Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:32 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 14h 56m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Library Board is scheduled to meet at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1918, the Bolsheviks execute Nicholas II of Russia and several members of his immediate family, after which their “bodies were then mutilated,^[1] burned and buried in a field called Porosenkov Log in the Koptyaki forest.^[3] ”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Anne Applebaum observes that It’s now clear: The most dangerous threats to the West are not external:

Just over a week has passed since President Trump offered, in Warsaw, a very particular defense of Western civilization. He praised Poland for its fight against Nazism and Soviet communism long ago, though he said little about the country’s success since 1989. He spoke of the things that hold the West together, including classical music and God, but made only glancing references to democracy. He also spoke of the threats to the West, alluding to dangers from the “South or the East” as well as from an “oppressive ideology,” radical Islam, that “seeks to export terrorism and extremism all around the globe.”

In the days since that speech, rapidly moving events in Warsaw have proved him wrong: As I write this, Poland is proving that the greatest threat to the West is not radical Islam. The greatest threat is not even external: It is internal. In Poland, a democratically elected but illiberal government has, in the past few days, escalated its attack on its own constitution, pushing new laws openly designed to create a politicized judiciary. And it feels emboldened to do so by the visit of the U.S. president….

Vann R. Newkirk writes about What The ‘Crack Baby’ Panic Reveals About The Opioid Epidemic:

….I was struck by a recent article in the New York Times by Catherine Saint Louis that chronicles approaches for caring for newborns born to mothers who are addicted to opioids. The article is remarkable in its command and explanation of the medical and policy issues at play in the ongoing epidemic, but its success derives from something more than that. Saint Louis expertly captures the human stories at the intersection of the wonder of childbirth and the grip of drug dependency in a Kentucky hospital, all while keeping the epidemic in view….

The article is an exemplar in a field of public-health-oriented writing about the opioid crisis—the most deadly and pervasive drug epidemic in American history—that has shaped popular and policy attitudes about the crisis. But the wisdom of that field has not been applied equally in recent history. The story of Jamie Clay and Jay’la Cy’anne stood out to me because it is so incongruous with the stories of “crack babies” and their mothers that I’d grown up reading and watching.

The term itself still stings. “Crack baby” brings to mind hopeless, damaged children with birth defects and intellectual disabilities who would inevitably grow into criminals. It connotes inner-city blackness, and also brings to mind careless, unthinking black mothers who’d knowingly exposed their children to the ravages of cocaine. Although the science that gave the world the term was based on a weak proto-study of only 23 children and has been thoroughly debunked since, the panic about “crack babies” stuck. The term made brutes out of people of color who were living through wave after waves of what were then the deadliest drug epidemics in history.

Of Trump, Jay Rosen writes His campaign to discredit the press is a permanent feature of Trump’s political style (article has detail around each point):

Which is to say this “war” (terrible term, clumsy and lazy) will almost certainly continue, despite the periodic discovery by journalists that Trump loves to banter with reporters, and that he lives and dies by the very media coverage that he poisonously calls fake. 

The campaign to discredit mainstream journalism is thus a permanent feature of Trump’s political style. Why? I have some ideas. But I probably missed a few. If you point them out in the comments (or by social media) I will add the best ones to this post, with credit. 

1. Because it’s a base-only presidency with a niche, not a broadcasting strategy….

2. Because this is what they have; they don’t have much else….

3. Because Trump is a creature of media— and its creation….

4. Because people in the White House think “media” warring is governing….

5. Because turning reporters into ritualized hate objects is easy to do, supporters love it, and it meets Trump’s need for public displays of dominance….

6. Because it’s the one campaign promise he can definitely keep….

7. Because with the Federal government in Republican hands there is an “enemy gap”….

8. Because it binds him to the base, which has been tutored in this resentment since 1969….

9. Because they know a lot of bad news has yet to emerge….

10. Because the sheer ugliness of the spectacle repels the uncommitted, persuading them that there’s no point in paying attention….

11. Because his fantasy claims during the campaign pre-ordained critical coverage if Trump won….

Avi Selk writes that Trump praised a woman’s body. A foreign minister wondered ‘if she could say the same of him’:

But, speaking of allies, what did they think of what Trump said in Australia, which has its own history of awkward diplomacy with the president?

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation called up the country’s foreign minister to find out.

“You’re in such good shape, such good physical shape, beautiful,” the host told Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, quoting Trump. “Would you be flattered or offended?”

This was arguably a politically sensitive question, what with alliance and all. But the foreign minister didn’t hesitate.

“I’d be taken aback,” Bishop said.

And then this zinger: “I wonder if she could say the same of him?”

(She probably couldn’t — Trump is sedentary to the point of obesity.)

Loren Grush writes that one can Feel like you’re zooming over Pluto and its moon Charon with NASA’s new 3D animations:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy six. Sunrise is 5:31 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 58m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1945, the United States conducted the first detonation of an atomic bomb at “at 5:29 am on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range (now part of White Sands Missile Range). The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer report that the Soviet Veteran Who Met With Trump Jr. Is a Master of the Dark Arts:

MOSCOW — Rinat Akhmetshin, the Russian-American lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in June 2016, had one consistent message for the journalists who met him over the years at the luxury hotels where he stayed in Moscow, London and Paris, or at his home on a leafy street in Washington: Never use email to convey information that needed to be kept secret.

While not, he insisted, an expert in the technical aspects of hacking nor, a spy, Mr. Akhmetshin talked openly about how he had worked with a counterintelligence unit while serving with the Red Army after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan and how easy it was to find tech-savvy professionals ready and able to plunder just about any email account.

A journalist who visited his home was given a thumb drive containing emails that had apparently been stolen by hackers working for one of his clients.

Christian Caryl explains to his Dear red-state friends: Embracing Russia is not an act of patriotism:

Some of you admire Putin because he’s a “strong leader.” But do you ever discuss the issue of his personal corruption, his alliances with Hezbollah and Iran and North Korea, his gross mismanagement of his state-dominated economy? (Given Russia’s incredible natural wealth, it should be the richest country in the world. Instead, it has a gross domestic product roughly equivalent to Italy’s.) Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders: They persuaded by argument and example. Putin operates more like Tony Soprano.

I’ve even heard some of you say that he’s a Christian leader who’s defending “Western civilization” from the threat of liberals and gays and feminists. Really? Putin makes an odd poster boy for the defense of Christianity. He started his political career in the Soviet KGB, a militantly atheistic organization. The present-day Russian Orthodox Church is basically a branch of the Kremlin, locked in a mindset of xenophobia and anti-Western paranoia. It is run by priests who worked as KGB informers in Soviet days, and who are themselves profoundly corrupt.

The kind of Russian political culture that Putin represents today, steeped in centuries of autocracy, has far more in common with places such as China or the Middle East than with any part of the West. But Putin knows what conservatives in the West like to hear, and he’s shrewd enough to give it to them. (Note to you gun fans: Russia is scamming you when it portrays itself as a paradise for gun owners. It has some of the toughest gun control laws in the world.)

Jennifer Rubin (now back from vacation) observes that The GOP’s moral rot is the problem, not Donald Trump Jr.:

Let’s dispense with the “Democrats are just as bad” defense. First, I don’t much care; we collectively face a party in charge of virtually the entire federal government and the vast majority of statehouses and governorships. It’s that party’s inner moral rot that must concern us for now. Second, it’s simply not true, and saying so reveals the origin of the problem — a “woe is me” sense of victimhood that grossly exaggerates the opposition’s ills and in turn justifies its own egregious political judgments and rhetoric. If the GOP had not become unhinged about the Clintons, would it have rationalized Trump as the lesser of two evils? Only in the crazed bubble of right-wing hysteria does an ethically challenged, moderate Democrat become a threat to Western civilization and Trump the salvation of America.

Indeed, for decades now, demonization — of gays, immigrants, Democrats, the media, feminists, etc. — has been the animating spirit behind much of the right. It has distorted its assessment of reality, giving us anti-immigrant hysteria, promulgating disrespect for the law (how many “respectable” conservatives suggested disregarding the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage?), elevating Fox News hosts’ blatantly false propaganda as the counterweight to liberal media bias and preventing serious policy debate. For seven years, the party vilified Obamacare without an accurate assessment of its faults and feasible alternative plans. “Obama bad” or “Clinton bad” became the only credo — leaving the party, as Brooks said of the Trump clan, with “no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code” — and no coherent policies for governing.

Peter Beinart explains The Projection President (“Months into his tenure, Trump still responds to controversies by lobbing the same charges at his opponents”):

In Paris on Thursday, Donald Trump said, “A lot of people don’t know” that “France is America’s first and oldest ally.” That may be true. But commentators noted that when Trump uses the “a lot of people don’t know” formulation, it’s usually a sign that he didn’t know himself….

Why does Trump do this? Sigmund Freud believed people project onto others impulses that they cannot accept as their own. Erick Erickson suggested that projection may be a response to crisis or extreme stress. Others have linked it to narcissism….

The more important question is why it works, at least among Trump’s base. One answer may be that Trump supporters embrace his projection because they’re doing it themselves. Consider Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton is the real bigot. On its face it’s odd given that Clinton enjoyed overwhelming African American support. But it’s easier to understand the statement’s appeal when you realize that, according to a November 2016 Huffington Post/YouGov poll, Trump supporters were twice as likely to say whites face a “lot of discrimination” as they were to say blacks face a lot of discrimination. When it came to bigotry, in other words, Trump’s overwhelmingly white fan base may have been projecting, too.

(The simplest formation of this observation about Trump: Trump falsely accuses others of the very conduct of which he is truly guilty.)

NPR’s Skunk Bear offers A Sketchy History Of Pencil Lead:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 14h 59m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 64.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1980, the state experiences the Western Wisconsin Derecho, “a severe weather system that moved through several western counties on July 15, 1980. It cut a 20-mile-wide swath through St Croix, Pierce, Dunn, Eau Claire, Chippewa, and Clark counties. Although much of the storm’s damage was caused by straight-line winds in excess of 100 mph, several tornadoes were also reported. The storm caused nearly $160M in damage (1980 dollars) and killed three people.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who served for three years as director of intelligence & counterintelligence at the Dept. of Energy and 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer, writes that Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting sure sounds like a Russian intelligence operation:

Donald Trump Jr. is seeking to write off as a nonevent his meeting last year with a Russian lawyer who was said to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “It was such a nothing,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday. “There was nothing to tell.”

But everything we know about the meeting — from whom it involved to how it was set up to how it unfolded — is in line with what intelligence analysts would expect an overture in a Russian influence operation to look like. It bears all the hallmarks of a professionally planned, carefully orchestrated intelligence soft pitch designed to gauge receptivity, while leaving room for plausible deniability in case the approach is rejected. And the Trump campaign’s willingness to take the meeting — and, more important, its failure to report the episode to U.S. authorities — may have been exactly the green light Russia was looking for to launch a more aggressive phase of intervention in the U.S. election….

Paul Krugman describes The New Climate of Treason:

The radicalization of the GOP began as a top-down affair, driven by big-money interests that financed campaigns and think tanks, pushing the party to the right. But to win elections, the forces engaged in this push cynically appealed to darker impulses – racism first and foremost, but also culture war, anti-intellectualism, and so on. To make this appeal, they created a media establishment – Fox News, talk radio, and so on – which drew in many working-class whites. This meant that a large segment of the population was no longer hearing the same news – basically not experiencing the same account of reality – as the rest of us. So what had been real but not extreme differences became extreme differences in political outlook.

And political figures either adapted or were pushed out. There once were Republicans who would have reacted with horror to Trump’s embrace of Putin, but they’ve left the scene, or are no longer considered Republicans.

Ryan Reilly reports that Judge Tosses Jury’s Conviction Of Woman Who Laughed At Jeff Sessions, Orders New Trial:

WASHINGTON – A D.C. judge has tossed out a jury’s conviction of a protester who laughed during Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Senate confirmation hearing, finding on Friday that the government had improperly argued during the trial that her laughter was enough to merit a guilty verdict. The judge ordered a new trial in the case, setting a court date for Sept. 1.

Desiree Fairooz, 61, who was associated with the group Code Pink, had been convicted of disorderly and disruptive conduct and demonstrating inside the Capitol. Fairooz was taken into custody during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in January after she laughed when Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) claimed Sessions had a “clear and well-documented” record of “treating all Americans equally under the law.” (The Senate rejected Sessions’ nomination for a federal judgeship in the 1980s over concerns about his views on race.)

But Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia tossed out the guilty verdict on Friday because the government had argued that the laugh alone was enough to warrant the verdict.

Maureen C. Gilmer writes that in Indiana, a Bride-to-be calls off wedding, invites homeless to her reception:

INDIANAPOLIS — Sarah Cummins was supposed to get married this weekend. The 25-year-old Purdue University pharmacy student had been planning her dream wedding for two years, scrimping and working overtime to save for the $30,000 extravaganza.

A week ago, she called it off (she prefers not to say why) and was left with a broken heart and a nonrefundable contract for a venue and a plated dinner for 170 guests Saturday night at the Ritz Charles in Carmel….

Then she decided to bring some purpose to her pain. She worked with event planner Maddie LaDow at the Ritz Charles to re-arrange the reception area, then started contacting homeless shelters in Indianapolis and Noblesville and inviting residents to her party.

“We’re doing all the same stuff, just arranging the tables differently, so there’s no head table for the bridal party, no cake table or gift table,” she said.

Why is Take Me Out to the Ballgame is Sung During the 7th Inning Stretch? Here’s why:

Good morning.

Bastille Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 01m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred forty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM this evening.

On this day in 1789, French citizens storm the Bastille, freeing the seven inmates held there, as part of a broader movement against the French monarchy. On this day in 1948, Janesville sprays for bugs: “intending to create a bug-free environment, Janesville tested a DDT fogging machine that quickly emitted a “smokescreen of insect-killing fog.” City officials hoped to persuade the county to buy the machine for use by all municipalities or to buy it jointly with Beloit.”

Recommended for reading in full —