Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional thunderstorms with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s 4th of July festival opens today at noon.
On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg begins:
After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863, Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even Philadelphia. Prodded by President Abraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved of command just three days before the battle and replaced by Meade.
Elements of the two armies initially collided at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, and soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the streets of the town to the hills just to the south.[14]”
Recommended for reading in full —
Adam Davidson reports The Inconvenient Legal Troubles That Lie Ahead for the Trump Foundation:Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman report Inside the White House’s Quiet Campaign to Create a Supreme Court Opening:Barring an unexpected change, the Donald J. Trump Foundation will be defending itself in a New York courtroom shortly before this fall’s midterm elections. The proceedings seem unlikely to go well for the institution and its leadership; President Trump and his elder children, Ivanka, Donald, Jr., and Eric, are being sued by New York’s attorney general, Barbara Underwood, for using the charity to enrich and benefit the Trump family. On Tuesday, the judge in the case, Saliann Scarpulla, made a series of comments and rulings from the bench that hinted—well, all but screamed—that she believes the Trump family has done some very bad things.
The judge seemed frustrated, even confused, that the Trumps were fighting the case at all. At one point, she told a lawyer for the Trump children that they should just settle out of court and voluntarily agree to one of the sanctions: a demand by the Attorney General that they not serve on the boards of any nonprofits for one year. (The case will be tried in civil court, and the Trumps aren’t facing any criminal charges.) That’s far from the worst sort of punishment, but to accede to it would be a public embarrassment and an acknowledgement that the family did, indeed, use the foundation as something of a private slush fund to enrich themselves and reward their cronies. Judge Scarpulla made clear that she felt the children should agree to the sanction now, and that, if they don’t, she will probably impose a similar restriction “with or without your agreement.”
The case against the Trumps appears damning. Charitable foundations are governed by a crucial compromise: they can operate without paying taxes on the condition that their leadership insures that all money spent is spent in pursuit of the public good. The case brought by Attorney General Underwood shows that the Trump Foundation was neither well-managed nor focussed on what would generally be considered the public good. Its operations were shockingly sloppy; at least one of the organization’s official board members said that he had no idea he was on the board and that the board had never met, to his knowledge. No surprise, then, that the other controls that normally govern nonprofits were absent. As David Fahrenthold, of the Washington Post, exposed in a series of stories in 2016, the Foundation did virtually none of the charitable things it claimed to be doing.
Nina Totenberg writes Justice Kennedy May Soon Find Himself Disappointed And His Legacy Undermined:One person who knows both men remarked on the affinity between Mr. Trump and Justice Kennedy, which is not obvious at first glance. Justice Kennedy is bookish and abstract, while Mr. Trump is earthy and direct.
But they had a connection, one Mr. Trump was quick to note in the moments after his first address to Congress in February 2017. As he made his way out of the chamber, Mr. Trump paused to chat with the justice.
“Say hello to your boy,” Mr. Trump said. “Special guy.”
Mr. Trump was apparently referring to Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. The younger Mr. Kennedy spent more than a decade at Deutsche Bank, eventually rising to become the bank’s global head of real estate capital markets, and he worked closely with Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer, according to two people with knowledge of his role.
During Mr. Kennedy’s tenure, Deutsche Bank became Mr. Trump’s most important lender, dispensing well over $1 billion in loans to him for the renovation and construction of skyscrapers in New York and Chicago at a time other mainstream banks were wary of doing business with him because of his troubled business history.
About a week before the presidential address, Ivanka Trump had paid a visit to the Supreme Court as a guest of Justice Kennedy. The two had met at a lunch after the inauguration, and Ms. Trump brought along her daughter, Arabella Kushner. Occupying seats reserved for special guests, they saw the justices announce several decisions and hear an oral argument.
Lachlan Markay reports Exclusive: Pro-Trump Group, Turning Point USA, Has Finances Revealed:That will leave Chief Justice John Roberts with the next move. Though a consistent conservative, he occasionally has voted with the court’s liberals, as he did this year in declaring that police must obtain a warrant to obtain cellphone location information from service providers.
Few doubt that any new Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump will move the court decidedly to the right, but as professor Rick Hasen, of the University of California, Irvine, put it this week, “The question is how John Roberts wants to move.”
Court observers have “spent the last 11 years asking what Anthony Kennedy had for breakfast,” he said. Now it’s ” ‘What did John Roberts have for breakfast?’ and it’s a slightly different menu.”
They’re Catching Tiny Fish With Tiny Rods:Turning Point reported $1.87 million in grants to other charitable groups. But the vast majority of that sum, $1,825,150, was given to an affiliated nonprofit arm, the Turning Point Endowment, to which the IRS granted tax-exempt status this year. It reported an additional $45,000 in grants to individuals, but the form doesn’t list who those individuals are.
That means that Turning Point gave out exactly zero grant money to any charitable organization not directly affiliated with Turning Point itself. That, of course, doesn’t tell the full story. Turning Point isn’t a grantmaking organization; its nonprofit program activities take place in-house, and its tax filing says about 88 percent of its budget went toward program expenses.
That would make its lack of grantmaking unremarkable, but for [organization leader Charlie] Kirk’s own public statements of late. Responding to allegations that Donald Trump illegally used his personal foundation to benefit his presidential campaign, Kirk claimed that all of the Trump Foundation’s money went to charitable grants, whereas the Clinton Foundation sent “only 6.4 percent of money to charities.” But like Turning Point, the Clinton Foundation conducts most of its charitable work in-house. Grantmaking is not the sole measure of a charitable group’s activities or effectiveness, as Kirk suggests. If it were, Turning Point’s record would be vastly more problematic than the Clinton Foundation’s.
Every fisherman today has a big fish story, but in ancient Japan, the tiniest fish was the biggest catch. Tanago fishing is a Japanese tradition dating back to samurai over 200 years ago. A tanago fish can be as small as the nail of a pinky finger; in order to catch one, a fisherman must have a hook, bait, and a very special fishing rod called Edo Wazao, handmade from natural bamboo. Twin brothers Toryo and Shuhei Tosaku are the 8th generation of their family to keep up the precious craft of Edo Wazao. With less than ten skilled craftsmen left, the brothers are hoping carry on the legacy of their ancestors.