Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a thunderstorm in one or two spots this afternoon, and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 23m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred ninety-eighth day.
On this day in 1958, the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, becomes the first watercraft to travel beneath the ice cap reach the geographic North Pole.
Recommended for reading in full:
The Washington Post‘s editorial board writes of A smart way to keep Putin out of the next U.S. election:
THERE IS a lot Congress could do to better protect U.S. elections, and a lot Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has not allowed lawmakers to achieve. Now, two senators are offering one more opportunity.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are urging colleagues negotiating this year’s defense spending bill to include an amendment in that legislation that they believe would make Russia less likely to repeat its 2016 interference. The provision would mirror parts of the duo’s stand-alone Deter Act, and it also would build on a proposal tacked on to a version of the reauthorization act the House passed last month.
The senators’ Deter Act idea differs from its House counterpart in a few ways, the most important of which is that it is more carefully targeted actually to deter. The House bill would impose additional sanctions on Russia’s sovereign debt immediately and make them difficult to remove. Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Rubio instead suggest readying sanctions that would take effect in the event of future interference. It’s a smart strategy.
Any state that considers taking aggressive action against another weighs the potential costs against the gains. The U.S. response to Russian malfeasance has not been consistent or credible enough to change Vladimir Putin’s calculus. President Trump’s sternest reprimand to the Kremlin leader has been a smirking “Don’t meddle,” so altering the equation is up to Congress. The House bill would make Russia suffer now, no matter whether it decides to attack again, and the bar for removing sanctions is so high that the country has no guarantee of relief even if it does not. Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Rubio, on the other hand, would give Russia a clear reason to refrain.
The senators’ suggestion has another advantage: Because there is a small stock of sovereign debt available, they would include a panoply of other punishments, including blocking transactions with Russia’s energy, banking and defense sectors, as well as sanctioning oligarchs and other figures participating in any interference efforts.