Daily Bread for 8.30.18

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 13m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Wisconsin troops rest at the White House lawn:

The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run. By the end of this third day, more than 18,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded and Union forces had been pushed back to Washington, D.C. When the Wisconsin regiments arrived in Washington, they rested on the White House lawn. According to historian Frank Klement, “President Lincoln came out with a pail of water in one hand and a dipper in the other. He moved among the men, offering water to the tired and thirsty. Some Wisconsin soldiers drank from the common dipper and thanked the President for his kindness.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bruce Vielmetti reports Milwaukee County Jail inmate who remained shackled, handcuffed during childbirth sues county, sheriff:

A former Milwaukee County Jail inmate whom deputies ordered to wear leg shackles before, during and after she gave birth in a hospital has sued the county and Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt over her ordeal.

According to Sandra Robles’ federal civil rights lawsuit, the chain between her feet was so short she couldn’t reach the stirrups when it came time to push during labor. In addition, one hand was chained to the bed.

Deputies refused medical staff requests to remove Robles’ shackles at least during labor.

After she gave birth, Robles wore the shackles to the restroom, and the arm chain prevented her from having full skin contact with her newborn, she said. An armed deputy was present for her entire hospital stay.

Kevin Sieff reports U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question:

PHARR, Tex. — On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

(Note well that the Trump Administration has no specific reason to doubt any given American’s citizenship – they’re relying on a mere and general suspicion, and shifting the burden of proof to the citizen to prove his status. That general suspicion is cast on Latinos without particular evidence. In a free society, the burden of proof should rest with the state, not the citizen.)

Josh Rogin sets Trump straight on how a free press works:

Natasha Bertrand considers Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London (“The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee flew to London to gather intel on Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier alleging Trump-campaign ties with Russia. But MI5, MI6, and GCHQ didn’t seem interested”):

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign-intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)

A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for U.K. intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, and neither did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

(Nunes has so little credibility that allied officials know to shun him.)

Engineering a Racing Yacht to Cross the Pacific Ocean: