Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 18m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventeenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

At 6:30 PM, the Library Board will hold a meeting.

On this day in 1967, Pres. Johnson nominates Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court (“the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place”).

On this day in 1863, Wisconsinites defending the Union continued their engagement at the Seige of Vicksburg (” The 8th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th, 23rd, 25th,27th, 29th and 33rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments, the 1st, 6th, 7th and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries and the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry were among Union forces surrounding the city”).

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman report that Friend Says Trump Is Considering Firing Mueller as Special Counsel:

WASHINGTON — A longtime friend of President Trump said on Monday that Mr. Trump was considering whether to fire Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating possible ties between the president’s campaign and Russian officials.

The startling assertion comes as some of Mr. Trump’s conservative allies, who initially praised Mr. Mueller’s selection as special counsel, have begun trying to attack his credibility.

The friend, Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media, who was at the White House on Monday, said on PBS’s “NewsHour” that Mr. Trump was “considering, perhaps, terminating the special counsel.”

“I think he’s weighing that option,” Mr. Ruddy said.

His comments appeared to take the White House by surprise.

“Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said in a statement hours later. “With respect to this subject, only the president or his attorneys are authorized to comment.”

(I’m with Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior on this: it’s only a matter of time until Trump pressures the Justice Department to fire Mueller; if they resist that pressure, he’ll fire Justice Department officials until he finds someone to fire Mueller. Kendzior observes: “As I’ve been saying, they enjoy the flagrancy. Autocrat logic: “We know that you know what we did, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”)

Ellen Nakashima reports that Russia has developed a cyberweapon that can disrupt power grids, according to new research:

Hackers allied with the Russian government have devised a cyberweapon that has the potential to be the most disruptive yet against electric systems that Americans depend on for daily life, according to U.S. researchers.

The malware, which researchers have dubbed CrashOverride, is known to have disrupted only one energy system — in Ukraine in December. In that incident, the hackers briefly shut down one-fifth of the electric power generated in Kiev.

But with modifications, it could be deployed against U.S. electric transmission and distribution systems to devastating effect, said Sergio Caltagirone, director of threat intelligence for Dragos, a cybersecurity firm that studied the malware and issued a report Monday.

And Russian government hackers have shown their interest in targeting U.S. energy and other utility systems, researchers said.

Ron Brownstein asks Are Demographics Really Destiny for the GOP?:

Despite President Trump’s magnetic appeal for working-class whites, those fiercely contested voters continued their long-term decline as a share of the national electorate in 2016, a new analysis of recent Census Bureau data shows.

That continued erosion underscores the gamble Trump is taking by aligning the GOP ever more closely with the hopes and fears of a volatile constituency that, while still large, has been irreversibly shrinking for decades as a share of the total vote. The data analysis on 2016 voting, conducted for The Atlantic by Robert Griffin and Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress’s States of Change project, found that non-college-educated whites declined as a share of the electorate even in the key Midwestern states that tipped the election to Trump.

“This is a good example of just how hard it is to reverse an ongoing trend like this,” said Teixeira, a co-founder of the project, which studies how demographic change affects politics and policy. “It says to Republicans: ‘You have intrinsically placed your bets on a political group that under almost any conceivable circumstances will continue to decline as a share not only of eligible voters, but [of actual] voters going forward.’ If that didn’t [reverse] in this election, you have to say it’s not going to happen.”

(Even in an election that she lost, It’s official: Clinton swamps Trump in popular vote: “The Democrat outpaced President-elect Donald Trump by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”)

John Wagner reports on Praise for the chief: Trump’s Cabinet tells him it’s an ‘honor’ and ‘blessing’ to serve:

(Part perverse, part heretical: Priebus is nothing more than a groveling supplicant.)

What does an airliner look like when recorded from a weather balloon at 38,000 feet? It looks like this:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see a high of eighty-seven and an even chance of thunderstorms. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:43 PM, for 15h 18m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopts a Declaration of Rights. On this day in 1899, a tornado in New Richmond proves to be the worst tornado disaster in Wisconsin history.

Recommended for reading in full —

Conservative Christian Schneider observes that Donald Trump supporters concoct their own James Comey story:

To say that Comey’s testimony “vindicates” Trump in any way ignores giant swaths of what the former FBI director actually said — it’s like leaving the theater after seeing Wonder Woman and telling people it’s a World War I documentary.

This is the place where Trump’s supporters exist: rather than seeing the president for who he clearly is, they construct an entirely different Trump in the negative space around him. If Comey accuses the president of obstructing an FBI investigation, they will say, “but look at all the laws Comey didn’t charge Trump with breaking!” If Comey says Trump lied, they’ll say “according to Comey’s own admission, here’s an instance where Trump told the truth!”

….For #AlwaysTrumpers, it is also important to concoct fictions about Trump and never back down from them. Trump supporters are required to pretend, for instance, that the president is a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense negotiator who will only get us the best deals – yet the briefest of trips through his Twitter timeline reveals a thin-skinned moral adolescent obsessed with settling scores and being well-liked.

(Trump, a serial liar, makes liars or fiction writers of his ardent supporters.)

Aaron Davis reports that D.C. and Maryland to sue President Trump, alleging breach of constitutional oath:

Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.

The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government entities, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president. Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests.

But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests. For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.

Patrick Wintour reports that Trump’s state visit to Britain put on hold:

Donald Trump has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming.

The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.

The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.

The conversation in part explains why there has been little public discussion about a visit.

May invited Trump to Britain seven days after his inauguration when she became the first foreign leader to visit him in the White House. She told a joint press conference she had extended an invitation from the Queen to Trump and his wife Melania to make a state visit later in the year and was “delighted that the president has accepted that invitation”.

Many senior diplomats, including Lord Ricketts, the former national security adviser, said the invitation was premature, but impossible to rescind once made.

Margaret Sullivan asks (and answers) Is media coverage of Trump too negative? You’re asking the wrong question:

“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” he complained in a commencement address last month to U.S. Coast Guard graduates. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.”

Looked at through this lens, Trump’s press coverage has been a political nightmare.

Isn’t that terribly unfair?

Here’s my carefully nuanced answer: Hell, no.

That’s because when we consider negative vs. positive coverage of an elected official, we’re asking the wrong question.

The president’s supporters often say his accomplishments get short shrift. But let’s face it: Politicians have no right to expect equally balanced positive and negative coverage, or anything close to it. If a president is doing a rotten job, it’s the duty of the press to report how and why he’s doing a rotten job.

The idea of balance is suspect on its face. Should positive coverage be provided, as if it were a birthright, to a president who consistently lies, who has spilled classified information to an adversary, and who fired the FBI director who was investigating his administration?

Adam West, Gotham’s Caped Crusader, passed away recently after a brief bought with leukemia. Colin Fleming, in Adam West’s Criminally Overlooked Contribution to Cinematic History, recalls a film with West that’s great fun:

Most of the West tributes will focus on television’s Batman, naturally, but what even the most robust cineastes often overlook is West’s one great contribution to movie history, to the art house.

The 1960s were largely a bad time for sci-fi films. They’d blown their load in the 1950s, with pictures about atomically-altered bugs and extraterrestrial beings, all manner of body-snatching alien interlopers, peaceful Martians who get attacked by paranoid earthlings, you name it. We remember 2001: A Space Odyssey from the tail end of the ‘60s, but it wasn’t exactly box office gold. What sci-fi there was was commonly tucked away in low-budget productions, and there was none finer than 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars….

In Robinson Crusoe on Mars there are Martian canals, a polar ice cap, snow shelters, subterranean tunnels, autodestruct buttons, alien blasters, and a slave revolt, but the film’s haunting solemnity, its crucial, post-earth poetry, comes largely from West—the right-hand man in the cockpit, the space ghost who intervenes when reason is all but lost, and helps it again be found.

I’ve seen the Robinson Crusoe on Mars more than once, and have enjoyed more each time. Here’s the trailer from a fun, memorable film:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Vince Lombardi is born this day in 1913. On this day in 1935, Gene Wilder is born in Milwaukee.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jenna Johnson observes that Trump’s son seems to confirm Comey’s account of the president’s comments on the Flynn investigation:

…Donald Trump Jr. — the president’s eldest son — seemed to confirm Comey’s version of events in a Saturday interview on Fox News as he tried to emphasize the fact that his father did not directly order Comey to stop investigating Flynn.

“When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it, there’s no, ‘Hey, I’m hoping,'” Trump said.

Chris Buckley reports on China’s New Bridges: Rising High, but Buried in Debt:

The Chishi Bridge is one of hundreds of dazzling bridges erected across the country in recent years. Chinese officials celebrate them as proof that they can roll out infrastructure bigger, better and higher than any other country can. China now boasts the world’s highest bridge, the longest bridge, the highest rail trestle and a host of other superlatives, often besting its own efforts….

But as the bridges and the expressways they span keep rising, critics say construction has become an end unto itself. Fueled by government-backed loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who profit from them, many of the projects are piling up debt and breeding corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits.

For all its splendor, the Chishi Bridge, in Hunan Province, exemplifies the seamy underside of China’s infrastructure boom. Its cost, $300 million, was more than 50 percent over the budget. The project struggled with delays and a serious construction accident and was tarnished by government corruption. Since it opened in October, the bridge and the expressway it serves have been underused and buried in debt.

Jeremy Peters tells of A Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story:

Jack Posobiec had his Twitter sights set on James B. Comey.

A pro-Trump activist notorious for his amateur sleuthing into red herrings like the “Pizzagate” hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a Democratic aide, Mr. Posobiec wrote on May 17 that Mr. Comey, the recently ousted F.B.I. director, had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”

….It mattered little that Mr. Comey had said no such thing. The tweet quickly ricocheted through the ecosystem of fake news and disinformation on the far right, where Trump partisans like Mr. Posobiec have intensified their efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of expanding investigations into Trump associates’ ties to Russia.

But as the journey of that one tweet shows, misinformed, distorted and false stories are gaining traction far beyond the fringes of the internet. Just 14 words from Mr. Posobiec’s Twitter account would spread far enough to provide grist for a prime-time Fox News commentary and a Rush Limbaugh monologue that reached millions of listeners, forging an alternative first draft of history in corners of the conservative media where President Trump’s troubles are often explained away as fabrications by his journalist enemies.

Ana Swanson and Max Ehrenfreund report that Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas:

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

In Atlanta, during a Braves game, a contestant gets the chance to race against a competitor called the Freeze (who’s very fast). Here’s what happens when the contestant underestimates the contest, and the mighty Freeze:

this is the funniest thing that will happen at a sporting event this year pic.twitter.com/f6Yq9lErin

— Joon Lee (@iamjoonlee) June 10, 2017

Via @iamjoonlee, Staff Writer, Bleacher Report & B/R Mag.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 14s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 99% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1978, Affirmed wins the Belmont Stakes, and becomes a Triple Crown winner. He would remain the last Triple Crown winner for 37 years, until 2015. On this day in 1837, workmen arrive to begin building what would be Wisconsin’s first capitol building.

Recommended for reading in full —

David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr. recount in Trump: A True Story how the “mogul, in a 2007 deposition, had to face up to a series of falsehoods and exaggerations. And he did. Sort of”:

It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.

Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.

For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.

The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.

Thirty times, they caught him.

Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.

Yoni Applebaum contends that Trump’s Ignorance Won’t Save Him:

(I’m sure Trump is ignorant of many things, but I doubt that when Trump cleared the room to talk to Comey he was ignorant of what he was about to attempt. In any event, Applebaum’s point holds: ignorance would not be exculpatory. Ironic, though, that so many of Trump’s hardcore supporters would insist that ignorance should not be an excuse when considering the conduct of minorities, but insist upon it when considering the conduct of the vulgar white billionaire they support.)

Alana Petroff reports that Murdoch’s Fox-Sky deal at greater risk after U.K. election shock:

Labour, which has opposed the massive media takeover, gained seats in parliament following Thursday’s election. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party saw its majority wiped out. May is now trying to form a minority government.

Broadcasting regulator Ofcom is currently reviewing whether or not to approve Fox’s purchase of Sky (SKYAY), in which it already holds a 39% stake. It is due to complete its review by June 20.

“Had the Conservatives won a large majority, we think it would have been more straightforward to approve the deal relatively quickly,” said Polo Tang, head of European telecom research at UBS. “We still see scope for the deal to be approved but the risks around an extended review have increased,” he added.

Rachel Walker explains How to plan the perfect road trip:

In 2006, my boyfriend and I drove from Colorado to Moab, Utah, for a week of desert exploration. For 300 miles, we had no problems. Then the gas light came on, 40 miles from Moab and at least an hour after we had passed the last service station. Did we panic? No. The impending calamity only fed our sense of ad­ven­ture. We drove giddily on, eventually coasting into a gas station on fumes just as the engine cut out.

Nowadays, I can’t be so cavalier. With two school-age kids, road trips require slightly more vigilance. Since my boys were born, my husband (the boyfriend from the Moab trip) and I have canvassed the country with them strapped into a succession of car seats. We drive to save money and to show them our world — and because we believe in the power of “windshield time,” the moments of intimate connection that intersperse the monotony of car travel.

Here’s what to consider before pulling out of the driveway….[list follows]

Great Big Story tells of Cultivating Japan’s Rare White Strawberry:

Cultivating Japan’s Rare White Strawberry from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

In Japan, there’s a specialty fruit craze sweeping the nation, from square watermelons to grapes the size of Ping-Pong balls. Still, the crown jewel of the luxury fruit basket is the white strawberry, bred to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot sweeter than its classic red counterpart. We took a tour of Yasuhito Teshima’s farm in Karatsu, Japan, to find out why so many people are spending a pretty penny for a taste of these famous white berries.

Good morning.

The work week ends for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 34s of daytime. The moon is full, with 100% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch, representing the U.S. Army, responds to one of the many baseless charges from Sen. Joe McCarthy, as described at the U.S. Senate website:

At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.

(When Welch mentions Mr. Cohn in the clip, he’s referring to Roy Cohn, chief counsel to McCarthy and later lawyer and mentor to Donald Trump.)

For those who would like a “bare-bones, just-the-facts version of Comey’s testimony today. It’s the 75-minute, distilled version of what we’ve all been waiting to hear,” Matthew Kahn of Lawfare has what you’re wanting in The Lawfare Podcast, Special Edition: Comey Versus the Senate Intelligence Committee with No Bull:

(For those who’d like to hear Comey’s full public testimony, along with transcript and statement for the record, see James Comey Testimony, U.S. Senate, 6.8.17.)

About that testimony, Benjamin Wittes (the editor-in-chief of Lawfare) considers Trump, in On the “Nature of the Person”: Initial Thoughts on James Comey’s Testimony:

It is a clarifying moment whenever an honorable person speaks plainly in public about a person he or she evidently regards as dishonorable on a matter of public moment. And today, a nation not normally riveted by congressional hearings got a chance to see what I was talking about. In three hours of testimony characterized by well-controlled but palpable anger, Comey attacked what he described as “lies” about the FBI and “defam[ation]” about himself; he accused the President of the United States of implicitly directing him to drop a major criminal investigation of a former senior official; he described a pattern of disrespect for the independence of the law enforcement function of the FBI; he alleged that the President made repeated misstatements of fact in his public accounts of their interactions; and he stated flatly that he believed that the President had fired him because of something related to the Russia investigation—an investigation that directly involves the President’s business, his campaign, his subordinates in the White House, and his family.

Throughout it all, the sense that he had spent four months dealing with people who were not honorable was, once again, written on every line of his face and evident in the tone he took when describing the President.

Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman examine 5 Clues James Comey Just Left Behind:

Throughout the three-hour hearing, Comey dropped several breadcrumbs for legislators, FBI investigators, reporters, concerned citizens, and Tweetstormers to follow. Here are five of these enticing potential clues ….[list follows]

David Frum enumerates the The Five Lines of Defense Against Comey—and Why They Failed:

Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history.

I’ve my doubts about a Roomba for your garden, but readers may be more optimistic about it than I am: