Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 40m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6 PM, and Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.
On the night of August 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other communist forces invade Czechoslovakia to crush Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring liberalization reforms.
On this day in 1794, American soldiers defeat a tribal confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers:
On this date American troops under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne defeated a confederation of Indian forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees. Wayne’s soldiers, who included future Western explorer William Clark and future President William Henry Harrison, won the battle in less than an hour with the loss of some 30 men killed. (The number of Indian casualties is uncertain.)
The battle had several far-reaching consequences for the United States and what would later become the state of Wisconsin. The crushing defeat of the British-allied Indians convinced the British to finally evacuate their posts in the American west (an accession explicitly given in the Jay Treaty signed some three months later), eliminating forever the English presence in the early American northwest and clearing the way for American expansion. The battle also resulted in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which the defeated Indians ceded to Wayne the right of Americans to settle in the Ohio Valley (although the northwestern area of that country was given to the Indians). Wayne’s victory opened the gates of widespread settlement of the Old Northwest, Wisconsin included. [Source: American History Illustrated, Feb. 1969]
Recommended for reading in full —
Eric Lindquist reports Foxconn Technology Group lease for Haymarket Landing upsets some who envisioned riverside restaurant there:
From the time developers first talked six years ago about building a massive project at the confluence of the Eau Claire and Chippewa rivers that would be the centerpiece of Eau Claire’s downtown revitalization efforts, a key component was a restaurant offering spectacular river views.
The restaurant, which was to include a patio with outside dining, was proposed for the retail space on the ground floor of what became Haymarket Landing, a six-story multiuse building that began housing UW-Eau Claire students in August 2016 in apartments on the upper five floors.
But two years later, with the Pablo Center at the Confluence — the community performing arts center that is half of the Confluence Project — about to open next month, the space once designated for the long-awaited riverside restaurant on developer drawings is now committed to the controversial Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group for a planned innovation center. And some people aren’t happy about the change.
“There has been a lot of overwhelmingly negative feedback about it,” City Council acting President Andrew Werthmann said. “I think that’s because we as a community were investing in a certain vision for downtown and that space, and this is not in keeping with that vision.”
(Given the choice, residents of Eau Claire would rather have a restaurant than a Foxconn ‘innovation center.’ Good for them – they’re showing more sense than policymakers in Whitewater did a decade ago when they repurposed a grant for flood victims and unemployed autoworkers into a third-tier university building innovation center in Whitewater. They’re also showing more economic sense than the Greater Whitewater Committee did when it invited a state operative, Matt Moroney, as a guest speaker to flack Foxconn in Whitewater.)
Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani claims ‘Truth isn’t truth’:
E.J. Dionne Jr. contends America is slouching toward autocracy:
The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”
This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.
William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, and Maggie Haberman report Michael Cohen, Trump’s Ex-Lawyer, Investigated for Bank Fraud Over $20 Million:
Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter.
Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.
Any criminal charges against Mr. Cohen would deal a significant blow to the president. Mr. Cohen, 52, worked for the president’s company, the Trump Organization, for more than a decade. He was one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal and visible aides and called himself the president’s personal lawyer after Mr. Trump took office.
NASA offers its own version of Moonlight (Clair de Lune):