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Daily Bread for 8.22.17

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:44 PM, for 13h 34m 51s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with just 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 3 PM, and there is a Fire Department Business Meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1485, Richard III meets his end at the Battle of Bosworth Field. On this day in 1920, Milwaukee runner Arlie Schardt wins a gold medal in the 3,000-meter team race (with teammates Hal Brown and Ivan Dresser) at the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium.

Recommended for reading in full —

Eliot A. Cohen asks Is It Time for Trump Aides to Resign?:

….The answer is different for different people. Young people who seek careers in the civil service, military, diplomatic corps, or intelligence services should do so— career people do not represent any particular administration; their seniors must stay in, because some of the most effective brakes on Trump’s excesses will come from officials stubbornly adhering to constitutional norms. This is not the Deep State of Stephen Bannon’s dark fantasies; it is the deep fidelity of public servants to the law.

Political appointees are another matter. Yes, they take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but they are representatives of the president, and are presumed to be committed to implementing his plans and his platform. If they cannot say as much openly, if they construct a distance between themselves and him on the most important issues, then they are lying to themselves and to others. It may not seem to present an immediate  moral crisis for a deputy assistant secretary for warehouse maintenance, but challenges to one’s integrity in public service can crop up in the oddest places.

Those who are already at the center of government have a much tougher problem. Unless they had been living in an isolation chamber during all of 2016, they had to have gone in knowing that Trump was awful. The name Trump will be tattooed invisibly on their foreheads going forward; henceforth in the right light it will be brightly illuminated. They may, in later years, like to say, “I worked for Rex Tillerson” or “I served honorably at the Treasury.” Those around them, including those whose respect is worth having, will think, “No, you signed up for Trump and you know it”….

Michelle Ye Hee Lee assesses Attorney General Sessions’s absurd link between sanctuary policies and crimes in Chicago and Miami-Dade:

….The data connecting sanctuary city policies to crime is quite thin. We previously awarded Three Pinocchios to Sessions and to Trump when they claimed that sanctuary cities “breed crime” or that “criminals take notice” when cities make it known that they have sanctuary policies.

There is limited research on the effect of sanctuary policies on crime. The research that does exist found no statistically significant impact of sanctuary policies on crime or showed that immigrant-friendly policing strategies reduced crime in some jurisdictions. Sanctuary jurisdictions release inmates after their criminal case is complete, and extensive research shows noncitizens are not more prone to criminality than U.S.-born citizens. Moreover, some sanctuary jurisdictions do cooperate with the federal government if they believe the inmate is a public safety threat.

Despite Sessions’s assertion, there’s no evidence that sanctuary policies had anything to do with crime trends in Chicago and Miami, including over the 2017 Fourth of July weekend….

Trump apologists like Ken Abramowitz want to argue that Trump is unpopular with successful executives because there’s an illusion that Trump’s toxix; Jennifer Rubin sets him straight, that it’s no illusion and that apologists like Abramowitz are covering for bigotry and incompetency:

Brian Beutler rightly observes that History Will Remember the Republicans Who Appeased Trump:

….After Trump’s initial comments transformed the disgrace in Charlottesville into a crisis for the White House, only a handful of CEOs on Trump’s business councils resigned unprompted. A few more followed when activists threatened boycotts, but it was only after Trump’s truly unhinged defense of neo-Nazis on Tuesday that the remaining participants responded en masse. Only, rather than resign in disgrace, they connived with Trump to dissolve the councils altogether, sparing themselves the personalized wrath Trump directed at Merck CEO Kenneth C. Frazier, who initiated the exodus, and protecting their access to regulatory favors in the future. Like Ryan, they are now free to criticize white supremacy as an abstraction, without having to cite Trump specifically.

Within the White House, the response has been even more craven. Trump’s closest advisers—at least, those who are not white nationalists personally—promote themselves, individually and collectively, as the country’s saviors. When they then fail to protect the country from Trump’s depredations, they distance themselves from his behavior through anonymous leaks to the press. Thus we learn that Trump’s Jewish aides, including chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, are supposedly “disgusted” with Trump. But Cohn returned to work dutifully on Wednesday, still angling, no doubt, for a plum appointment to the Federal Reserve chairmanship early next year.

Though the president who took America to war with Nazis was a Democrat, and conservatives fought the civil rights movement with billy clubs, Republicans have nevertheless fashioned themselves for decades as the true heirs to both righteous traditions. This rhetorical sorcery has paid off for them in many ways, but it will be put to the ultimate test now that Trump is appeasing neo-Nazis in the role of GOP Grand Wizard.

33,600 piece jigsaw puzzle time lapse video shows the value of patience:

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