Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 71. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 38m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1973, Skylab, the United States’ first space station, is launched.
Recommended for reading in full —
Craig Gilbert writes Two former congressmen from Wisconsin join group of disaffected Republicans unhappy with Trump Era GOP:
Two former Wisconsin congressmen have joined a national group of Republicans who say they’re dismayed by the GOP’s direction in the Trump era and want to either “re-imagine” their party or create a new one.
The two are Reid Ribble, who represented Wisconsin’s 8th Congressional District from 2011 to 2017, and Tom Petri, who represented the 6th District from 1979 to 2015.
They are among more than 100 disaffected Republicans (and ex-Republicans), many of them former government officials or former members of Congress, who signed an open letter Thursday rejecting populism, “fear-mongering, conspiracism and falsehoods.”
“Our nation’s future should not be dictated by a single person but by principles that bind us together. That’s why we believe in pushing for the Republican Party to rededicate itself to founding ideals — or else hasten the creation of an alternative,” the letter said.
Adam Goldman and Mark Mazzetti report Activists and Ex-Spy Said to Have Plotted to Discredit Trump ‘Enemies’ in Government:
A network of conservative activists, aided by a British former spy, mounted a campaign during the Trump administration to discredit perceived enemies of President Trump inside the government, according to documents and people involved in the operations.
The campaign included a planned sting operation against Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, H.R. McMaster, and secret surveillance operations against F.B.I. employees, aimed at exposing anti-Trump sentiment in the bureau’s ranks.
The operations against the F.B.I., run by the conservative group Project Veritas, were conducted from a large home in the Georgetown section of Washington that rented for $10,000 per month. Female undercover operatives arranged dates with the F.B.I. employees with the aim of secretly recording them making disparaging comments about Mr. Trump.
The campaign shows the obsession that some of Mr. Trump’s allies had about a shadowy “deep state” trying to blunt his agenda — and the lengths that some were willing to go to try to purge the government of those believed to be disloyal to the president.
Catherine Rampell writes Don’t freak out about inflation yet:
It could well be true that parts of the Biden fiscal agenda will have some inflationary effects; based on the limited data available, we don’t know yet, and I don’t want to suggest there is no risk of that outcome. But it’s also too early to freak out. So far it looks like prices are picking up not because there’s too much money sloshing around, but rather because of a bunch of temporary, idiosyncratic shocks and supply chain issues that seem unlikely to lead to self-sustaining inflation.
For instance: Among the biggest drivers of consumer price increases in April was the category for used cars and trucks, which rose a whopping 10 percent from the previous month. That was the largest month-over-month spike since the federal government began keeping track in 1953. Yet this spike is less reflective of broad-based trends in inflation than factors unique to the car market.