Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 79. Sunrise is 5:51 and sunset is 8:09 for 14 hours 18 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waning crescent with 45.5 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1965, President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.
Residents of Whitewater may have heard, over these last months, from local special-interest men insisting that they’re concerned about higher prices. There are two fitting responses to these gentlemen. First, the easiest way to relieve many thousands of residents of higher costs would be, after all, for incumbent landlords to charge less for rent. (It’s the one solution they never propose. They’re like a man who complains about a locked door while keeping the key in his pocket.)
Second, these men have backed the very national policies that have made affordability harder:
[Federal Reserve Governor Lisa] Cook also said the Fed is running out of space to deal with inflation given how long it has overshot the 2% target. As measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index, inflation in June versus the same month a year before stood at 3.7%.
Cook warned “Inflation may become entrenched in price- and wage-setting behavior, leading to persistence that would be much harder for us to attack,” adding, “while we might be able to afford to wait for longer in a different environment, we do not have that luxury in this one.”
[…]
Cook said of the FOMC meeting that “I felt it was appropriate not to change rates while we see how” inflation trends shape up. She noted that drivers of inflation like tariffs, the Middle East war and investment tied to the artificial intelligence sector, may ease, which would help lower overall price pressures and obviate the case for raising interest rates.
That said, Cook noted “I am firmly committed to restoring price stability.”
(Emphasis added.) See Michael S. Derby, Fed’s Cook ready to raise rates if inflation doesn’t start easing, Reuters, August 5, 2026.
The inflationary drivers that Cook describes are of the Trump administration’s making. National trade and foreign policies create price pressure, after which the central bank imposes higher borrowing costs on households and businesses to contain the resulting inflation. Federal policies have been choices to impose tariffs and wage wars, producing inflation that compels interest rate hikes to slow it.
Such is the new golden age under the president of peace.
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A New Ethics Ordinance and a Whitewater Comparative Analysis.
New images of the sun show its surface in the finest detail yet: