Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see clouds give way to sun with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1816, soldiers arrive at Fort Crawford:

After the War of 1812, the United States Congress approved a plan to erect a chain of forts along the Fox-Wisconsin-Mississippi waterway. In 1816 Fort Crawford was erected on a mound behind the main village of Prairie du Chien. It was a four-sided enclosure made of squared logs, set horizontally. At the two opposing corners stood a blockhouse. Soldiers’ quarters formed the walls of the fort, faced the parade ground, and accommodated five companies. By the middle of the year, the 8th Infantry had established three posts on the east bank of the Mississippi: Fort Edwards, Fort Armstrong and Fort Crawford, the latter named for the Secretary of War.

Recommended for reading in full:

 David Von Drehle writes Jeffrey Epstein’s scandal of secrecy points to a creeping rot in the American justice system:

When rich people are credibly accused of crimes, does the public have a right to know? Should multimillionaires be allowed to silence their accusers with cash?

According to superlawyer David Boies, “dozens” of women who could give testimony about being sexually assaulted as girls by mysterious financier Jeffrey Epstein are silenced by settlements they reached with their alleged assailant. The exact number is yet another secret in this least transparent of criminal cases. “Three dozen or eight dozen, I don’t know, but there are dozens,” Boies told me recently. He himself represents two alleged Epstein victims bound by “non-disclosure agreements” (NDAs).

Because Epstein can afford to buy silence, he may succeed in shuttering the window of accountability pried open in a South Florida court back in February. U.S. District Judge Kenneth A. Marra ruled that federal prosecutors — led by the current labor secretary, Alexander Acosta — broke the law by entering a secret sweetheart deal to allow Epstein to serve a cushy sentence without facing evidence that he assaulted more than 30?underage girls in Palm Beach.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see showers with a high of sixty-eight.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 21s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On June 19th and 20th in 1944, the United States engages and decisively defeats Imperial Japan at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Erin Banco, Sam Brodey, Lachlan Markay, and Noah Shachtman report Admin Hid Shanahan’s Dark Past, Senators Say:

The senators tasked with vetting Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan say they were unaware of the accusations of domestic violence in his family that led to his resignation Tuesday. The altercations never came up during Shanahan’s 2017 confirmation hearing for the position of Deputy Secretary of Defense, lawmakers told The Daily Beast, nor did it arise as he was preparing to assume the role of Pentagon chief permanently.

“We’ve been wondering why we have not gotten an FBI report. It has seemed slow to us. And now we understand why,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, adding that he “didn’t know” about Shanahan’s ex-wife’s arrest for punching Shanahan in the face, nor his son’s arrest for attacking his mother with a baseball bat, until reports surfaced in USA Today and the Washington Post about the alleged incidents.

President Donald Trump nominated Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, for defense secretary in March 2019. Since then, his confirmation process lingered, leaving the Pentagon without a confirmed leader for the longest stretch in history and raising concerns among lawmakers who were told that the postponement was partly because of a hold up by the FBI. At least one of those lawmakers called for an investigation on Tuesday as to why they had not been told by the administration about Shanahan’s past.

“I want to know what was known, and whether it was fully disclosed,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who also sits on the armed services committee, told The Daily Beast. “It was material to this nomination when he was proposed for deputy secretary, as well as named his nominee as secretary, although the full paperwork was never sent to us.”

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 20m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1812, Pres. Madison signs a Congressional declaration of war against Great Britain.

Recommended for reading in full:

Caitlin Dickerson reports The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old (‘Baby Constantin spent five months of his first year in a foster home. His family got a painful look at America’s experiment with family separation as an immigration policy’):

Constantin was ultimately the youngest of thousands of children taken from their parents under a policy that was meant to deter families hoping to immigrate to the United States. It began nearly a year before the administration would acknowledge it publicly in May 2018, and the total number of those affected is still unknown. The government still has not told the Mutus why their son was taken from them, and officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to comment for this story.

In Constantin’s case, it would be months before his parents saw him again. Before then, his father would be sent for psychiatric evaluation in a Texas immigration detention center because he couldn’t stop crying; his mother would be hospitalized with hypertension from stress. Constantin would become attached to a middle-class American family, having spent the majority of his life in their tri-level house on a tree-lined street in rural Michigan, and then be sent home.

Now more than a year and a half old, the baby still can’t walk on his own, and has not spoken.

Immunology wars: The battle with HIV: 

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 20m 04s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School Board meets tonight in closed session beginning at 6:30 PM, with open session scheduled for 7 PM.  Whitewater’s Library Board also meets at 6:30 PM.

(A necessary condition of a good government is that it has sound policies.  A second condition is that it faithfully follows those policies, should they be sound.  Anything less is a provocation.)

On this day in 1673, Marquette & Joliet reach the Mississippi: “Here we are, then, on this so renowned river, all of whose peculiar features I have endeavored to note carefully.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Early birds awoke to a treat today at The Atlantic‘s website: William Langewiesche’s extraordinary Vanished: How Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 Disappeared (“The explanation lies not in the sea but on land—in Malaysia, where officials know more than they dare to say”):

1. The Disappearance

at 12:42 a.m. on the quiet, moonlit night of March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777-200ER operated by Malaysia Airlines took off from Kuala Lumpur and turned toward Beijing, climbing to its assigned cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. The designator for Malaysia Airlines is MH. The flight number was 370. Fariq Hamid, the first officer, was flying the airplane. He was 27 years old. This was a training flight for him, the last one; he would soon be fully certified. His trainer was the pilot in command, a man named Zaharie Ahmad Shah, who at 53 was one of the most senior captains at Malaysia Airlines. In Malaysian style, he was known by his first name, Zaharie. He was married and had three adult children. He lived in a gated development. He owned two houses. In his first house he had installed an elaborate Microsoft flight simulator. He flew it frequently, and often posted to online forums about his hobby. In the cockpit, Fariq would have been deferential to him, but Zaharie was not known for being overbearing.

The arrangement was standard. Zaharie’s transmissions were a bit unusual. At 1:01 a.m. he radioed that they had leveled off at 35,000 feet—a superfluous report in radar-surveilled airspace where the norm is to report leaving an altitude, not arriving at one. At 1:08 the flight crossed the Malaysian coastline and set out across the South China Sea in the direction of Vietnam. Zaharie again reported the plane’s level at 35,000 feet.

Eleven minutes later, as the airplane closed in on a waypoint near the start of Vietnamese air-traffic jurisdiction, the controller at Kuala Lumpur Center radioed, “Malaysian three-seven-zero, contact Ho Chi Minh one-two-zero-decimal-nine. Good night.” Zaharie answered, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.” He did not read back the frequency, as he should have, but otherwise the transmission sounded normal. It was the last the world heard from MH370. The pilots never checked in with Ho Chi Minh or answered any of the subsequent attempts to raise them.

Why Does Extra Data Cost Money?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of sixty-five.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 48s of daytime.  The moon is full with  99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Henry Dodge and his militia fight at the Battle of the Pecatonica:

On the morning of June 16, 1832, Colonel Henry Dodge led a party of volunteer militia on horseback in pursuit of a group of thirteen Kickapoo Indians. The militia cornered the party at a bend in the Pecatonica River in present-day eastern Lafayette County. In the quick and fierce battle that ensued, all thirteen Native Americans were killed and three militiamen wounded. This small engagement of the 1832 Black Hawk War marked an early success against Black Hawk’s band and served to enhance the reputation of Dodge, who became Wisconsin’s first territorial governor four years later.

Recommended for reading in full:

Colin Lecher reports Russia used social media to keep EU voters at home, report finds:

The report, an update on a continuing plan to battle disinformation, said some progress had been made in deterring malicious campaigns. Officials said plans to tackle disinformation campaigns through a task force had shown progress, and that work with tech companies had also stemmed the tide of false information.

The report said it could not “identify a distinct cross-border” attempt to specifically target European elections. But, the report also found, “evidence collected revealed a continued and sustained disinformation activity by Russian sources aiming to suppress turnout and influence voter preferences.” The activity included challenging the EU’s “democratic legitimacy” and exploiting controversial topics like immigration, with actors using images like the Notre Dame Cathedral fire “to illustrate the alleged decline of Western and Christian values in the EU.”

According to the report, the number of disinformation cases attributed to Russian sources doubled between 2018 and 2019, jumping from about 430 in January 2018 to nearly 1,000 a year later. While Russia was singled out for the efforts, the EU said “other external actors were also involved.”

(The most immediate threat to Western and Christian values in Europe comes from Putin’s Russia and Putin’s American admirer in the White House.)

Margaret Sullivan writes Sarah Sanders was the disdainful Queen of Gaslighting:

When Sarah Sanders said Thursday that she hopes to be remembered for her transparency and honesty, the first impulse was to laugh.

But lying to citizens while being paid by them really isn’t all that funny.

Sanders took on an impossible job when she became President Trump’s spokeswoman, a job that’s about to reach a welcome conclusion.

She would claim to represent the truth on behalf of a president who lies.

She did it disrespectfully and apparently without shame or an understanding of what the role of White House press secretary should be.

She misled reporters or tried to, and through them, misled the American people. And all with her distinctive curled-lip disdain.

Four Stories About Dogs:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 19m 30s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1215, King John of England accedes to the Magna Carta:

Recommended for reading in full:

Brian Faler reports Big businesses paying even less than expected under GOP tax law:

The U.S. Treasury saw a 31 percent drop in corporate tax revenues last year, almost twice the decline official budget forecasters had predicted. Receipts were projected to rebound sharply this year, but so far they’ve only continued to fall, down by almost 9 percent or $11 billion.

Though business profits remain healthy and the economy is strong, total corporate taxes are at the lowest levels seen in more than 50 years.

At the same time, overall taxes paid by individuals under the new tax law are up so far this year by 3 percent, thanks to higher wages and salaries, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Last year tax payments by individuals went up 4 percent.

The drop comes even as some Republicans, such as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, have claimed, dubiously, that the law will pay for itself.

(There’s no smaller government to be had from a system of deficit spending through tax redistribution that benefits the few.)

Carol D. Leonnig, Katie Zezima, and Tom Hamburger report Inside the NRA’s finances: Deepening debt, increased spending on legal fees — and cuts to gun training:

The National Rifle Association spent growing sums on overhead in 2018 even as it cut money for core activities such as gun training and political efforts, ending the year deeper in debt, new financial documents show.

The gun rights group’s 2018 financial report, which was obtained by The Washington Post, portrays the longtime political powerhouse as spending faster than its revenue rose.

The records show that the NRA froze its pension plan for employees at the end of last year, a move that saved it close to $13 million, and obtained a $28 million line of credit by borrowing against its Virginia headquarters.

Despite that, the nonprofit group, four affiliated charities and its political committee together ended the year $10.8 million in the red. In 2017, the six groups ended the year with a $1.1 million shortfall.

Brian Mittendorf, an Ohio State University accounting professor who has studied nonprofits, including the NRA, and examined the 2018 report for The Post, said it depicted “a bad year for them financially.” He compared the NRA to a person living paycheck to paycheck, leaning on credit cards with very little cushion.

(There’s no legitimate Second Amendment defense from wasting money and aligning with the ambitions of Putin’s Russia. See Investigators Are Zeroing in on Top NRA Leaders’ Russia Ties—and Challenging the Gun Group’s Story.)

Girl invents teddy bear pouches to hide IVs: