Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sun with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:18 PM, for 14h 54m 34s of daytime. The moon is new with none of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred ninety-first day.
On this day in 1968, “Milwaukee Bucks” is selected as the franchise name after 14,000 fans participated in a team-naming contest.
Recommended for reading in full —
Alison Durkee writes The Mike Pompeo Scandals Just Keep Piling Up:
President Donald Trump’s recent firing of State Department inspector general Steve Linick at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s request has set off a cascade of damning stories about the secretary of state’s behavior in office. And the news just keeps getting worse. Days after NBC News reported Pompeo’s frequent taxpayer-funded “Madison” dinners, which appear to be more of a political opportunity for the secretary’s presidential ambitions than official diplomatic affairs, the New York Times reports Pompeo has done even more politicking under the guise of official business. Per the Times, Pompeo has on multiple occasions used his official State trips to visit conservative donors and politicians—without putting them on his public schedule or informing reporters of the trips.
Pompeo’s reported secret visits included a dinner meeting with Republican donors while in London for a NATO meeting, and a visit with Republican billionaire Charles Koch aboard a government aircraft while on an official trip to Kansas. On an official visit to Florida in January, the secretary of state also made a mysterious detour to the Villages, a retirement community chock-full of Republican donors. The Tampa Bay Times reported in February that based on the address Pompeo visited, he was likely visiting GOP donor Mark Morse, whose family developed the Villages and has donated more than $100,000 to Republicans since January 2019. The secretary and former CIA director has also made trips to major gatherings of business leaders—which were branded as official business but prime for political schmoozing—including visiting the annual Bilderberg Meeting in Switzerland last year and the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in 2017 and 2019. (These visits are all on top of Pompeo’s repeated trips to Kansas while he was considering running for Senate there, which were so frequent that the Kansas City Star issued an op-ed proclaiming, “Mike Pompeo, either quit and run for U.S. Senate in Kansas or focus on your day job.”)
Robert Tracinski writes You Will Never Be #MAGA Enough:
It is pretty obvious that Fox News has done more to boost Donald Trump and carry water for him than any other institution. But that isn’t enough to save them. Only the most unblinkingly slavish devotion, with never a hint of even accidental criticism, will do. And so the president has been preparing to put the skids under his previous favorite media organization.
No, scratch that, his second favorite media organization. His favorite is and always will be Twitter, which is the platform he used to slide the knife between Fox’s ribs, declaring, “Fox News is no longer the same. We miss the great Roger Ailes. You have more anti-Trump people, by far, than ever before. Looking for a new outlet!”
He said this in response to a random Twitter fan who complained to Laura Ingraham, “Your colleagues at @FoxNews might as well be on @cnn because all they do is spew #FakeNews.”
….
If you stay on the Trump Train long enough you will discover—as Fox News has and OANN eventually will—that you will find that the demands for conformity are endless, capricious, and unforgiving.