Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 50m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 35% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred ninety-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1961, 400 U.S. Marshals Sent to Alabama as Montgomery Bus Riots Hurt 20; [the] President Bids State Keep Order: “Washington, May 20 — The Federal Government dispatched 400 marshals and other armed officers to Alabama tonight to restore order in areas that were torn by racial violence. The Government acted after a mob of white persons attacked a racially mixed group of bus riders in Montgomery, Ala. The disorders lasted two hours. At least twenty of the riders were beaten. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy announced the Federal action in a telegram to Alabama officials.” On this day in 1863, Union Forces Regroup at Vicksburg, Mississippi: “The 1st Wisconsin Light Artillery and the 8th, 11th, 18th and 23rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments joined the 14th and 17th Infantries to prepare for the next attack. While these arrangements were taking place at Vicksburg, the 4th Wisconsin Infantry fought in a skirmish in Cheneyville, Lousiana.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Janell Ross explains ‘They were not patriots’: New Orleans removes monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee:
Mayor Mitch Landrieu marked the historic moment with a rousing speech that sought to end nearly two years of heated debate in the city over what the monuments said about its past.
“They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for,” Landrieu said, adding that Lee and the Confederate army fought against the United States. “They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.”
(Exactly right: the Confederacy was an organized expression of racism and treason. Neo-Confederates have any number of false justifications for their views, but they are, in fact, the closest homegrown movement America has to Holocaust denial. They all regurgiate variations of the Redeemers ‘Lost Cause‘ lies and rationalizations for slavery. Some are practiced at it, but even the best of them are among the worst of our society.)
Karoun Demirjian reports that Former FBI director Comey to testify publicly:
Former FBI director James B. Comey will testify publicly before the Senate Intelligence Committee at a date to be set after Memorial Day, committee leaders announced Friday night.
The public commitment to testify comes after a tumultuous week and a half since President Trump dismissed Comey — a move that perplexed committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), who vowed to bring Comey before the committee nonetheless to testify as part of their probe into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 elections, including potential ties between the Trump campaign and Kremlin officials.
(This assumes that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will not request that Comey refrain from public comment during this part of Mueller’s investigation.)
Connon Friedersdorf describes The World’s Worst Negotiation:
“The conversation [Trump in Oval office with Russian FM and Ambassador], during a May 10 meeting — the day after he fired Mr. Comey — reinforces the notion that Mr. Trump dismissed him primarily because of the bureau’s investigation into possible collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives,” the Times wrote. And that’s right. That it leaked clearly hurts the White House.
If I see that it hurts them, and you see it, and TheNew York Times saw it? Then so did the Russians. The highest-ranking Russian diplomats in the United States are not idiots. They are savvy. And while it appears they weren’t the ones who leaked the story, that means Trump gave the Russians information they could have used to weaken him.
And he did so without even realizing it.
That is unnerving, because it suggests that even if Trump is innocent of Russia ties and obstruction of justice—and he may be!—he cannot hold his own in a low-pressure meeting, on his own turf. He wasn’t even pressured in a clever bid to extract information; Trump’s words here were self-sabotage, a totally unforced error.
(Even under the most charitable interpretation – and I do not believe the most chartible view is an accurate one – Trump’s in over his head.)
Evan Perez reports that, to defend Trump from all possibilities, White House lawyers research impeachment:
Washington (CNN) White House lawyers have begun researching impeachment procedures in an effort to prepare for what officials still believe is a distant possibility that President Donald Trump could have to fend off attempts to remove him from office, two people briefed on the discussions tell CNN.
White House officials believe the President has the backing of Republican allies in Congress and that impeachment is not in the cards, according to the people briefed on the legal discussions. Even Democrats have tried to calm impeachment talk out of concern it is premature.
But lawyers in the White House counsel’s office have consulted experts in impeachment during the past week and have begun collecting information on how such proceedings would work, a person briefed on the matter told CNN.
SpotMini, Boston Dynamics’ dog-like robot is versatile: