Good morning. 
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with scattered afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:22 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 14m 17s of daytime. The moon is waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand three hundred thirty-third day.
On this day in 1863, the Union is victorious on the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Recommended for reading in full —
Catherine Rampell writes The U.S. job market is still in very bad shape. Just wait until the fiscal time bomb goes off:
First, even with these [June reported] gains, U.S. payrolls are still deeply in the hole. Second, these official government numbers are based on a snapshot from mid-June, and more recent data suggest the recovery has either stalled or deteriorated since then. And, third, a major fiscal time bomb is about to detonate.
You may have a sense that things are still quite bad, given that the unemployment rate remains higherthan it ever was during the Great Recession. To help visualize just how far in the red the country is, take a gander at the Scariest Jobs Chart You’ll See All Day. It plots the trajectory of job changes in this recession alongside those from previous postwar downturns (and subsequent recoveries).
The horizontal axis shows months since the most recent employment peak of a given business cycle. The teal line plots the Great Recession. Until recently, the depth, duration and sluggish recovery from the Great Recession had put all other postwar downturns to shame.
Now look at the red line, which represents the awful situation the country is experiencing.
Things are so much worse than even the Great Recession that the red line almost doesn’t fit on the same chart as the others. It starts with a near-vertical downward drop, followed by a short spike upward.
Again, it’s fantastic that the hiring trend has, in fact, turned upward. But there are still 14.7 million, or about 10 percent, fewer payroll jobs than there were at the start of the pandemic recession. And as you can see, even if job growth continues at what President Trump calls “rocket ship” pace, the economy still has a long way to go before reaching an acceptable altitude — that is, until U.S. payrolls are anywhere near pre-pandemic levels.
Jeremy Schwartz and Perla Trevizo report He Built a Privately Funded Border Wall. It’s Already at Risk of Falling Down if Not Fixed:
Tommy Fisher billed his new privately funded border wall as the future of deterrence, a quick-to-build steel fortress that spans 3 miles in one of the busiest Border Patrol sectors.
Unlike a generation of wall builders before him, he said he figured out how to build a structure directly on the banks of the Rio Grande, a risky but potentially game-changing step when it came to the nation’s border wall system.
Fisher has leveraged his self-described “Lamborghini” of walls to win more than $1.7 billion worth of federal contracts in Arizona.
But his showcase piece is showing signs of runoff erosion and, if it’s not fixed, could be in danger of falling into the Rio Grande, according to engineers and hydrologists who reviewed photos of the wall for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. It never should have been built so close to the river, they say.
How Twitter Evolved From Startup To President Trump’s Megaphone: