Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 53m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s University Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM, the Parks and Rec Board at 5:30 PM, and the Fire Department has a business meeting in closed session at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1898, Congress declares that a state of war between the U.S. and Spain had de facto existed since April 21, the day the blockade of Cuba had begun.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Glenn Thrush reports Mulvaney, Watchdog Bureau’s Leader, Advises Bankers on Ways to Curtail Agency:
WASHINGTON — Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
➤ Greg Sergeant writes Trump’s historic unpopularity is a big, important story:
What’s more, as Gallup reminds us today, if you look at Trump’s approval ratings, as opposed to the reelect numbers, those have steadily been worse than those of his recent predecessors — by sizable margins, in fact. So not only is Trump on track to face large midterm losses — he is also substantially less popular than those predecessors.
…
Because Trump has blown through so many norms, the question of whether the American public is rejecting him is a momentous one. Trump has embraced overt racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism, in the form of regular racial provocations, assaults on our institutions and the rule of law, and an unprecedented level of self-dealing that basically constitutes a big middle finger to the country. He has married all this to orthodox GOP economic priorities — indeed, as Brian Beutler says, the three pillars of Trump-era conservatism are self-enriching plutocracy, racism and authoritarianism.
If that is so, then it is notable that majorities are rejecting all of those things. Obamacare repeal crashed and burned. The tax law passed, but it remains deeply unpopular. Majorities disapproved of Trump’s response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Majorities sided with the “dreamers” against Trump and majorities reject Trump’s border wall and many of his demagogic arguments about immigration (though in fairness the polling is mixed on the thinly veiled Muslim ban). Big majorities still want Trump to release his tax returns. Large majorities support special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of both potential collusion with Russia, dismissing Trump’s claims of a “witch hunt,” and of Trump’s finances. The public has sided with the investigation and the rule of law, and against Trump.
(Sergeant accurately sees that for those in resistance and opposition “we face a long, hard slog” – there’s much difficult work to be done, and on the other side of Trumpism’s defeat is likely to come – will need to come – a Third Reconstruction.
One of the characteristics of Trumpists is their cult-like reliance on a few, mediocre but insistent publications, to sustain their false belief that Trump is doing well, is popular, is a great leader, etc.)
➤ Steve Eder and Hiroko Tabuchi report Scott Pruitt Before the E.P.A.: Fancy Homes, a Shell Company and Friends With Money:
OKLAHOMA CITY — Early in Scott Pruitt’s political career, as a state senator from Tulsa, he attended a gathering at the Oklahoma City home of an influential telecommunications lobbyist who was nearing retirement and about to move away.
The lobbyist said that after the 2003 gathering, Mr. Pruitt — who had a modest legal practice and a state salary of $38,400 — reached out to her. He wanted to buy her showplace home as a second residence for when he was in the state capital.
“For those ego-minded politicians, it would be pretty cool to have this house close to the capitol,” said the lobbyist, Marsha Lindsey. “It was stunning.”
Soon Mr. Pruitt was staying there, and so was at least one other lawmaker, according to interviews. Mr. Pruitt even bought Ms. Lindsey’s dining room set, art and antique rugs, she said.
A review of real estate and other public records shows that Mr. Pruitt was not the sole owner: The property was held by a shell company registered to a business partner and law school friend, Kenneth Wagner. Mr. Wagner now holds a top political job at the Environmental Protection Agency, where Mr. Pruitt, 49, is the administrator.
(Grifter from the get-go.)
➤ Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes find more Bad News for President Trump
(“The Comey memos are more revealing than they seem”):
One feature of the truth is that it doesn’t change much. A lie is hard to sustain. The details may change in each retelling because the liar is not actually remembering the events, but instead remembering the telling of the events. The truth, by contrast, is sticky. Consistency is not the only hallmark of truth—some people’s memories are better than other people’s memories, to be sure—but there’s a reason that inconsistency tends to discredit a witness.
…
The broader point about the memos is the degree to which they corroborate even minor details of the other accounts Comey has given. The consistency is the most striking when the details are shared between the book and the original memos only and are omitted from Comey’s testimony: Comey would have had access to the testimony while writing the book, so it makes sense that those accounts share details and corroborate one another. Even were he Lyin’ Comey, after all, he’d make sure to get his public story straight between two high-profile written statements. But by his own account, he had no access to the memos—which had by that point been handed over to the FBI—during the drafting of his book. So all the details shared between the memos and the book were carried over from memory. This makes it all the more notable when the memos and book share information down to the word—like when Comey describes Trump as commenting that the FBI director had had “a hell of a year” or declaring his respect for Putin as “the leader of a major country.”
Comey even uses the same image in both his memos and his book to characterize Trump’s conversational style. “It was conversation-as-jigsaw-puzzle, with pieces picked up, then discarded, then returned to,” he writes in his memo recording his January 28, 2017, dinner with Trump. In his book, he describes the president as speaking “like an oral jigsaw puzzle contest, with a shot clock … He would, in rapid-fire sequence, pick up a piece, put it down, pick up an unrelated piece, put it down, return to the original piece, on and on.” (Comey takes this opportunity in his memo to muse about the difficulty of accurately remembering a conversation with a person who speaks this way.)
➤ Amy Nicholson remembers The Paraplegic Possum, the Cross-Eyed Cat, and the Fish That Can’t Swim:
Growing up, Amy Nicholson would never have described her father as “one of those kooky pet people,” even though the family owned dogs, cats, ponies, rabbits, sheep, and chickens. “But they didn’t sleep in the house or go under the blow dryer,” Nicholson told The Atlantic.
Years later, Nicholson’s father remarried, and the couple decided to rescue animals. But not just any animals — a menagerie of variously sick, deformed, or otherwise abnormal creatures, which would become pampered house pets. “When I visited my father over the years,” Nicholson said, “there was always some chicken being nursed back to health, or a cat had been hauled away since my last visit, or some other creature had been eaten.”
Nicholson’s enormously entertaining short film Pickle surveys the quirky animals her father and step-mother accrued, such as obese chickens, a paraplegic possum, a cross-eyed cat, and a body-less fish. The film shows how the couple goes to great lengths to keep their pets comfortable; in many cases, despite their unusual medical conditions, the creatures have lived well beyond their expected lifespans.