Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a one-third chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset is 7:19 PM, for 12h 53m 18s of daytime. The moon is full today, with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
1918 photo of the original Piggly Wiggly store, Memphis, Tennessee. The first self service grocery store, opened 1916.
On this day in 1916, the first self-service grocery store – a Piggly Wiggly – opens in Memphis, Tennessee. On this day in 1864, the 25th Wisconsin Infantry leaves a fortified position at Lovejoy’s Station to rejoin Sherman’s army in Atlanta.
Recommended for reading in full —
David A. Graham reminds that Only Mueller’s Team Knows What It’s Actually Doing:
Washington sometimes comes to resemble the sitting president. Like Donald Trump, the political and media establishments of the moment have come to expect—nay, demand—instant gratification. Trump’s chaotic style have produced an unintentional experiment in unprecedented White House transparency, in which a senior aide can barely sneeze without seven colleagues telling The Washington Post about it. This in turn has created the expectation that any new development will soon be explained with detailed accounts of what the major players are thinking and what their motivations are—sometimes relayed by anonymous sources, but occasionally, as with Anthony Scaramucci, delivered in shockingly vivid terms by the principals themselves.
In this strange new normal, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation seems especially odd. Such a probe—with the power to alter or even end the path of a presidency—would always be the subject of fascination, but combined with expectation of instant answers, the secretiveness of Mueller’s team has made the few crumbs which have emerged the subject of particularly fevered speculation….
Notably, they aren’t talking. The public knows a decent amount more about the Mueller investigation now than it did two weeks ago, but most of those revelations have come when Mueller has had to work with other agencies—the FBI, which conducted the Manafort raid, the New York attorney general’s office, the IRS, or someone else. Even with all the new information, the Mueller probe remains highly opaque. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon, but neither is the importance of the probe or the desire to figure out where it’s going. That means the summer of speculation is about to give way to an equally feverish autumn of apparent augury.
(This is a sign of Mueller’s team’s discipline.)
McKay Coppins and Elaine Godfrey write, on 8.24.17, that The Republican Establishment Stands Behind Trump:
In the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, The Atlantic reached out to 146 Republican state party chairs and national committee members for reaction to Trump’s handling of the events. We asked each official two questions: Are you satisfied with the president’s response? And do you approve of his comment that there were “some very fine people” who marched alongside the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis?
The vast majority refused to comment on the record, or simply met the questions with silence. Of the 146 GOP officials contacted, just 22 offered full responses—and only seven expressed any kind of criticism or disagreement with Trump’s handling of the episode. (Those seven GOP leaders represent New Mexico, Texas, Virginia, North Dakota, Alaska, Massachusetts, and North Carolina.) The rest came to the president’s defense, either with statements of support or attempts at justification.
Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah writes of A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof:
….I had come to Charleston intending to write about them, the nine people who were gone. But from gavel to gavel, as I listened to the testimony of the survivors and family members, often the only thing I could focus on, and what would keep me up most nights while I was there, was the magnitude of Dylann Roof’s silence, his refusal to even look up, to ever explain why he did what he had done. Over and over again, without even bothering to open his mouth, Roof reminded us that he did not have to answer to anyone. He did not have to dignify our questions with a response or explain anything at all to the people whose relatives he had maimed and murdered. Roof was safeguarded by his knowledge that white American terrorism is never waterboarded for answers, it is never twisted out for meaning, we never identify its “handlers,” and we could not force him to do a thing. He remained inscrutable. He remained in control, just the way he wanted to be.
And so, after weeks in the courtroom, and shortly before Dylann Roof was asked to stand and listen to his sentence, I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would. Which is why I left Charleston, the site of his crime, and headed inland to Richland County, to Columbia, South Carolina—to find the people who knew him, to see where Roof was born and raised. To try to understand the place where he wasted 21 years of a life until he committed an act so heinous that he became the first person sentenced to die for a federal hate crime in the entire history of the United States of America….
Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton report Trust damaged between Milwaukee police and community, Department of Justice draft report says:
The Milwaukee Police Department fails the community and its own officers by not communicating clearly, making too many traffic stops and applying inconsistent standards when disciplining officers, according to a draft of a federal report obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The draft report offers a particularly damning critique of Chief Edward Flynn’s reliance on data, a signature component of his strategy since he took over the department in 2008. Federal evaluators found this approach is having a damaging, if unintended, effect on police-community relations.
“MPD’s attention to crime data has distracted the department from the primary tenet of modern policing: trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve,” the draft report states.
What’s more, many officers don’t know what community policing is and don’t think it’s part of their jobs — even though Flynn promised when he was sworn in nine years ago that the department would implement it….
(Ignorance of genuine community policing is probably common in many cities & even small towns: it’s become mostly an ill-grasped slogan for poorly trained officers.)
Tech Insider introduces The Man Who Invented the Super Soaker: