Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 09m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand fourth day.
On this day in 1862, the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fight at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia.
Recommended for reading in full:
Catherine Rampell writes For Trump and his cronies, draining the swamp means ousting experts:
The latest, most egregious example involves the Economic Research Service, an independent statistical agency at the Agriculture Department.
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The small-but-mighty ERS is arguably the world’s premier agricultural economics agency. It produces critical numbers that farmers rely on when deciding what to plant and how much, how to price, how to manage risk; and that other stakeholders and public officials use to evaluate agricultural policy.
However, because it is independent, the ERS produces research that the Trump administration sometimes finds inconvenient, such as who has really been helped by his tax cuts, how climate change might affect agriculture or how his trade wars hurt farmers.
The administration’s solution to these inconveniences? Blowing up the agency altogether.
In June, the Agriculture Department informed employees at the ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which manages $1.7 billion in scientific funding, that they were moving to “the Kansas City Region,” precise location TBD. Employees had 30 days to decide whether to uproot their families or lose their jobs.
As of July 26, only 116 employees agreed to relocate, according to a USDA spokesperson. That’s about 20 percent of those initially asked. Representatives from the employees’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, told me they expect even fewer to ultimately move, since some employees who said they’d relocate are searching for other opportunities.
John Fritze reports A USA TODAY analysis found Trump used words like ‘invasion’ and ‘killer’ at rallies more than 500 times since 2017:
Invasion. Aliens. Killers. Criminals.
Those are among the words President Donald Trump repeatedly uses while discussing illegal immigration during his campaign rallies, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the transcripts from more than five dozen of those events.
Trump, who traveled Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, to meet with victims and family members reeling from mass shootings, is facing pressure from critics who say his language has fed a climate of anger toward immigrants, raising the risk of violence. A manifesto authorities believe was written by the El Paso gunman before his attack decries “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
But “invasion” is just one of several incendiary terms Trump regularly embraces.
A USA TODAY analysis of the 64 rallies Trump has held since 2017 found that, when discussing immigration, the president has said “invasion” at least 19 times. He has used the word “animal” 34 times and the word “killer” nearly three dozen times.