Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon rain with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 02m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred third day.
The Whitewater School Board will meet for a bargaining session beginning at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1803, American representatives sign the Louisiana Purchase Treaty: “The Louisiana Territory was vast, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico in the south to Rupert’s Land in the north, and from the Mississippi River in the east to the Rocky Mountains in the west. Acquiring the territory would double the size of the United States, at a sum of less than 3 cents per acre.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Robert Reich contends In fighting all oversight, Trump has made his most dictatorial move:
“We’re fighting all the subpoenas,” says the person who is supposed to be chief executive of the United States government.
In other words, there is to be no congressional oversight of this administration: no questioning officials who played a role in putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census. No questioning a former White House counsel about the Mueller report.
No questioning a Trump adviser about immigration policy. No questioning a former White House security director about issuances of security clearances.
No presidential tax returns to the ways and means committee, even though a 1920s law specifically authorizes the committee to get them.
Such a blanket edict fits a dictator of a banana republic, not the president of a constitutional republic founded on separation of powers.
If Congress cannot question the people who are making policy, or obtain critical documents, Congress cannot function as a coequal branch of government.
If Congress cannot get information about the executive branch, there is no longer any separation of powers, as sanctified in the US constitution.
There is only one power – the power of the president to rule as he wishes.
David Graham contends Charlottesville Was a Turning Point:
The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned.
That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers chanted “Jews will not replace us” and employed other anti-Semitic slogans. There were multiple violent clashes, and one woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when James Alex Fields Jr., one of the marchers, drove his car into a crowd. And President Donald Trump infamously equivocated about the incident. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and then vacillated over the course of several days, declining to mount a sincere and forceful condemnation of the march.
By any objective standard, the incident was one of the lowest points of an administration defined by its nadirs, and the immediate reaction showed that public opinion concurred. Americans condemned Trump’s response, and his approval hit a record low.