America, including shows like Redacted Tonight with self-proclaimed comedian Lee Camp and The World According to Jesse with former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura.
Garrett Epps writes Trump Is at War With the Whole Idea of an Independent Judiciary:
How will history view Trump’s four most important judicial enablers—Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh? If the Court’s conservatives really do care about their historical legacy, they should take heed that Trump has pushed them and the Court onto very dangerous ground, and shows no sign that he will stop pushing.
As I’ve noted before, the conservative majority—those four justices plus Chief Justice John Roberts—has taken on the role of Trump’s enforcer, ensuring that controversial priorities such as the border wall and the immigration “public charge” rule take effect even before they can be fully considered by lower courts. In a dissent from the decision granting a stay in the immigration case last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant [the government] over all others.”
Will anything cause the conservatives to rethink? Will they, for example, become less eager to salivate at the president’s bell if he intensifies his assault on the independence of the courts?
Let’s hope so—because in recent weeks he has done exactly that, opening two new fronts in this sordid war. He is at swords’ points with the federal courts generally, with individual judges who have displeased him, with private citizens who as jurors defy his preferences, and now with the Supreme Court. If the nation were not numb from the shocks of the past three years, this remarkable vendetta would be prompting an uproar.