Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 03m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred seventy-ninth day.
On this day in 1945, American aircraft destroy the Japanese battleship Yamato, the largest battleship ever constructed:
During 1944, the balance of naval power in the Pacific decisively turned against Japan, and by early 1945, its fleet was much depleted and badly hobbled by critical fuel shortages in the home islands. In a desperate attempt to slow the Allied advance, Yamato was dispatched on a one-way mission to Okinawa in April 1945, with orders to beach herself and fight until destroyed protecting the island. The task force was spotted south of Kyushu by US submarines and aircraft, and on 7 April 1945 she was sunk by American carrier-based bombers and torpedo bombers with the loss of most of her crew.
Recommended for reading in full:
Roger Lowenstein writes How Trump would make the Fed a partisan tool:
Like Nixon, Trump is unhappy with the Fed for raising rates. He has tried to browbeat the Federal Reserve Board into submission through Twitter attacks on the Fed and on Powell, personally.
It’s hard to imagine that, if approved, Moore will be a voice for independence. Moore has pandered to the president by repeating Trump’s criticisms of the Fed. He has groveled to Trump by suggesting he deserves the Nobel Prize. With Arthur Laffer, he has written a fawning book, “Trumponomics.” Moore is also good friends with Larry Kudlow, Trump’s economic adviser.
Moore thus bids to become a new of kind of board member — a presidential lackey. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who had Kudlow’s job in the Bush administration, said, in reviewing “Trumponomics,” that it was written in the voice “of the rah-rah partisan.” Were Trump to fill the board with partisans, the Fed’s prestige would collapse, and so would its ability to implement policy.
Heather Long reports Trump’s Fed nominee Stephen Moore was found in contempt of court for failing to pay ex-wife more than $333,000:
Stephen Moore, President Trump’s planned nominee for the Federal Reserve Board, was found in contempt of court in 2013 for failing to pay his ex-wife more than $330,000 in alimony and child support, court documents show.
A court in Fairfax County, Va., ordered Stephen Moore to sell his home in order to pay his ex-wife, Allison Moore, the money he legally owed her but had failed to pay for months. Stephen Moore ended up paying $217,000, although only after the court sent several police officers, two real estate agents and a locksmith to his home to change the locks and prepare the property for sale, records show.
(Moore: unfit professionally and personally.)