Daily Bread for 7.7.18

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:24 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 10m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 37.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Black Hawk War soldiers begin an encampment in Palmyra:

On this date during the Black Hawk War, General Atkinson led his entire militia, which included future President’s Abraham Lincoln and Zachary Taylor, to a camp just south of Palmyra. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  The Committee to Investigate Russia reports Trump declares “Putin’s Fine”:

President Trump held a campaign rally in Montana Thursday and made fun of national security concerns regarding his July 16th summit with Vladimir Putin:

“You know President Putin is KGB. This and that. You know what? Putin’s fine. He’s fine. We’re all fine. We’re people.” (Video)

Read more about What Putin Wants, How Russia Operates, and the Putin regime’s Human Rights Abuses – none of which is “fine.”

(‘Putin’s fine’ – so speaks the monkey of the organ grinder.)

  Greg Jaffe, Josh Dawsey and Carol D. Leonnig report Ahead of NATO and Putin summits, Trump’s unorthodox diplomacy rattles allies:

In November and again in March, Trump invited Putin to the White House for a summit against the advice of aides, who argued that the chances of progress on substantive issues was slim.

For Trump, the meeting was the point. In an interview with Fox News last month, Trump speculated that he and Putin could potentially hash out solutions to Syria and Ukraine over dinner.

“I could say: ‘Would you do me a favor? Would you get out of ­Syria,’?” Trump said. “?‘Would you do me a favor? Would you get out of Ukraine.’?”

Some White House officials worry that Putin, who has held several calls with Trump, plays on the president’s inexperience and lack of detailed knowledge about issues while stoking Trump’s grievances.

The Russian president complains to Trump about “fake news” and laments that the U.S. foreign policy establishment — the “deep state,” in Putin’s words — is conspiring against them, the first senior U.S. official said.

“It’s not us,” Putin has told Trump, the official summarized. “It’s the subordinates fighting against our friendship.”

In conversations with Trudeau, May and Merkel, Trump is sometimes assertive, brash and even bullying on issues he feels strongly about, such as trade, according to senior U.S. officials. He drives the conversation and isn’t shy about cutting off the allies mid-sentence to make his point, the officials said.

With Putin, Trump takes a more conciliatory approach, often treating the Russian leader as a confidant.

  Lee Bergquist reports Dairy group uses behind-the-scenes influence with Gov. Scott Walker to shift regulation of large livestock farms:

Agriculture interests are working behind the scenes with the administration of Gov. Scott Walker as he mounts a major change in the way large livestock farms are regulated in Wisconsin.

The Republican governor introduced a wide-ranging rural agenda on Oct. 26 that included a proposal to shift oversight of large dairy farms and other livestock operations to the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

Moving those powers from the Department of Natural Resources — the state’s chief environmental enforcement agency — has sparked controversy. Environmentalists are concerned about less emphasis on conservation, but farm groups say the agriculture department is the rightful place to enforce permitting and manure handling of big farms.

While the public has yet been able to weigh in on promised hearings, farms groups have had Walker’s ear.

State records show that one day before Walker’s speech in Trego, in northwestern Wisconsin, the governor’s office received detailed plans from the Dairy Business Association on legal requirements and strategic options to move the program.

According to the documents, the association also emailed talking points to the governor, describing the agriculture department as a “natural regulator of farms,” housed with experts who understand farming practices.

“As a state, we need to double-down on policies to help our farmers, and this change is certainly consistent with doing just that,” the group advised Walker.

Late last year, emails show the dairy group and its representatives provided draft legislation to guide the transition.

  Peniel E. Joseph writes America’s nonviolent civil rights movement was considered uncivil by critics at the time:

Black college students who engaged in peaceful sit-ins at lunch counters that denied them service because of the color of their skin were criticized for behavior that, however passive, appeared provocative to defenders of the status quo. What movement activists  proudly characterized as “putting your body on the line” in promotion of racial justice and radical democracy was, in certain quarters, demonized as the unpatriotic behavior of communist-inspired subversives.

Fannie Lou Hamer, the legendary Mississippi sharecropper turned voting rights activist, certainly fit the picture of simmering rage against racism during her now-famous August 1964 testimony before the credentials committee at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. “I question America!” she passionately declared, raising her voice as she recounted a sorrow song of racial violence, economic exploitation, and raw terror personally experienced for simply wanting to live in peace as a human being.  Mrs. Hamer’s blunt description of the systemic nature of white supremacy in the Deep South made her a hero to millions of Americans who recognized her candid testimony as an act of faith based on her love of freedom, democracy and black folk everywhere.

King, the prince of nonviolence, received steady streams of criticism from politicians, journalists and clergy for engaging in peaceful demonstrations that, by stoking the anger of white supremacists, threatened to turn violent at any moment.  At the height of his global popularity, between 1963-1965, King defended himself from right-wing attacks that smeared him as a communist, as well as liberal hand-wringing over the accelerating pace of civil rights demonstrations.  His famous “Letter From Birmingham City Jail” represents perhaps his most eloquent response to critics who charged that even peaceful demonstrations could stir political chaos.  King played defense by going on the offensive, memorializing the young black demonstrators who risked their lives by filling up the city’s jail cells protesting against racial segregation. Their quest for black dignity, citizenship and humanity, King argued, transcended quaint notions of civility.  King predicted, correctly it turns out, that in the not-too-distant future this nation would celebrate civil rights protesters for “carrying the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy” that formed the bedrock of America’s political faith.

King’s steadfast belief that achieving racial justice represented the beating heart of democracy made him, in the eyes of certain critics, an extremist.

A young blue whale swims nearby: