Good morning. 
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 89. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 35m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 78.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Pedestrian and Bicycle Committee meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1854, USS Constellation (1854), the last all-sail warship built by the United States Navy and now a museum ship in Baltimore Harbor, is commissioned.
Recommended for reading in full —
Shane Goldmacher reports Hooked on Trump: How the G.O.P. Still Banks on His Brand for Cash (‘Trump pint glasses. Trump T-shirts. Trump memberships’):
Even in defeat, nothing sells in the Republican Party quite like Donald J. Trump.
The Republican National Committee has been dangling a “Trump Life Membership” to entice small contributors to give online. The party’s Senate campaign arm has been hawking an “Official Trump Majority Membership.” And the committee devoted to winning back the House has been touting Mr. Trump’s nearly every public utterance, talking up a nonexistent Trump social media network and urging donations to “retake Trump’s Majority.”
Six months after Mr. Trump left office, the key to online fund-raising success for the Republican Party in 2021 can largely be summed up in the three words it used to identify the sender of a recent email solicitation: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”
The fund-raising language of party committees is among the most finely tuned messaging in politics, with every word designed to motivate more people to give more money online. And all that testing has yielded Trump-themed gimmicks and giveaways including Trump pint glasses, Trump-signed pictures, Trump event tickets and Trump T-shirts — just from the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the month of July.
Nate Blakeslee reports ‘An abomination’: the story of the massacre that killed 216 wolves:
The woods were full of the sounds of snowmobiles and baying hounds. A group of perhaps a dozen hunters had gathered to give chase to big game along a frozen creek in north-eastern Wisconsin.
Hound hunting, chiefly for black bear and coyote, is a popular pastime in this part of the state. But the houndsman who emerged from the hemlocks onto a snowy road around twilight held a different kind of trophy.
Flanked by a half-dozen of his buddies clad in ball caps and snow boots, the man hugged an enormous gray wolf to his chest, its head lolling against one shoulder and its tail nearly touching the ground.
….
As it happened, the hunt earned far more attention than either the houndsmen or their nemesis could have anticipated. State regulators set a quota of 119 wolves out of an estimated statewide population of 1,000, but they issued an unusually high number of permits – 1,548 of them – and allowed hound hunters to participate on the first day, rather than requiring them to wait until the far less efficient rifle hunters and trappers had taken their share.
The result was astounding. After just two and a half days, hunters were already approaching the limit. Before regulators could shut down the hunt, 216 wolves had been killed – overshooting the quota by 83%.
The unprecedented media coverage and public outcry that followed not only called into question the state’s ability to properly regulate its wolf population, it has also drawn attention to the practice of hounding, a traditional method of hunting celebrated by an insular subculture in the northern Great Lakes region that has lately become hi-tech – and far more deadly.