Daily Bread for 6.2.18

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-three.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1966, NASA’s Surveyor 1 lands on the moon:

The Surveyor series of space probes was designed to carry out the first soft landings on the Moon by any American spacecraft. No instrumentation was carried specifically for scientific experiments by Surveyor 1, but considerable scientific data were collected by its television camera and then returned to Earth via the Deep Space Network from 1966 to 1967. These spacecraft carried two television cameras — one for its approach, which was not used in this case, and one for taking still pictures of the lunar surface. Over 100 engineering sensors were on board each Surveyor. Their television systems transmitted pictures of the spacecraft footpad and surrounding lunar terrain and surface materials. These spacecraft also acquired data on the radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, the load-bearing strength of the lunar surface, and the temperatures for use in the analysis of the lunar surface temperatures. (Later Surveyor space probes, beginning with Surveyor 3, carried scientific instruments to measure the composition and mechanical properties of the lunar “soil”.)

Recommended for reading in full —

Steven Mufson and David J. Lynch report Breaking from GOP orthodoxy, Trump increasingly deciding winners and losers in the economy:

President Trump is increasingly intervening in the economy, making decisions about corporate winners and losers in ways that Republicans for decades have insisted should be left to free markets — not the government.

The shift amounts to a major change in the GOP’s approach to the management of the economy, and it promises to shape the success of everything from American agriculture and manufacturing to the companies that produce the nation’s electricity.

On Friday, citing national security, Trump ordered the Energy Department tocompel power-grid operators to buy from ailing coal and nuclear plants that otherwise would be forced to shut down because of competition from cheaper sources.

The order came one day after the president imposed historic metals tariffs on some of the country’s strongest allies and trading partners. Now the Commerce Department is further picking winners and losers as it weighs thousands of requests from companies for waivers from the import taxes.

“It replaces the invisible hand with the government hand,” said Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist. “You’re replacing the market with government fiat.”

(The point about intervention is correct, but the headline is misleading.  The GOP hasn’t routinely practiced sound free-market economics in years, and truly never sufficiently.  In Wisconsin, our state has seen eight years of WISGOP intervention in the marketplace on behalf of insiders and cronies, and even in a small town like Whitewater, there have been years of futile meddling in the local economy on behalf of outside business interests, to no value for overall household income in the community.  State & crony capitalism is sham capitalism, with many of the attributes of a long con, promising for many but delivering only for a few.  See Two Truths of Whitewater’s Economy.  Long before Trump, state and local flacks paved the way with this disordered approach.)

Steve Eder, Hiroko Tabuchi and Eric Lipton report A Courtside View of Scott Pruitt’s Cozy Ties With a Billionaire Coal Baron:

LEXINGTON, Ky. — It was one of the biggest games of the University of Kentucky basketball season, and Scott Pruitt had scored two of the best seats in the arena: a few feet from the action, in a section reserved for season-ticket holders who had donated at least $1 million to the university.

The special access for Mr. Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, also included watching from the players’ entrance as the team streamed onto the court, and posing for a photo with a star player in the locker room area.

But there was more to the game last December than a superfan experience for Mr. Pruitt and his son, who joined him. They sat in seats belonging to Joseph W. Craft III, a billionaire coal executive who has engaged in an aggressive campaign to reverse the Obama administration’s environmental crackdown on the coal industry. Mr. Craft and his wife donated more than $2 million to support President Trump’s candidacy and inauguration.

Mitra Ebadolahi writes CBP Fails to Discredit Our Report on Abuse of Immigrant Kids:

Last week, the ACLU’s Border Litigation Project and University of Chicago Law’s International Human Rights Clinic published a reportdetailing child abuse by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The report, based on a portion of the more than 30,000 pages of government records we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, identifies numerous cases of serious alleged misconduct by CBP officials between 2009 and 2014, focusing on the agency’s verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse of migrant children.

CBP responded by calling our report “unfounded.” Here, we address the false statements CBP made in its response.

“CBP . . . is greatly disappointed that [the report] doesn’t acknowledge that the [Office of Inspector General] conducted an investigation in 2014 that determined that prior claims made by the ACLU were completely unfounded.  The OIG conducted 57 unannounced visits to 41 different CBP facilities and “did not observe misconduct or inappropriate conduct by DHS employees during our unannounced visits.”  The full report is available here.”

Certain key facts are omitted here.

First, OIG conducted unannounced CBP site visits only afterimmigrants’ rights groups filed a complaint in June 2014 detailing 116 cases of child abuse or neglect. Second, the visits occurred in July and August 2014 — months after these abuses had been reported and after those children referenced in the complaint had been released. Third, in the fall of 2014, OIG announced that it would no longer conduct site inspections, without explaining why.

Perhaps most importantly, in June 2015 — almost a year after the visits touted in CBP’s response — a coalition of immigrants’ rights advocates filed a class action lawsuit challenging CBP detention conditions. The litigation, which continues today, documents former CBP detainees’ horrific experiences, including through photos showing just how bleak these facilities are. CBP fought to keep all of this information secret — and was sanctioned by a federal judge for willfully destroying video evidence about conditions in its detention. [Additional refutation of the CBP’s reply, and support for the ACLU’s contentions, follows in the full article.  Note: I am a member of the ACLU.]

Tim Johnson reports New internet accounts are Russian ops designed to sway U.S. voters, experts say: