Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM, for 12h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred eighty-fifth day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets today at 10:00 AM.
On this day in 1864, the 41st Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 41st Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving on garrison duty, railroad guard and picket duty at Memphis and in that vicinity for 90 days.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jane Mayer reports How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump (“A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive”):
Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.
The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”
Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”
David Leonhardt contends The Supreme Court Is Coming Apart (“It’s not just the Kavanaugh mess. Over the long term, the court risks a crisis of legitimacy”):
There are two fundamental problems. The first is that the court has become an intensely partisan institution that pretends otherwise.
The founders envisioned the justices as legal sages, free from the political scrum. They receive lifetime appointments to protect their independence. The justices themselves cherish this image. John Roberts, the chief justice, has famously equated himself with an umpire who merely calls balls and strikes. The comparison is meant to suggest that justices don’t have their own opinions: They just follow the law.
But this is laughable. In almost every major decision last term — and many others over the past decade — the justices divided neatly along partisan lines. The five justices chosen by a Republican president voted one way, and the four chosen by a Democrat voted the other. If the justices are umpires, it sure is strange that Republican and Democratic umpires use vastly different strike zones.
….
The second major threat to the court comes from the radicalness of Republican-appointed justices.
It’s true that the Democratic-appointed justices are more reliably liberal than in the past. There are no more conservatives like Byron White (a John Kennedy appointee) or Felix Frankfurter (a Franklin Roosevelt appointee). But the court’s Democrats still range from moderate to progressive. Stephen Breyer is only somewhat to the left of White and well to the right of Sonia Sotomayor, academic analysis shows. Merrick Garland, Obama’s jilted nominee, was also a moderate.
There are no more Republican moderates. With Anthony Kennedy gone, every Republican justice is on the far end of the spectrum — among the most conservative since World War II. Kavanaugh would almost certainly join them, as would any other Trump nominee.
Adrian Higgins reports Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare:
The U.S. Agriculture Department scientists who gave us the Bradford pear thought they were improving our world. Instead, they left an environmental time bomb that has now exploded.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, the callery pear was the urban planner’s gift from above. A seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion.
The Bradford pear seemed to leap from an architect’s idealized rendering. But in this case, reality outshone the artist’s vision. It was upright and symmetric in silhouette. It exploded with white flowers when we most needed it, in early spring. Its glossy green leaves shimmered coolly in the summer heat, and in the fall, its foliage turned crimson, maroon and orange — a perfect New England study in autumnal color almost everywhere it grew. And it grew everywhere. It flourished in poor soil, wet or dry, acidic or alkaline. It shrugged off pests and diseases, it didn’t drop messy fruit like mulberries or crab apples. Millions of Bradford pears would be planted from California to Massachusetts and would come to signal the dream and aspirations of postwar suburbia. Like the cookie-cutter suburbs themselves, the Bradford pear would embody that quintessentially American idea of the goodness of mass-produced uniformity.
But like a comic book supervillain who had started off good, the Bradford pear crossed over to something darker. It turned from thornless to spiky, limber to brittle, chaste to promiscuous, tame to feral. Most of all, it became invasive. It is now an ecological marauder destined to continue its spread for decades, long after those suburban tract houses have faded away. Generations yet to be born will come to know this tree and learn to hate it.
Dan Friedman writes Giuliani Has Been Told to Stop Advocating for Foreign Interests but Just Did It Anyway:
“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” Giuliani told the audience. “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.”
Giuliani also said that sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration after the United States pulled out of a deal in which Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons “are working” by damaging Iran’s economy. “These are the conditions that lead to successful revolution,” he said.
This statement conflicts with official US policy. The State Department says the United States does not support regime change in Iran and announced last week that Giuliani “does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy.” During an appearance on CNN Sunday, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley also responded to the suggestion by the president’s lawyer. “The United States is not looking to do a regime change in Iran,” Haley said.
Giuliani was paid through his “firm” to deliver the speech, he told The Daily Beast last week. He declined to disclose his fee. Giuliani does not reveal all his clients, but he has recently worked for foreign entities including the government of Qatar, a member of Ukrainian political party that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort admitted he illegally lobbied for, and Turkish officials prosecuted in the United States for circumventing prior US sanctions on Iran.
What’s Actually In a Camel’s Hump?:
Anura Wijewikrama fishes two hours each morning and two hours each evening. And like his grandfather and father before him, he does so on handmade stilts driven into the sand. He is one of the few still carrying on the practice, which is exclusively found in the stunning waters off Sri Lanka. What started as a World War II-era reaction to food and boat shortages is now done to keep tradition alive, with stilt fishermen like Anura taking on other jobs to make ends meet.