Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:13 AM and sunset 7:39 PM, for 13h 25m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 21.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM. The Whitewater Unified School Board meets in closed session at 6:30 PM, and in open session beginning at 7 PM. 

 On this day in 1863, the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry is among the Union forces that assault Confederate positions in Perryville, Oklahoma.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Rick Romell reports Farm Bureau report: Wisconsin again leads nation in family farm bankruptcies:

From July 2018 through June 2019, Wisconsin farmers filed 45 bankruptcies under Chapter 12, a section of the U.S. bankruptcy code that provides financially troubled family farmers with a streamlined path to repay all or part of their debts.

….

With depressed milk prices besetting Wisconsin’s thousands of dairy operations, the state has led the country in farm bankruptcies in recent years. Ronald Wirtz, regional outreach director of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, also has pointed to Wisconsin’s smaller average farm size as a factor.

Wisconsin also has lots of farms — the 11th highest total in the nation, data from the 2017 U.S. Census of Agriculture shows. Even accounting for the relatively large number of farms here, however, Wisconsin’s farm bankruptcy rate is among the highest in the country.

Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev report Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting U.S.:

President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.

….

• Asked how the briefer reacted, the source recalled he said something to the effect of, “Sir, we’ll look into that.”
• Trump replied by asking incredulously how many hurricanes the U.S. could handle and reiterating his suggestion that the government intervene before they make landfall.
• The briefer “was knocked back on his heels,” the source in the room added. “You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting. People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, ‘What the f—? What do we do with this?'”

Trump also raised the idea in another conversation with a senior administration official. A 2017 NSC memo describes that second conversation, in which Trump asked whether the administration should bomb hurricanes to stop them from hitting the homeland. A source briefed on the NSC memo said it does not contain the word “nuclear”; it just says the president talked about bombing hurricanes.

  Meet Hong Kong’s Teenage Protesters:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 28m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 30.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1835, the Michigan legislature incorporates the Wisconsin Internal Improvement Company to open communication between Green Bay and the Mississippi by land or water.

Recommended for reading in full:

Raj Karan Gambhir and Jack Karsten report Why paper is considered state-of-the-art voting technology:

Without a paper audit trail, it can be difficult to detect errors or breaches in the voting machine’s software or hardware, possibly allowing an incursion into American voting systems to go unnoticed. Even if an error is found, performing an audit of a paperless system can be difficult or impossible given a lack of redundant records to verify vote totals.

These concerns are not hypothetical: At the 2018 DEF CON hacking conference, a computer scientist easily manipulated a paperless DRE system such that every vote for one candidate registered as a vote for their opponent. Even more troubling was that without a paper audit trail, it was not possible to know the true count for each candidate.

The vulnerability of paperless systems became a real issue during the tight Georgia gubernatorial and Texas senate races of 2018. In both cases, paperless DRE machines allegedly switched votes for Democratic candidates into Republican votes. While this was likely a software glitch, the lack of a paper audit trail confuses what the intended votes were, and whether these allegations were true.

Lachlan Markay reports Steve King Is Broke And Has Been Abandoned by His Colleagues as He Runs for Re-Election: 

It is a remarkable though not entirely unpredictable abandonment of a sitting member of Congress. Though he was always controversial and further to the right than most of his colleagues, King has burned virtually all his bridges in the party this year with outlandish comments about white supremacy and abortion.

But while those comments have made King a pariah in the party—with House Republican leaders stripping him of his committee assignments—King has refused to leave office. Now, as he faces the toughest campaign since he was first elected in 2002, he is doing so with a potentially catastrophic lack of resources. The $18,365 that King’s campaign had in the bank at the end of June was the least cash on hand he’s ever reported after the first six months of a cycle.

King is dealing with that lack of resources as he faces very immediate threats to his incumbency. His 2018 Democratic opponent, former professional baseball player J.D. Scholten, lost by fewer than three points last year, and is making another run for the seat. This time around King also has a formidable Republican primary opponent, state senator Randy Feenstra, who has already scored endorsements from influential Iowans such as evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. At the end of July, Feenstra’s campaign committee reported having $337,314.30 cash on hand, compared to King’s $18,000.

See also Congressman Steve King, But Not Only Steve King… and Why We (Now) Fight.

 Trying the Chow Mein Sandwich:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:42 PM, for 13h 30m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 40.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1970, a car bomb detonated near Sterling Hall on the UW-Madison campus kills research scientist Robert Fassnacht.

Recommended for reading in full:

 David A. Graham observes Trump Longs to Command the Economy (‘In his struggle against China, the president has begun to resemble his authoritarian rival Xi Jinping’):

The phrase that leaps from this meandering jeremiad [Trump on Twitter on 8.23.19] is this: Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China. In his ongoing struggle against China, Trump has begun to ever more resemble his rival Xi Jinping—an authoritarian presiding over a command economy.

….

Even if Trump is serious, does he really think he can mandate the behavior of private business via Twitter missive? Who knows! Trump has shown enough autocratic impulse, and enough ignorance of how the government and law work, that it’s impossible to rule that out. It’s also possible, though, that Trump knows he can’t actually decree such a move, but understands the power of saying it anyway, both as public relations and as a way to pressure companies to act out of fear of presidential reprisal.

Trump has demonstrated a yearning for the tools of a command economy since his campaign, when he repeatedly promised to keep American jobs in the country. In November 2016, when he was still president-elect, he bullied Carrier, the air-conditioner company, to cancel the closing of a plant in Indiana. The move horrified small-government conservatives, many of whom had opposed Trump during the election, but he was just getting started. As his trade war has hurt American agriculture, the president has undertaken a $16 billion subsidy program for farmers.

James Hamblin writes Trump Orders ‘a Lot’ of Ketamine for Depressed Veterans:

Trump said on Wednesday that the government will purchase “a lot” of the drug esketamine, a derivative of ketamine.

Though ketamine is known as a recreational hallucinogen, Trump asserted that a new nasal-spray derivative would be of great benefit to veterans with depression. As he left the White House for a veterans’ conference in Kentucky, he told reporters that he had instructed the Department of Veterans Affairs to make a large purchase—overriding a recent decision by the doctors who manage the hospitals’ formulary of which drugs are to be prescribed.

“There’s a product that’s made right now that just came out by Johnson & Johnson which has a tremendously positive—pretty short-term, but nevertheless positive—effect,” Trump said. But that statement is contrary to the evidence. A review by the Food and Drug Administration of what limited studies have been done with esketamine found mixed results, leaving many scientists unsure if the drug is indeed effective and safe. Just last week, the agency published a report that said the drug was not reliably better than placebo.

A[nother] benefit from dogs:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:44 PM, for 13h 33m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression pact.

Recommended for reading in full:

Damian Paletta, Robert Costa, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker report The month a shadow fell on Trump’s economy:

Top White House advisers notified President Trump earlier this month that some internal forecasts showed that the economy could slow markedly over the next year, stopping short of a recession but complicating his path to reelection in 2020.

The private forecast, one of several delivered to Trump and described by three people familiar with the briefing, contrasts sharply with the triumphant rhetoric the president and his surrogates have repeatedly used to describe the economy.

Even as his aides warn of a business climate at risk of faltering, the president has been portraying the economy to the public as “phenomenal” and “incredible.” He has told aides that he thinks he can convince Americans that the economy is vibrant and unrattled through a public messaging campaign. But the internal and external warnings that the economy could slip have contributed to a muddled and often contradictory message.

Administration officials have scrambled this week to assemble a menu of actions Trump could take to avert an economic downturn. Few aides have a firm sense of what steps he would seriously consider, in part because he keeps changing his mind.

Noah Lanard reports Trump’s New Indefinite Family Detention Plan Completes a Cruel Agenda:

On Wednesday, the Trump administration rolled out the last major piece of that crackdown: A regulation that would allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement to detain families indefinitely, instead of the current legal limit of about 20 days. The rule is set to go into effect in October and would lead to families spending months, if not longer, in family detention centers.

Department of Homeland Security officials under Barack Obama and Trump have argued that detaining families who cross the border together is necessary for deterring people without strong asylum claims from crossing in large numbers to find work or reunite with relatives. But since the 2015 court ruling that created the 20-day limit, families have usually been quickly released after seeking out Border Patrol agents. Adults who cross the border can already be subjected to indefinite detention and increasingly are under Trump.

Immigrant advocates have strongly opposed family detention under both presidents. They point to DHS’s often terrible track record of overseeing family detention centers and argue that short periods of confinement can cause lasting trauma to people fleeing persecution.

A Robotic Wheelchair Revolution:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:45 PM, for 13h 36m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1485, Richard III meets his end at the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Recommended for reading in full:

Jim Tankersley and Emily Cochrane report Budget Deficit on Path to Surpass $1 Trillion Under Trump:

The deficit — the gap between what the government takes in through taxes and other sources of revenue and what it spends — will reach $960 billion for the 2019 fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. That gap will widen to $1 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office said in updated forecasts released on Wednesday.

The updated projections show deficits rising — and damage from Mr. Trump’s tariffs mounting — faster than the office had previously predicted. In May, the budget office said it expected a deficit of $896 billion for 2019 and $892 billion for 2020.

That damage would be even higher if not for lower-than-expected interest rates, which are reducing the amount of money the government has to pay to its borrowers. Still, the 2019 deficit is projected to be 25 percent larger than it was in 2018, and the budget office predicts it will continue to rise every year through 2023.

By 2029, the national debt will reach its highest level as a share of the economy since the immediate aftermath of World War II.

Elaina Plott writes Trump’s Phone Calls With Wayne LaPierre Reveal NRA’s Influence:

Earlier this afternoon [8.20], according to a person briefed on the call, the president told LaPierre in another phone call that universal background checks were off the table. “He was cementing his stance that we already have background checks and that he’s not waffling on this anymore,” the source told me. “He doesn’t want to pursue it.” In the call, the source added, Trump said he wanted to focus now on “increasing funding” for mental-health care and directing attorneys general across the country to start prosecuting “gun crime” through federal firearms charges from the Justice Department.

The NRA has been consumed by internal strife in recent months, including attempted coups from within, investigations into questionable spending by top executives, and a messy battle with its former advertising agency—all of which the group’s officials calmly refer to as “family issues.” Accordingly, many have speculated that the gun lobby’s clout is not what it once was, that its so-called family issues have caused the NRA’s grip on the GOP to soften. But as the conversations between Trump and LaPierre show, the NRA continues to influence gun policy, or lack thereof, in the Republican Party. Even with its leadership in disarray, the group has once more ensured that modest gun-control efforts are a nonstarter, turning a president who once boasted that he wasn’t “afraid” of the NRA into one of its most reliable advocates.

See also Investigators Are Zeroing in on Top NRA Leaders’ Russia Ties.

Looking at Mass Shootings That Happen Every Year: