Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.

On this day in 1944,  the Allies land at Normandy to liberate Western Europe and thereafter force the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.

Recommended for reading in full:

Maria Sacchetti reports Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters:

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber.

(The denial of simple services for minor children is a present to Trump’s base, a gift to his most bigoted admirers.)

Paul Farhi reports Lies? The news media is starting to describe Trump’s ‘falsehoods’ that way:

It’s (almost) official: The president of the United States is a liar.

This will not come as a revelation to people who have closely followed President Trump’s public statements and Twitter feed and have long doubted his veracity. It is, instead, a late-dawning recognition by mainstream news organizations, which until fairly recently shied away from branding the president’s many questionable utterances as outright lies.

Nowadays, many in the news media are no longer bothering to grant Trump the benefit of the doubt. In routine news and feature stories, Trump’s dishonesty carries no fig leaf. It is described baldly.

A recent sampling:

– CNN: “The Mueller report: A catalog of 77 Trump team lies and falsehoods.”

– Minneapolis Star Tribune: “President Trump lies to troops about pay raise.”

– Financial Times: “The real reason Donald Trump lies.”

(Trump is a liar – we should say so about him.)

Molly Beck writes Wisconsin will soon become an island surrounded by legal weed:

MADISON – When Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signs into law a bill making way for recreational marijuana use in our neighbor to the south, his signature will put Wisconsin on an island surrounded by legal weed.

Three out of the four states that border Wisconsin — Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota —  have now legalized marijuana use and two of them allow residents to purchase and consume cannabis for any reason.

While more and more state legislatures are embracing legal marijuana for medical or recreational reasons — 33 in all — Wisconsin isn’t likely to anytime soon.

Republican lawmakers who control which bills arrive at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ desk are opposed to legalizing recreational marijuana use and are split on whether the plant should be widely available for medicinal purposes.

The Real Reason Japan is Called the “Land of the Rising Sun”:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 44s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1883, William Horlick patents malted milk:

Horlick’s product went on to be used as a staple in fountain drinks as well as survival provisions. Malted milk was even included in explorations undertaken by Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen and Richard Byrd.

Recommended for reading in full:

Andy Sullivan reports Promising thousands of US jobs, Foxconn offshored 155 to Mexico:

Foxconn has offshored more than 150 U.S. jobs to Mexico, according to the Labor Department, even as it struggles to meet job-creation targets promised as part of a massive new factory championed by President Donald Trump.

The Taiwan-based electronics maker said in a filing in Indiana in November 2018 that it would lay off 155 workers at a computer factory outside Indianapolis, citing “changes in our business and production objectives.”

The Labor Department in February determined that the jobs were eliminated because the company had shifted some production to Mexico, records obtained by Reuters through a Freedom of Information Act request show.

Foxconn officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company told the Indianapolis Business Journal in November that the plant in Plainfield, Indiana, was operated by a subsidiary firm and added that the layoffs would not affect other Foxconn-related companies.

The 155 jobs amount to a small fraction of Foxconn’s global workforce, which stood at 988,000 at the end of 2017, according to its corporate responsibility report.

But the company is under the spotlight for having so far failed to meet job-creation targets at another facility in Wisconsin unveiled at a White House ceremony in 2017 and cited by Trump as proof that he was reviving American manufacturing.

(Emphasis added.)

Tory Newmyer reports Manufacturing slips as signs grow of softening Trump economy:

A key measure of U.S. manufacturing strength just slipped to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years, as pressures from President Trump weighed on the sector. 

Add that to a pile of recent worrisome signals that the economy is headed for a slowdown, if not an outright recession, just as the 2020 presidential race starts to kick into higher gear. Trump is counting on the so-far rosy economic picture to boost his reelection chances even as warning signs grow that all is not as good as it appears.

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard put a finer point on it in a Monday presentation opening the possibility of an interest rate cut later this year to jumpstart stalling growth. The central bank “faces an economy that is expected to grow more slowly going forward, with some risk that the slowdown could be sharper than expected due to ongoing global trade regime uncertainty,” he said.

(Emphasis in original.)

How iTunes Secretly Saved Apple:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 11m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1989, Chinese oppression against protestors leads to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

From 6.5.1989:

Recommended for reading in full:

Diana Dombrowski reports Human trafficking is all over Wisconsin, but subtle. You might have seen victims and never known:

Women are bound, hands tied with chains or ropes. They look dirty, as if they’ve been kept in a basement. Some are wide-eyed with fear. Others are stamped with a bar code.

If you type “human trafficking” into an image search on your computer, these are the pictures you will see. The message is clear: Women and children are being sold. They’re trapped. These are the makings of a horror film.

But that bar code was edited into the photo. And these are images from a marketing campaign.

Human trafficking in Wisconsin doesn’t look quite like this. It looks like the promise of a new career as a model. It looks like an expensive gift to your child from an acquaintance. It looks like a drug addiction and the hope of something more, as it did for Stratton.

Not all trafficking involves sex. A recent example of labor trafficking surfaced in the Milwaukee area where federal prosecutors charged five people in what they called a conspiracy to force Mexican nationals to work on farms in Wisconsin.

It’s not the easiest crime to recognize, but human trafficking cases have been documented in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties.

The National Human Trafficking Hotline says it was contacted 122 times about 64 cases in the first six months of 2018 in Wisconsin. Since 2007, the hotline has received 1,523 calls about 362 cases in the state.

Yet no one knows exactly how often people are bought and sold in Wisconsin. Not only do victims sometimes fail to recognize they’re being trafficked and the crimes go unreported, but until this year, the state had no mechanism to collect statewide information on trafficking cases, said Derek Veitenheimer from the Department of Justice.

A new data collection process will include more detailed information about each reported incident.

Meanwhile, Sheboygan Detective Tamara Remington speaks to packed rooms of concerned residents when she shares what she’s learned working trafficking cases.

The average age for kids is 13 or younger

….

If you need help or know someone who does
Contact the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text them at 233733. A live chat option is also available on their website: humantraffickinghotline.org.

If you need immediate assistance, you can also call 9-1-1.

The 23-Year-Old Woman Who Pioneered Investigative Journalism:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 38s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Downtown Whitewater Board at 5 PM.

On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Cold Harbor, when “the 36th Wisconsin Infantry moved to the front, its colonel, Frank Haskell of Madison, was shot dead while commanding his troops to take cover. Co.G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters, from Wisconsin, was placed in the front of the battle on this day as well.”

Recommended for reading in full:

Tara Bahrampour and Robert Barnes report Despite Trump administration denials, new evidence suggests census citizenship question was crafted to benefit white Republicans:

Just weeks before the Supreme Court is expected to rule on whether the Trump administration can add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, new evidence emerged Thursday suggesting the question was crafted specifically to give an electoral advantage to Republicans and whites.

The evidence was found in the files of the prominent Republican redistricting strategist Thomas Hofeller after his death in August. It reveals that Hofeller “played a significant role in orchestrating the addition of the citizenship question to the 2020 Decennial Census in order to create a structural electoral advantage for, in his own words, ‘Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites,’ ” plaintiffs’ lawyers challenging the question wrote in a letter Thursday morning to U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman, one of three federal judges who ruled against the question this year. The lawyers also argued that Trump administration officials purposely obscured Hofeller’s role in court proceedings.

The letter drew on new information discovered on hard drives belonging to Hofeller, which were found inadvertently by his estranged daughter. Stephanie Hofeller Lizon then shared them with the organization Common Cause for a gerrymandering lawsuit it is pursuing in North Carolina.

The files show that Hofeller concluded in a 2015 study that adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and benefit white Republicans in redistricting. Hofeller then pushed the idea with the Trump administration in 2017, according to the lawyers’ letter to Furman.

The evidence, first reported by the New York Times, contradicts sworn testimony by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s expert adviser A. Mark Neuman and senior Justice Department official John Gore, as well as other testimony by defendants, the letter said.

Stuart Stevens writes Trump-Drunk Republicans Are Choosing Russia Over the Constitution:

How did this happen? How did the Republican Party descend from the moral heights of Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” to this apologist sewer filled with the weak trying to reassure the weaker that weakness is a virtue?

For the first time in American history we have meticulously detailed evidence that a hostile foreign power attempted to influence the choice of an American commander in chief, and the collective Republican response is apparently, “Our side won, move on.”

Drone racers:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 15h 09m 29s of daytime.  The moon is new with 1.0% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1966, NASA successfully lands Surveyor 1 on the Moon.

Recommended for reading in full:

Matt O’Brien reports The Trump tax cuts are failing badly:

There are a lot of words you could use to describe the Trump tax cuts, but “successful” isn’t one of them.

That, at least, is what the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service found when it looked at how much Trump’s signature accomplishment has actually, well, accomplished so far. The answer isn’t much. Indeed, the CRS estimates that, in the past year, the tax cuts haven’t added a lot, if anything, to growth in wages, investment or the overall economy. The best you can say is that things might be better in the future.

Or, you know, they might not.

The important thing to understand here is that the Trump tax cuts were supposed to help people by helping corporations first. While households got small, temporary tax cuts — then-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), you might remember, touted that one secretary was getting an extra $1.50 a week — companies got large, permanent ones. The idea being that this would make companies invest a lot more money in their businesses, which, in turn, would make their workers so much more productive, they’d eventually get bigger raises than they otherwise would have. The administration, for its part, rather absurdly claimed that this would be somewhere between $4,000 and $9,000 per household.

That’s why the most damning news isn’t that the gross domestic product is growing only a bit faster but rather that business investment is. If that doesn’t change, then what little boost there’s been to the economy won’t last long, and barely any of it will reach the middle class. Why is that? Well, the tax cuts were supposed to help in two ways: by giving wealthy shareholders more money to spend and corporations more reason to invest. The problem, though, is that the first part should increase growth for just a little while — and not by much, since rich people don’t tend to spend as much of any tax cut — so that second part really has to work for any of this to be sustainable. It’s also the only way, as we mentioned before, that any of this will trickle down to, shall we say, people in less-exclusive income groups. After all, they’re not getting much of a tax cut themselves, so their only hope is that the people who are benefiting more are putting that money to work in investments that will benefit them, too.

But that doesn’t seem to be happening so far. As the CRS points out, the types of investments the Trump administration cut taxes on the most actually grew less last year than others.

(Emphasis added.)

The Sandwich in a Pickle:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater begins a new month with scattered thundershowers and a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 15h 08m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 4.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, Wisconsinites defend the Union at the Battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia:

On June 1, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry arrived after a long march, barefoot and exhausted. Nevertheless, they charged enemy lines and captured a number of prisoners. By the afternoon, the 36th Wisconsin Infantry lost 140 of  the 142 men who tried to take an enemy position.

Recommended for reading in full:

Catherine Rampell writes Just a few of the reasons that Trump’s Mexico tariffs are deeply stupid:

1. Americans are paying these tariffs. We already have two studies by teams of top-notch trade economists who have found that the costs of Trump’s earlier tariffs are being passed along to American businesses and consumers. An update of one of those studies pegged the cost of tariffs announced before Thursday (including the most recent escalation on $200 billion of Chinese goods) at $831 per U.S. household. It seems reasonable that this latest round of tariffs on Mexican goods will also be largely absorbed by Americans.

Industry groups, including those for produce and retail, have put out statements warning about the cost to consumers of these tariffs.

2. This will seriously screw up supply chains and hurt American companies — including American companies that need Mexican parts to make their own products that get sold here or exported abroad.

Mexico recently became our No. 1 trading partner. Two-thirds of our imports from Mexico are intra-company trade (i.e., a firm trading with itself across the border).

….

The auto industry is especially vulnerable; of U.S. auto exports, about 35 percent of the value-added comes from imported inputs, according to Deutsche Bank Securities chief economist Torsten Slok. Note also that the U.S. auto industry is already in trouble. Announced layoffs for the first four months of this year in autos are the highest since 2009, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

3. We don’t know the full economic cost of the tariffs, but it would be painful for the United States. Two years ago, a research and consulting firm calculated an estimate for the costs of a similar (20 percent) tariff on Mexican imports: “Over three years, the bill comes to $286 billion in lost value to the U.S. economy and a loss of 755,000 American jobs. Two-thirds of those job losses would be at the expense of low- to medium-skilled workers.”

….

10. If Trump does indeed manage to wreck the Mexican economy, that would likely increase the flow of immigrants trying to cross the border into the United States. When the Mexican economy is lousy, after all, demand to come to the United States rises.

(Rampell lists six other reasons, numbers 4 through 9, in her full article.)

Tonight’s Sky for June 2019: