Good morning. 
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:51 PM, for 12h 08m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 45.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand forty-eighth day.
On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, with the proclamation (Proclamation 95) to take effect on January 1, 1863.
Recommended for reading in full:
Tom Nichols writes If This Isn’t Impeachable, Nothing Is:
The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.
Until now, there was room for reasonable disagreement over impeachment as both a matter of politics and a matter of tactics. The Mueller report revealed despicably unpatriotic behavior by Trump and his minions, but it did not trigger a political judgment with a majority of Americans that it warranted impeachment. The Democrats, for their part, remained unwilling to risk their new majority in Congress on a move destined to fail in a Republican-controlled Senate.
Now, however, we face an entirely new situation. In a call to the new president of Ukraine, Trump reportedly attempted to pressure the leader of a sovereign state into conducting an investigation—a witch hunt, one might call it—of a U.S. citizen, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden.
As the Ukrainian Interior Ministry official Anton Gerashchenko told the Daily Beast when asked about the president’s apparent requests, “Clearly, Trump is now looking for kompromat to discredit his opponent Biden, to take revenge for his friend Paul Manafort, who is serving seven years in prison.”
….
If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.
Lily Kuo reports Chinese journalists to be tested on loyalty to Xi Jinping (‘Exam will test journalists on president’s teachings on socialism and propaganda’):
The on-site, closed-book exam, to be administered by news organisations in early October, will be divided into five parts, including two on Xi Jinping’s teachings on socialism for the new era and Xi’s “important thoughts on propaganda”, according to Media Reform, a self-published news account on WeChat.
News of the test, first reported by the South China Morning Post and the research programme China Media Project, comes as Chinese media face increasing restrictions. China is considered one of the least free countries to operate as a journalist, ranked 177 out of 180 in 2019 by Reporters Without Borders, above Eritrea and North Korea.