Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon showers and a high of 73. Sunrise is 5:16 and sunset is 8:31, for 15 hours, 15 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1959, USS Barbero and the United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail:
Upon witnessing the missile’s landing, [Postmaster General] Summerfield stated, “This peacetime employment of a guided missile for the important and practical purpose of carrying mail, is the first known official use of missiles by any Post Office Department of any nation.” Summerfield proclaimed the event to be “of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world,” and predicted that “before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles. We stand on the threshold of rocket mail.”
Tariffs threaten an industry they’re meant to save:
“For a president who is intent on building U.S. manufacturing, the tariff strategy he’s laid out is remarkably short-sighted,” said Gordon Hanson, a Harvard Kennedy School professor whose groundbreaking 2016 research work, “The China Shock,” was among the first to sound the alarm about the threat to American industry. “It fails to recognize what modern supply chains look like.”
“Even if you’re intent on reshoring parts of manufacturing, you can’t do it all,” he said. “Steel and aluminum are part of that.”
If Trump’s tariffs fail to result in a manufacturing renaissance — a central focus of his presidential campaign — it could weaken the prospects of a GOP coalition that’s increasingly reliant on working-class voters who supported his protectionist trade policies. But as unanticipated tariffs continue to drive up input costs for companies that need steel and aluminum for production, the warning signs emanating from manufacturers are getting louder.
An index published this week by the Institute for Supply Management, which tracks manufacturing, slipped for the third straight month in May as companies made plans to scale back production. A quarterly survey conducted by the National Association of Manufacturers reported the steepest drop in optimism since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, with trade uncertainty and raw material costs cited as top concerns. Federal Reserve data this month reported weaker manufacturing output.
See Sam Sutton, Trump wants a manufacturing boom. The industry is buckling, Politico, June 6, 2025.
US Veterans Mark 81 Years Since D-Day: