Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 14h 09m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred seventieth day.
On this day in 1956, the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.
Recommended for reading in full —
John J. Pitney writes Donald Trump, Un-American (‘Again and again, the president has rejected America’s founding principles’):
For all his “America First” sloganeering, the term that applies best to Donald J. Trump is “Un-American.” He has repudiated the oath of office and the documents at the core of our national identity: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Consider how he describes presidential authority. At a recent press briefing, he suggested that he could order states to reopen businesses. “The federal government has absolute power … I have the absolute right to do if I want to.” He has often made similar claims, including his assertion that he has an “absolute right” to seek foreign investigations of American political figures–an offense that triggered the first article of his impeachment.
Absolute power was precisely what the Founders sought to avoid. The word “absolute” appears three times in the Declaration, always to proclaim what the patriots were fighting against: “absolute Despotism,” “absolute Tyranny,” and “absolute rule.”
Trump’s threat to adjourn Congress calls to mind the Declaration’s charge that George III had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
To prevent anyone from gaining absolute power, the Constitution included elaborate checks on the government and provided that all officials would be accountable for their actions. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a British monarch “is the absolute master of his own conduct in the exercise of his office,” whereas in a republic, “every magistrate ought to be personally responsible for his behavior in office.”
Margaret Sullivan writes Trump has played the media like a puppet. We’re getting better — but history will not judge us kindly:
Even if you get past the objectionable notions of “winning” and “losing,” I very much doubt that history will judge mainstream journalism to have done a terrific job covering this president — including in this difficult moment.
On the contrary, the coverage, overall, has been deeply flawed.
Those flaws were on full display over the past few days, just as they have been every day since a real estate mogul/reality TV star grandly descended a goldtone escalator into the marble atrium of Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential campaign.
For nearly five years, the story has been Trump. And, in all that time, the press is still — mostly — covering him on the terms he dictates.<
We remain mesmerized, providing far too much attention to the daily circus he provides.
We normalize far too much, offering deference to the office he occupies and a benefit of the doubt that is a vestige of the dignified norms of presidencies past.