Daily Bread for 7.11.18

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 05m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 3.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1839, the first patent is issued to a Wisconsin resident:

On this day Ebenezar G. Whiting of Racine was issued patent #1232 for his improved plow, the first patent issued to someone from Wisconsin. Whiting’s improvements consisted of making the mold-board straight and flat which, when united in the center with the curvilinear part of the mold-board, would require less power to drag through the dirt. Whiting went on to serve as Vice President of the J.I. Case Plow Company and received another patent for a steel plow in 1876.

Recommended for reading in full — 

As President Trump joins his second NATO summit meeting — having called the alliance “obsolete,” derided its members as deadbeats and suggested that American military protection is negotiable — there is deep unease on the alliance’s eastern flank. And that sense has only been heightened by Mr. Trump’s scheduled one-on-one meeting next week with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

For the nations of Latvia and Estonia, nestled between Russia and the Baltic Sea and with large ethnic Russian populations, NATO is no abstraction.

Long before the debate over the Kremlin’s interference in the American election, there was alarm in the Baltic nations over Russian attempts to influence public opinion and exploit the complicated issues of ethnic identity in a region reshaped by war and occupation. In both the annexation of Crimea and its actions in Ukraine, the Russian government has used protecting the rights of ethnic Russians as a pretext for intervention. About one-third of the populations of Latvia and Estonia are ethnic Russians.

(Putin’s American cat’s paw has never shown the slightest desire to defend democratic allies with whom we have mutual defense treaties.)

  Attorney Yoshinori H.T. Himel writes Enough with the euphemisms. They’re not ‘family residential centers.’ They’re jails:

And our government continues to use euphemisms. In response to the outcry against its enforcement of the Trump administration’s family separation policy, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking permission to build more “family residential centers” to detain immigrant families while their immigration cases make their way through the courts. By the benign label “family residential center,” ICE means what most of us would call a jail. ICE jails parents and children, many of whom are escaping violence and are using lawful procedures to apply for asylum.

“Tender age” shelters is another euphemism — “a chilling phrase we will not soon forget,” says Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). Those are warehouses for children — including toddlers and infants — whom our government has torn from their families.

We must seek the truth behind the Orwellian labels. We must be wary of officials using language to evade responsibility. We must not, as we have done in the past, permit official euphemisms to lull us into silent complicity. Let’s call this what it is: violating human rights.

The new ICE directive states that women are not to be held into their third trimester and that ICE is responsible for “ensuring pregnant detainees receive appropriate medical care including effectuating transfers to facilities that are able to provide appropriate medical treatment.”

But BuzzFeed News has found evidence that that directive is not being carried out. Instead, women in immigration detention are often denied adequate medical care, even when in dire need of it, are shackled around the stomach while being transported between facilities, and have been physically and psychologically mistreated.

In interviews and written affidavits, E and four other women who’ve been in ICE detention and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) custody while pregnant told of being ignored when they were obviously miscarrying, described their CBP and ICE-contracted jailers as unwilling or unable to respond to medical emergencies, and recounted an incident of physical abuse from CBP officers who knew they were dealing with a pregnant woman. Those descriptions were backed by interviews with five legal aid workers, four medical workers, and two advocates who work with ICE detainees.

The incidents were not limited to a single detention center. Three medical workers and five legal aid workers who spoke to BuzzFeed News all said they had seen — and some had documented — cases of pregnant women not receiving or being denied medical care in more than six different detention centers in California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

Brett Talley had already been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee and was on his way to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench when reporters discovered what he’d written about the Klan. Since 2005, Talley, a 36-year-old lawyer nominated for a seat on the US District Court for the Middle District of Alabama, appeared to have posted more than 16,000 comments on University of Alabama sports message board TideFans.com. Writing as BamainBoston, he commented on everything from race to abortion. He disparaged Muslims, joked about statutory rape, and, most notably, wrote approvingly about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He defended the “first KKK” as something entirely different than the racist, violent organization it’s known as today.

After outcry about the comments and his general lack of qualifications for the job—Talley had never tried a case—he withdrew from consideration for the judgeship in December. But the controversy didn’t send him packing to Alabama. Instead, he simply continued working as deputy associate attorney general at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy, where he oversaw the judicial nominations unit that advises the president and attorney general on the selection and confirmation of federal judges and conducts the vetting, interviewing, and evaluating of nominees. This spring, he moved to a more junior position at the Justice Department, as an assistant US attorney.

President Donald Trump has submitted 95 judicial nominations since Talley withdrew his own; 22 of those nominees have been confirmed. Among the 95 nominees are controversial picks such as Wendy Vitter, wife of disgraced former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) and a staunch anti-abortion activist, and Oregon prosecutor Ryan Bounds, who wrote a series of articles while at Stanford University mocking multiculturalism and advocating for leniency for alleged campus rapists. Talley headed the Justice Department unit that helped select and vet many of those nominees.