Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 22m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred tenth day.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1864, the Battle of the Wilderness ends:
Although the Wilderness is usually described as a draw, it could be called a tactical Confederate victory, but a strategic victory for the Union army. Lee inflicted heavy numerical casualties (see estimates below) on Grant, but as a percentage of Grant’s forces they were smaller than the percentage of casualties suffered by Lee’s smaller army. And, unlike Grant, Lee had very little opportunity to replenish his losses. Understanding this disparity, part of Grant’s strategy was to grind down the Confederate army by waging a war of attrition. The only way that Lee could escape from the trap that Grant had set was to destroy the Army of the Potomac while he still had sufficient force to do so, but Grant was too skilled to allow that to happen. Thus, the Overland Campaign, initiated by the crossing of the Rappahannock, and opening with this battle, set in motion the eventual destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia
Recommended for reading in full:
Jennifer Rubin writes Trump tries to silence another witness: Mueller:
So can he stop Mueller from testifying? “Of course there is no way Trump can stop Bob Mueller from testifying,” constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me. “There is no executive privilege between them, and obviously no attorney-client privilege, and Mueller doesn’t even work for Trump.” Tribe continues, “Until he leaves [the Justice Department], he works for Barr. And Barr has no conceivable basis to stop Mueller from testifying.” In any event, Tribe explains, “Mueller is free to leave [Justice] at any time and will then be simply a private citizen.”
He’ll be as unsuccessful in stopping private citizen Mueller from testifying as he has been in preventing former White House counsel Donald McGahn from telling his story. “Only a dictator can tell a private citizen not to testify in a duly constituted legislative or parliamentary inquiry into the head of state’s conduct,” Tribe concludes. “And though Trump might fancy himself a dictator, that’s not the reality. Not yet, anyway.”
Trump had no luck halting former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying, former Justice spokesman Matthew Miller says.
Trump must be frustrated. His spin works only when the facts are hidden or too complicated to unravel. Put the facts out in plain sight, have someone more credible than Trump (an open-ended category) explain what has happened and — poof! — Trump’s smokescreen, the nonsensical patter coming from Fox News hosts and the incoherent arguments from Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, will vanish.
How Nonrecyclable Plastic Bags Are Being Turned Into Speakers: