Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 63. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 18m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
There will be a joint meeting of the Whitewater Planning Commission, Common Council, and Community Development Authority via audiovisual conferencing at 6 PM, followed by an audiovisual meeting of the Whitewater Common Council.
On this day in 1862, troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla in Mexico.
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael S. Schmidt reports Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions:
A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.
The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.
“The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Judge Jackson wrote of Mr. Trump.
She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.
“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.
Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”
Dan Diamond reports The coronavirus vaccine skeptics who changed their minds:
Kim Simmons, a 61-year-old small-business owner in Illinois, vividly remembers the moment she went from vaccine skeptic to vaccine-ready: watching a Johns Hopkins University doctor on C-SPAN make the case for why the shots are safe.
For Lauren Bergner, a 39-year-old homemaker in New Jersey, it was when she realized it would make it easier for her family to attend New York Yankees games, after the team announced fans would need to show proof of a negative coronavirus test or that they had been vaccinated.
And for Elizabeth Greenaway, a 34-year-old communications consultant in Pennsylvania, it was the sudden fear that if she got sick, she wasn’t sure who would take care of her 2-year-old daughter, who has a rare health condition.
“Thinking about herd immunity, thinking about my daughter, thinking about all of that, I just realized — it’s about being a part of something bigger than yourself,” said Greenaway, who’s had to cut back on work to care for her daughter.
Space-aged wine could sell for $1 million after spending 14 months on International Space Station:
A great deal of Trump’s corruption was enabled by Barr. Barr is in serious jepordy of being cuffed and stuffed for doing so. Judge Jackson’s throwdown is just the leading indicator of the disclosure of lots of other DoJ malfeasance that Barr buried. I’ll not be surprised if Garland is having a conversation with Barr along the lines of “Rat on Trump, or you go to prison for years”.
Barr is the last stop on the way to Trump, and there is nothing Trump can do about it. Trump’s fanatical backers are not going to take it lightly, as the defenestration of Liz Cheney in the house is showing. The second civil war is not over yet. It is likely to get even uglier.
I wonder if Yertle is pondering how Garland would have been a lot less trouble for Republicans if they had not stonewalled his SC nomination.
Strangest about Barr: did he think Trump and the GOP would be in power forever? (Perhaps he hoped for an enduring, right-wing autocracy, but did he expect it?) Once the DOJ slipped out of Trump’s hands, it was only a matter of time until Barr met his jurisprudential reckoning. The bar was always bigger than Barr, the judiciary was always bigger than Barr, the legal academy was always bigger than Barr. The truth was going to catch up with him. Delusional, dysfunctional Trump might be able to fabricate a false image of himself with ignorant cultists, but Barr had and has no ability to suspend similarly a disbelief in others.