Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1940, the Allies complete the evacuation from Dunkirk. On this day in 1861, Dr. Erastus B. Wolcott, a Milwaukee surgeon, performed the first recorded removal of a diseased kidney.
Recommended for reading in full —
Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg describe How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise:
Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group [David Horowitz Freedom Center] to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming. Center officials described Hillary Clinton as evil, President Barack Obama as a secret communist and the Democratic Party as a front for enemies of the United States.
The Freedom Center has declared itself a “School for Political Warfare,” and it is part of a loose nationwide network of like-minded charities linked together by ideology, personalities, conservative funders and websites, including the for-profit Breitbart News.
Horowitz’s story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics, while taking advantage of millions of dollars in what amount to taxpayer subsidies….
Horowitz makes a good living as the Freedom Center chief executive, earning $583,000 from a charity that received $5.4 million in donations in 2015, according to the latest available records.
(Anyone even casually acquainted with Horowitz’s work over the last two decades knows how increasingly severe his views have become; his FrontPage is a distillation of bigotry and lies. More on Horowitz’s views is available online from the Southern Poverty Law Center.)
The Reverend William Barber talks with David Remnick, contending that Politics Needs Religion:
Politics and religion go hand in hand for the Reverend William J. Barber II of the Greenleaf Christian Church. As he sees it, progressives made a mistake in walking away from Christianity during the rise of the Moral Majority….He talks with David Remnick about bringing morality back to contemporary politics.
(It’s worth noting that some of the contradictions on policy issues that Rev. Dr. Barber believes he sees in conservative Protestants would not be present, for example, among progressive Catholics.)
MJ Lee recounts in God and the Don that Trump, a self-professed mainline Presbyterian, felt the need to ask two Presbyterian pastors if Presbyterians were, in fact, Christians:
Two days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump greeted a pair of visitors at his office in Trump Tower.
As a swarm of reporters waited in the gilded lobby, the Rev. Patrick O’Connor, the senior pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, and the Rev. Scott Black Johnston, the senior pastor of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, arrived to pray with the next president.
“I did very, very well with evangelicals in the polls,” Trump interjected in the middle of the conversation — previously unreported comments that were described to me by both pastors.
They gently reminded Trump that neither of them was an evangelical.
“Well, what are you then?” Trump asked.
They explained they were mainline Protestants, the same Christian tradition in which Trump, a self-described Presbyterian, was raised and claims membership. Like many mainline pastors, they told the President-elect, they lead diverse congregations.
Trump nodded along, then posed another question to the two men: “But you’re all Christians?”
“Yes, we’re all Christians.”
(From Rev. Dr. Barber’s point of view, all Christians whether progressive or conservative are evangelicals, in the broadest sense; for the Presbyterian pastors, there’s a difference between mainline and evangelical Christians; but for Trump, astonishingly, there’s uncertainty even about the nature of his own self-professed, large Christian denomination.)
Susan Rice contends that To Be Great, America Must Be Good:
American corporations and civil society groups can assist by demonstrating that the United States remains committed to its integration into the global economy and to our democratic principles. In the absence of White House leadership, the American people should act as informal ambassadors, via contacts through tourism, study-abroad programs and cultural exchanges.
We can all contribute to showing other nations that we hold dear America’s place at the forefront of moral and political leadership in the world. And we must remain steadfast until, once again, we have a president willing to lead in accordance with American interests, traditions and values.
Brian Beutler writes that Ivanka Trump’s Political Brand Is Dead:
Now that Ivanka’s father has announced he will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, and has taken steps toward allowing all employers to deny contraceptive coverage for their female employees, my unfounded hope is that she will either realize that the jig is up, and stop pretending she ever cared about these issues; or acknowledge that she’s a massive, world historical failure in public life, and stop trying to convince people otherwise.
Either of these outcomes would at least spare people the constant indignity of having their intelligence insulted. But the truth of the matter is clear, and explains why Ivanka’s not going to stop, and why credulous stories about her private struggle will appear every time her father’s administration offends the world: Ivanka isn’t a failure, but a swindler of global proportions who has supplemented her preposterous fortune by pretending—in a not particularly convincing way—to play an inside game she really has no interest in….
It may be Ivanka’s tragic circumstance that she was born to an ethically vacant parent, and that forging a bond with him required making herself in his self-image. But it is our tragic circumstance that the man in question is a moral obscenity, a mental flyspeck, a fraud, and president of the United States. In the context of his presidency, her commitment to their relationship requires her to piss down our backs and tell us it’s raining.
A solar eclipse is coming August — Here’s how to make the most of it:
NASA has online information about the August 21st eclipse:
On Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun. Anyone within the path of totality can see one of nature’s most awe inspiring sights – a total solar eclipse. This path, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun’s tenuous atmosphere – the corona – can be seen, will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun’s disk. NASA created this website to provide a guide to this amazing event. Here you will find activities, events, broadcasts, and resources from NASA and our partners across the nation.