Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 04m 37s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s municipal government will hold a public meeting on a Lakes drawdown project at 5 PM.
On this day in 1995, a deadly heatwave begins:
From July 12-15, 1995, the Midwest was subjected to a deadly outbreak of hot and humid weather responsible for 141 deaths in Wisconsin. According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, this was the “greatest single event of weather-related deaths in Wisconsin history.” Most of the fatalities happened in the urban southeast counties of the state, and at one point several Milwaukee-area hospitals were unable to admit more patients.
Milwaukee Temperatures (from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel): July 12: Hi=91, Lo=65 July 13: Hi=103*, Lo=78 July 14: Hi=102, Lo=84 July 15: Hi=92, Lo=69 July 16: Hi=88, Lo=68 *Some communities reported highs as high as 108. Heat Index values were 120-130 degrees.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Corn offers While America Sleeps (“With a summit ahead, Trump works with Putin to cover up Moscow’s attack on the US”):
In 1938, Winston Churchill published a collection of his speeches warning that his homeland was not adequately contending with the threat posed by Nazi Germany. The title: “While England Slept.” Eighty years later, a similar observation can be rendered concerning the United States. Much of the political and media elite and the citizenry seem to be sleepwalking past a horrific and fundamental fact: The current president of the United States has helped to cover up a serious attack on the nation. This profound act of betrayal has gone unpunished and, in many quarters, unnoticed, even as it continues. With Donald Trump about to meet Vladimir Putin on Monday—rewarding the thuggish authoritarian Russian leader with a grand summit in Helsinki—this is an appropriate moment to remember that their dark bromance involves a mutual stonewalling of wrongdoing.
Though the US intelligence community, most of Trump’s top national security aides, and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders have all agreed with the assessment that Putin’s regime mounted information warfare against the United States in 2016 to cause discord during the election and help Trump win the White House, Trump has continued to assist Putin’s brazen campaign of denial. Two weeks ago, Trump, in a tweet, gave credence to Putin’s claim that Moscow did not intervene in the election. “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” Trump maintained. Instead, Trump insisted, the real scandal was that the Democratic National Committee in 2016 did not hand over to the FBI its servers, which were hacked by Russian intelligence. This server business is a phony Fox News-fueled scandal; the DNC provided copies of its servers to the bureau. And even if there were anything untoward about the server matter, it still would pale in comparison to a foreign adversary assaulting an American election with hacks and the dissemination of stolen material.
….
The aim of Trump’s tweet was to legitimize Putin’s disinformation and to divert attention from Putin’s operation to a distraction. In doing so, the president was stunningly serving Putin’s interests rather than those of the United States.
Eliot A. Cohen writes Meet the Trumpverstehers (“We know about the president’s most vocal supporters. But what about his more discreet following?”):
A few years ago, the Germans created one of the compound nouns in which their language excels. The Russlandverstehers—literally, “Russia understanders”—were those who while not openly supporting Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea expressed sympathetic acceptance of it. They would never openly endorse the stealing of elections or the assassination of journalists, of course, but they understood the circumstances that lead to such unfortunate things, and the larger impulse to rough behavior to restore Russian national pride and enhance Russian prestige.
I propose the term Trumpverstehers in a similar spirit. These are not the mass of his supporters who fear the loss of jobs to global trade or automation; they are not the rural white Americans who feel threatened by immigration, ravaged by the opioid epidemic, and treated contemptuously by a bicoastal elite. In fact, by background, income, and employment, they are actually members of that elite.
….
The Trumpverstehers have given up on character in politics. None of them likes Trump, although they will use words such as vulgarian to characterize him, not liar, or bully, or scoundrel. They disregard his cruelty, too. When pressed, they claim that he may be an ignoramus and a rascal, but that that does not matter: only his policies do. In some ways, this reflects their belief in the strength of institutional constraints on the presidency, and in others their view that Trump is a blowhard who lacks the nerve to actually try, for example, to shut down hostile news media or incite large-scale violence. As long as the lines of his policy are reasonable in their eyes, they will ignore behavior that 20 years ago would have outraged them. They now consider qualities such as probity, thrift, magnanimity, and fidelity to be private virtues: From public figures, we cannot and should not expect them.
(There are, to be sure, local versions of these same Trumpverstehers in small towns across America – boosters and brazen men, mostly, convinced they’ve ‘arrived,’ and more than happy to tout Trumpism without mentioning Trump more than necessary. They expect deference for inferior policy positions, mistaking their own sense of entitlement for worthy competency or insight.)
Don Behm reports Candidates for Milwaukee County sheriff promise changes after David Clarke:
Three Democratic candidates for Milwaukee County sheriff are sparring over which of them would move the department the greatest distance from former Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr.’s legacy of mistreatment of jail inmates, inadequate staff and budget deficits.
Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt promotes the dozen or more changes he has made since Clarke’s abrupt resignation in August 2017 — such as going after reckless drivers on freeways and reforming jail operations after several custody deaths during Clarke’s tenure — as the central theme of his campaign.
Earnell Lucas, a Major League Baseball security official and former Milwaukee Police Department captain, and Deputy Robert Ostrowski do not criticize any of Schmidt’s initiatives even as they attempt to link him to the troubles of the Clarke administration that he was a part of.
Rich Kremer reports Researchers Find Promising Results In Frac Sand Mine Reclamation Test Plot (“5-Year Collaboration Studied How Well Soils And Wild Prairie Rebound After Mining”):
A five-year study in Chippewa County has transformed a reclaimed frac sand mine into a successful wild prairie. Researchers are hopeful that lessons learned can be used at other mining operations around the state beginning to fill in their pits.
In a rare collaboration, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls worked with industrial sand mining firm Superior Silica Sands and Chippewa County’s Department of Land Conservation and Forest Management to learn how sand mining impacts soil that is stripped away, stored and replaced after mining operations wrap up.
Since 2013, students led by UW-River Falls geology and soil science professor Holly Dolliver have been taking hundreds of samples from land owned by Superior Silica Sands in the Town of Auburn.
Meet the Scientist Searching Sewers for Cures: