Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 40m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the one thousand thirty-seventh day.
Today is the eighteenth anniversary of the September 11th Al Qaida attacks on the United States.
Recommended for reading in full:
Bruce Reidel writes Al-Qaida today, 18 years after 9/11:
Eighteen years after the 9/11 attacks, the al-Qaida organization that carried them out is a shell of its previous self. The global campaign against Osama bin Laden’s creation has achieved notable success. The ideas that inspired bin Laden and his followers have lost some, but not all, of their attractiveness. There is no place for complacency, but the threat is different.
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The 9/11 attacks also transformed the American national security bureaucracy more thoroughly than any event since the dawn of the Cold War. New organizations like the National Counter Terrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Director of National Intelligence owe their creation to 9/11. This infrastructure is still essential to detecting and disrupting plots. The next administration should review the infrastructure with an eye to strengthening damaged foreign alliances.
Shawn Donnan reports Recession Already Grips Corners of U.S., Menacing Trump’s 2020 Bid:
Somewhere between his home near Madison and the factory he runs on the edge of the small town of Brodhead, the news will turn to the trade wars and Donald Trump will again claim that China is bearing the cost of his tariffs. That’s when Petras loses it.
“It’s just an outright lie, and he knows it,” says Petras, president of Kuhn North America, which employs some 600 people at its farm-equipment factory in Wisconsin. For Kuhn, Trump’s trade war has produced a toxic mix of rising costs and falling revenues. “You’re slamming your fist on the steering wheel and saying ‘Why would you tell people this?’”
About 250 Kuhn employees spent the Labor Day holiday caught in a two-week furlough, and they’re facing another in early October. A shrinking order book means Kuhn is cutting costs and slashing production as Petras and his managers peer out at a U.S. economy that looks far bleaker from the swing-state heartland than it does in either the White House or on Wall Street.
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In 22 states—including electorally important ones like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania—the number of people working in factories actually fell in the first seven months of this year, according to figures compiled by the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank.
This isn’t what Trump promised. From his trade policy to tax cuts and deregulation, his grand economic vow was to bring factories home. By unraveling trade deals such as Nafta, taking on China, and deploying tariffs like economic cruise missiles, Trump’s “America First” agenda was supposed to boost growth in an iconic sector of the economy.