Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:16 AM and sunset 7:35 PM, for 13h 19m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the Iron Brigade fights its first battle:
On this date the Iron Brigade (Western soldiers) fought their first battle at Browner Farm. The unit was composed of the 2nd Infantry, 6th Infantry, 7th Wisconsin Infantry, and the 19th Indiana Infantry, 24th Michigan Infantry, and Battery B of the 4th U.S. Light Artillery and was well known for its valor at such Civil War battles as Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Fickling and Anjani Trivedi report Trump’s Mexico Trade Deal Looks Like a Lemon (“Peer under the hood, and these auto rules pack less punch”):
The key elements certainly look dramatic: lifting rules-of-origin requirements to 75 percent to avoid import tariffs, and a separate rule that 40 percent to 45 percent of content come from factories paying more than $16 an hour. The wage rule in particular is about twice what Mexican assembly-line workers make, and four times the average at parts companies there.
When you take a look under the hood, though, there’s a lot less than meets the eye.
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Based on the NHTSA’s data [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], there are just three models made in Mexico that are currently exempt but would attract tariffs under the new regime: Nissan Motor Co.’s Versa Sedan, Audi AG’s SQ5, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s Fiat 500. Of these, only the Versa sells more than a handful of models in the U.S., with 106,772 vehicles shipped in 2017.
Tim Arango, Adam Nagourney, and Jose A. Del Real report Duncan Hunter’s Political Promise Foiled by Hard Partying and a Corruption Scandal:
SAN DIEGO — In Alpine, Calif., a suburban Southern California enclave, Duncan Hunter was a good neighbor. He’d help people do yard work, or move heavy furniture. He drove the same dented-up truck for years. At parties, he’d have a beer, two tops, and he might go off and sneak a cigarette so his wife wouldn’t see. He rarely talked about his job as a congressman.
In Washington, Mr. Hunter was a fixture on the bar scene, and spent lavishly — over $400 for 30 tequila shots at a bachelor party, and countless fancy dinners. He visited one of his favorite bars sometimes multiple times a day, piling up thousands of dollars in tabs. On occasion, he would get into loud arguments with patrons, once over the choice of music on the jukebox (he hated Celine Dion).
Those divergent lives — between the watering holes and halls of power in Washington and the suburban tracts and chain stores of Southern California — intersected for years, prosecutors say, as Mr. Hunter and his wife funded their personal lives with campaign donations, the dimensions of which were revealed in an indictment last week.
David Frum writes The President Is a Crook (“The country now faces a choice between the Trump presidency and the rule of law”):
So now it’s confirmed, as a matter of legal record, that President Donald Trump organized a scheme to violate federal election laws. He directed his longtime personal attorney to pay at least one woman for silence. That attorney got the money by lying to a bank to get a home-equity line of credit.
It’s a matter of legal record, too, that Trump’s campaign chair was a huge-scale crook. Despite his desperate financial straits, he volunteered to work for Trump for free—and Trump accepted.
These two cases complete the beginnings of the story. They are not the story in full. The Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort cases are like the first rocky outcroppings a ship passes as it makes landfall. They are examples of the kind of people willing to work for Trump—and the way that those people carried on their business. They indicate why one of Trump’s sons would write “I love it” when offered stolen information about the Hillary Clinton campaign by a purported representative of the Russian government, how so much doubtful money flowed into the Trump Organization after 2006, and why Trump dares not publish his tax returns.
Ashely Parker writes President non grata: Trump often unwelcome and unwilling to perform basic rituals of the office:
Shunned at two funerals and one (royal) wedding so far, President Trump may be well on his way to becoming president non grata.
The latest snub comes in the form of the upcoming funeral for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which, before his death, the late senator made clear he did not want the sitting president to attend. That the feeling is mutual — Trump nixed issuing a statement that praised McCain as a “hero” — only underscores the myriad ways Trump has rejected the norms of his office and, increasingly, has been rejected in turn.
Less than two years into his first term, Trump has often come to occupy the role of pariah — both unwelcome and unwilling to perform the basic rituals and ceremonies of the presidency, from public displays of mourning to cultural ceremonies.
Self-Driving Cars Need Lessons On Human Drivers: