Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 15m 49s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1982, in an address to the British Parliament, Reagan correctly predicted that the “march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is born this day in 1867.
Recommended for reading in full —
John Diedrich reports that a Jury awards $6.7M to inmate raped by guard in Milwaukee County Jail, shackled during childbirth:
A federal jury Wednesday awarded $6.7 million to a woman who was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was being held in the Milwaukee County Jail four years ago.
The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.
The jury also found there was “no legitimate government purpose” to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.
Kleinhaus said her client was pleased with the verdicts. The plaintiff is not being named because she was a victim of a sexual assault.
“She was raped repeatedly at the age of 19. She sought justice and she is glad the system delivered that justice,” Kleinhaus said. “She hopes to prevent other women from being sexually assaulted in the Milwaukee County Jail.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell, describes Trump succinctly as an organized crime godfather:
Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump admin. is “like a mafia family… That’s the way I view Pres. Trump now – as a godfather” https://t.co/xy52mbxGro
— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 8, 2017
Paul Farhi reports that Breitbart News seems to be cleaning house after readers and advertisers drift away:
The clarion of the far right seems to be having second thoughts about how far right it wants to go.
Faced with an advertiser boycott and plummeting readership, Breitbart News has lately been trimming back some of its more extreme elements in what may be a bid for more mainstream respectability.
The site’s visitor traffic has fallen 53 percent since November, from 22.96 million unique individuals to 10.76 million last month, according to ComScore, which tracks Web trends. Other news sites have seen a falloff since the election, too — The Washington Post and the New York Times are off 24 and 26 percent during this period, respectively — but Breitbart’s losses are at roughly twice the mainstream rate.
At the same time, an advertiser blacklist of Breitbart organized by an anonymous online group called Sleeping Giants appears to be biting hard. Only 26 companies had ads on Breitbart last month, down from 242 in March, according to the marketing-news site Digiday. It said the remaining advertisers were primarily smaller direct-response companies, although Amazon.com remains one of its sponsors, despite pressure from its employees to cut ties to the site (Amazon’s chief executive is Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Post).
David Corn observes that Comey Forces Trump Defenders Into Extreme and Absurd Spin:
The release of former FBI director Jim Comey’s prepared text for his upcoming congressional testimony has created a moment of crisis for Republicans and conservatives. And many are failing the challenge. Their reactions are revealing a profound dishonesty that far exceeds the norms of usual political spin, and are demonstrating that the Trumpified quarters of the GOP and the conservative movement are intellectually bankrupt and devoid of principle. These partisans now stand naked, and it sure ain’t pretty. It’s also a bad sign for the health of our constitutional democracy….
(I’d assume that GOP politicians and core Trump supporters will hold out long into the future; they’ll not yield. This ends when Trump, himself, is politically and legally ruined, so that there’s nothing left to support. See, Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)
Tech Insider offers an Animated timeline that shows how Silicon Valley became a $2.8 trillion neighborhood: