Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 15m 49s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1982, in an address to the British Parliament, Reagan correctly predicted that the “march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is born this day in 1867.

Recommended for reading in full —

John Diedrich reports that a Jury awards $6.7M to inmate raped by guard in Milwaukee County Jail, shackled during childbirth:

A federal jury Wednesday awarded $6.7 million to a woman who was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was being held in the Milwaukee County Jail four years ago.

The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.

The jury also found there was “no legitimate government purpose” to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.

Kleinhaus said her client was pleased with the verdicts. The plaintiff is not being named because she was a victim of a sexual assault.

“She was raped repeatedly at the age of 19. She sought justice and she is glad the system delivered that justice,” Kleinhaus said. “She hopes to prevent other women from being sexually assaulted in the Milwaukee County Jail.”

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell, describes Trump succinctly as an organized crime godfather:

Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump admin. is “like a mafia family… That’s the way I view Pres. Trump now – as a godfather” https://t.co/xy52mbxGro

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 8, 2017

Paul Farhi reports that Breitbart News seems to be cleaning house after readers and advertisers drift away:

The clarion of the far right seems to be having second thoughts about how far right it wants to go.

Faced with an advertiser boycott and plummeting readership, Breitbart News has lately been trimming back some of its more extreme elements in what may be a bid for more mainstream respectability.

The site’s visitor traffic has fallen 53 percent since November, from 22.96 million unique individuals to 10.76 million last month, according to ComScore, which tracks Web trends. Other news sites have seen a falloff since the election, too — The Washington Post and the New York Times are off 24 and 26 percent during this period, respectively — but Breitbart’s losses are at roughly twice the mainstream rate.

At the same time, an advertiser blacklist of Breitbart organized by an anonymous online group called Sleeping Giants appears to be biting hard. Only 26 companies had ads on Breitbart last month, down from 242 in March, according to the marketing-news site Digiday. It said the remaining advertisers were primarily smaller direct-response companies, although Amazon.com remains one of its sponsors, despite pressure from its employees to cut ties to the site (Amazon’s chief executive is Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Post).

David Corn observes that Comey Forces Trump Defenders Into Extreme and Absurd Spin:

The release of former FBI director Jim Comey’s prepared text for his upcoming congressional testimony has created a moment of crisis for Republicans and conservatives. And many are failing the challenge. Their reactions are revealing a profound dishonesty that far exceeds the norms of usual political spin, and are demonstrating that the Trumpified quarters of the GOP and the conservative movement are intellectually bankrupt and devoid of principle. These partisans now stand naked, and it sure ain’t pretty. It’s also a bad sign for the health of our constitutional democracy….

(I’d assume that GOP politicians and core Trump supporters will hold out long into the future; they’ll not yield. This ends when Trump, himself, is politically and legally ruined, so that there’s nothing left to support. See, Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)

Tech Insider offers an Animated timeline that shows how Silicon Valley became a $2.8 trillion neighborhood:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee puts forth a motion to the Continental Congress to declare independence from Great Britain:

Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

On this day in 1926, Milwaukee first has airmail service: “Milwaukee’s first airmail service was flown from the Milwaukee County Airport by the Charles Dickinson Line, which operated from Chicago to St. Paul via Milwaukee and LaCrosse.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ben Guarino reports that Tyrannosaurus rex had scaly skin and wasn’t covered in feathers, a new study says:

Tyrannosaurus rex was an odd animal, a predator with teeth the size of bananas, a massive head and tiny arms. Given that many dinosaurs had feathers, could T. rex have been even weirder — a giant carnivore with a downy coat?

A new study in the journal Biology Letters crushes any tyrant chicken dreams: T. rex was covered in scales. The new research “shows without question that T. rex had scaly skin,” study author Phil R. Bell, a paleontologist at Australia’s University of New England, said in an email to The Washington Post.

When T. rex first appeared in pop culture, as in 1918 film “The Ghost of Slumber Mountain,” the dinosaur had wrinkled skin and stood upright, dragging its tail. Scientists began dismantling this reptilian misconception in the late 1960s, and in 1993’s “Jurassic Park,” a fairly accurate, horizontal T. rex menaced the silver screen.

Neil MacFarquahr and Andrew Rossback describe How Russian Propaganda Spread From a Parody Website to Fox News:

Born in the shadowy reaches of the internet, most fake news stories prove impossible to trace to their origin. But researchers at the Atlantic Council, a think tank, excavated the root of one such fake story, involving an incident in the Black Sea in which a Russian warplane repeatedly buzzed a United States Navy destroyer, the Donald Cook.

Like much fake news, the story was based on a kernel of truth. The brief, tense confrontation happened on April 12, 2014, and the Pentagon issued a statement. Then in April, three years later, the story resurfaced, completely twisted, on one of Russia’s main state-run TV news programs.

The new version gloated that the warplane had deployed an electronic weapon to disable all operating systems aboard the Cook. That was false, but it soon spread, showing that even with all the global attention on combating fake news, it could still circulate with alarming speed and ease….

FoxNews.com soon picked up The Sun’s version of the story. Refet Kaplan, the managing editor of FoxNews.com, said the story was considered “not as a serious report on Russia’s military capability, but as another example of Russian media hyperbole.” That was not set out in the headline or the article, other than an oblique reference to the original as “propaganda.”

After The New York Times asked about the article, it was deleted from the FoxNews.com website.

Spencer Ackerman reports that Michael Flynn Had a Plan to Work With Russia’s Military. It Wasn’t Exactly Legal:

Donald Trump’s first national security adviser pushed so hard for the Pentagon to cooperate with the Russian military that his initiative would likely have broken the law if it had ever been enacted.

Four current and former Pentagon officials told The Daily Beast that during Michael Flynn’s brief White House tenure, the retired general advocated for the expansion of a relatively narrow military communications channel—one meant to keep U.S. and Russian pilots safe from one another—to see if the two nations could jointly fight the so-called Islamic State.

The initiative never went anywhere, in part because of opposition from the Pentagon and from U.S. Central Command; a legal prohibition set by Congress; and, ultimately, Flynn’s firing.

Inside the Pentagon, “there was a lot of fear that we’d move to outright cooperation [with Russia] through this channel,” according to a former senior defense official.

Michael Harriot describes How Police Brutality Keeps America Poor and Uneducated:

Cops don’t pay for police brutality—you do.

There is often a large public outcry when law-enforcement officers don’t face charges or are acquitted after killing unarmed citizens. Likewise, media outlets hop on the outrage bandwagon and trumpet the statistics about brutality, illegal searches and police misconduct. But even when there are no criminal charges or prosecution, juries often find police departments liable in civil cases, resulting in large settlements to victims and their families.

When this happens, cities, counties and states don’t go to the offending police departments and pass the hat until officers come up with the compensation money. Oftentimes, the officer keeps his or her job, the department doesn’t lose funding, and the taxpayers end up paying the salary of a cop who killed an innocent victim and millions in court settlements. in 2015 the Wall Street Journal reported that the 10 largest police departments spent over $1 billion on police brutality cases.

Take Chicago, for instance. Between 2004 and March 2016, the city paid over $662 million in legal fees, settlements and court costs for police misconduct, according to CBS News. After spending $147 million settling lawsuits in 2016, Los Angeles needs to borrow money to cover this year’s projected legal costs. The New York City Police Department paid $482 million in false arrest and civil rights settlements between 2009 and 2014—and that doesn’t include the $228 million it paid in 2016 alone. That’s right: New York City has paid almost three-quarters of a billion dollars because of police misconduct in less than 10 years….

 Colorado has (at least) one musical bear:

Black bear invades apartment, tickles the ivories in Colorado surveillance video. Read more: https://t.co/1bXyDRCBlX pic.twitter.com/9rBqQWJNMZ

— AP West Region (@APWestRegion) June 7, 2017

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 14m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred tenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1944, Allied forces storm the beaches of Normandy, France, in the D-Day liberation of Europe.

Ben Collins reports that Pro-Trump Canadians Throw ‘Million Deplorable March.’ Right-Wing Media Counts 5,000. Cops Say Hundreds:

Although it was dubbed the “Million Canadian Deplorables March,” both The Daily Caller and Breitbart claimed about 5,000 people showed up in Ottawa to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and to show favor for Donald Trump, whom protest organizer Mike Waine called a “smart man.”

[Ottawa Police Constable Marc] Soucy said that, while the Ottawa Police doesn’t officially provide crowd estimates, there were not 5,000 people at the rally’s “gathering point” in Ottawa’s Confederation Park.

“There were less than 100 [at the park],” he said.

A spokesperson for the Parliamentary Protection Services estimated to Canada’s iPolicy, who first reported on the discrepancy, that 300 to 400 people in total went to the rally in at the Canadian capital.

Kimberly Dozier reports that the White House Looked at Dropping Russia Sanctions—Even After Firing Michael Flynn:

The White House explored unilaterally easing sanctions on Russia’s oil industry as recently as late March, arguing that decreased Russian oil production could harm the American economy, according to former U.S. officials.

State Department officials argued successfully that easing those sanctions would actually hurt the U.S. energy sector, according to those former officials and email exchanges reviewed by The Daily Beast.

In one email exchange, a State Department official feels the need to explain that lowering punitive sanctions on the Russian oil industry would be rewarding Moscow—without getting anything from the Kremlin in return.

“Russia continues to occupy Ukraine including Crimea—conditions that led to the sanctions have not changed,” the official wrote.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee lists Every Russia story Trump said was a hoax by Democrats: A timeline:

There have been twists and turns over the past year in the saga of President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win.

Yet one thing has remained consistent: Trump blames the Democrats, not the Russians.

Trump says the latest reports of ties between his staff and Russians are the Democrats’ attempt to undermine his presidency. But a look at his comments over the past year shows Trump used the same explanation for every new development in stories involving Russia, the election and his staff.

In this timeline, we took a look at all the developments in the Trump-Russia controversy that Trump has blamed on Democrats. We will update the timeline as necessary….[timeline follows]

Charles Pierce asks Why Would Russia Stop at ‘Influence’ When They Could Hack Directly?:

So far, the only evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election has indicated that the hacking and ratfcking was one step removed from the actual balloting. The theft and release of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, and the spreading of invented news and slander over social media platforms, were both aimed at influencing people to vote a certain way. If it could be proven that the Russians actively hacked into the election process itself—which people have been warning for years is a genuine vulnerability—that would pretty much set the world on fire.

Now, though, The Intercept has a report that indicates that the National Security Agency considered this sort of sabotage very seriously in the days before the election.

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light. While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.

This is authentically terrifying and, at the same time, it seems horribly inevitable. If you could ratfck the election on a second-hand basis, why wouldn’t you try simply to ratfck the results as well?

Today I Found Out recounts The Story Behind the Morton’s Salt Girl:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1947, the Marshall Plan was drafted. On this day in 1883, William Horlick patents the world’s first malted milk.

Recommended for reading in full —

Jacob Carpenter reports that Milwaukee sheriff’s deputies kept an inmate shackled as she gave birth. Jurors will decide if it was legal:

The former inmate’s lawyers say the practice, authorized by Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr., violates her constitutional rights and unnecessarily increases the possibility of complications during childbirth.

“The practice of shackling is dangerous and risks injury to both mother and child,” lawyers for the former inmate, who’s listed in court files as Jane Doe, wrote in a legal complaint. They declined further comment last week.

Clarke has responded that the policy protects hospital staff from potentially dangerous inmates lashing out, according to court documents. Clarke said doctors can ask for the removal of shackles if it’s medically necessary, though there’s no policy for deciding whether the doctor’s request should be followed.

….The plaintiff is also suing the Sheriff’s Office and a former deputy, Xavier Thicklen, over allegations that Thicklen sexually assaulted her five times during her incarceration. Thicklen was criminally charged with five counts of sexual assault, but those charges were dropped when Thicklen pleaded no contest to a felony count of misconduct in public office.

Lawrence Summers asks if After 75 years of progress, was last week a hinge in history?:

Even for conservative statesmen such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger, the idea of a community of nations has been a commonplace. Come now H.R McMaster, national security adviser, and Gary Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, who have been held out as the president’s most rational, globally minded advisers. They have taken to the Wall Street Journal to proclaim that “the world is not a global community” and advanced a theory of international relations not unlike the one that animated the British and French at Versailles at the end of World War I. On this view, the objective of international negotiation is not to establish a stable, peaceful system or to seek cooperation or to advance universal values through compromise, they wrote, but to strike better deals in “an arena where nations, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses compete for advantage.”

Stephen Hendrix writes of Blood in the water: Four dead, a coast terrified and the birth of modern shark mania:

The shark mania that grips the country each summer began July 1, 1916, when a young stockbroker from Philadelphia headed into the surf at Beach Haven, N.J. Before then, there wasn’t much fear about attacks from the deep among the innocents at the Jersey Shore.

That all changed when Charles Vansant, a 25-year-old taking the first swim of  his summer vacation, struck out into the mild surf. What unfolded over the next dozen days would leave five swimmers dead or maimed and the East Coast terrified, sparking a presidential intervention and “a war on sharks” that continues to this day.

“It was the Titanic of shark attacks,” said Richard Fernicola, a New Jersey physician and author of “Twelve Days of Terror,” an account of what became known as the Matawan Man-Eater.

Jonathan Blitzer explains Why Police Chiefs Oppose Texas’s  New Anti-Immigrant Law:

Last month, Greg Abbott, the Republican Governor of Texas, signed into law an anti-immigrant measure allowing local police officers to ask for the citizenship status of anyone they detain. This sort of provision—often called a “show me your papers” law—has been attempted at the state level before, most notoriously in Arizona, which passed a measure in 2010 that was subsequently blocked in federal court. In response to the new law, civil-rights groups and several Texas city governments have filed lawsuits against the measure. Earlier this week, thousands of demonstrators descended on the state capitol, in Austin, to protest on the last day of the legislative session, prompting one overwhelmed Republican representative to call Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), presumably so that agents could arrest and deport members of the opposition while they stood in a gallery of the statehouse.

Police chiefs have been speaking out against the bill since it was introduced in the State Senate, last fall. “It’s kind of amazing that, during the initial hearing, the senators had all these chiefs and sheriffs from across Texas speaking against the bill—and they totally ignored the people in law enforcement,” the El Paso County sheriff, Richard Wiles, told me this week. He said that his staff is overworked as it is. “My officers are too busy to waste their time doing another agency’s work,” he said. “If there is an officer who wants to do this, we can’t stop him under the new law. The only area where one of my officers could now be allowed to go out there and ignore his own bosses is on immigration. It’s crazy.”

I know that not LeBron James isn’t everyone’s favorite player, so to speak, but I think he’s been good for the game (and that going back to Cleveland was the best decision of his career). Here, he ably answers a reporter’s trite question about defending home court:

LeBron: I mean, are you a smart guy?
Reporter: I think so.
LeBron: You think so, right? So we don’t defend homecourt, what happens?
Reporter: Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m saying.
LeBron: I’m asking you.
Reporter: Well yeah, then you guys are looking at getting swept.
LeBron: All right. So, that answered your question.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1940, the Allies complete the evacuation from Dunkirk. On this day in 1861, Dr. Erastus B. Wolcott, a Milwaukee surgeon, performed the first recorded removal of a diseased kidney.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg describe How a ‘shadow’ universe of charities joined with political warriors to fuel Trump’s rise:

Long before Trump promised to build a wall, ban Muslims and abandon the Paris climate accord, Horowitz used his tax-exempt group [David Horowitz Freedom Center] to rail against illegal immigrants, the spread of Islam and global warming. Center officials described Hillary Clinton as evil, President Barack Obama as a secret communist and the Democratic Party as a front for enemies of the United States.

The Freedom Center has declared itself a “School for Political Warfare,” and it is part of a loose nationwide network of like-minded charities linked together by ideology, personalities, conservative funders and websites, including the for-profit Breitbart News.

Horowitz’s story shows how charities have become essential to modern political campaigns, amid lax enforcement of the federal limits on their involvement in politics, while taking advantage of millions of dollars in what amount to taxpayer subsidies….

Horowitz makes a good living as the Freedom Center chief executive, earning $583,000 from a charity that received $5.4 million in donations in 2015, according to the latest available records.

(Anyone even casually acquainted with Horowitz’s work over the last two decades knows how increasingly severe his views have become; his FrontPage is a distillation of bigotry and lies. More on Horowitz’s views is available online from the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

The Reverend William Barber talks with David Remnick, contending that Politics Needs Religion:

Politics and religion go hand in hand for the Reverend William J. Barber II of the Greenleaf Christian Church. As he sees it, progressives made a mistake in walking away from Christianity during the rise of the Moral Majority….He talks with David Remnick about bringing morality back to contemporary politics.

(It’s worth noting that some of the contradictions on policy issues that Rev. Dr. Barber believes he sees in conservative Protestants would not be present, for example, among progressive Catholics.)

MJ Lee recounts in God and the Don that Trump, a self-professed mainline Presbyterian, felt the need to ask two Presbyterian pastors if Presbyterians were, in fact, Christians:

Two days before his presidential inauguration, Donald Trump greeted a pair of visitors at his office in Trump Tower.

As a swarm of reporters waited in the gilded lobby, the Rev. Patrick O’Connor, the senior pastor at the First Presbyterian Church in Queens, and the Rev. Scott Black Johnston, the senior pastor of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, arrived to pray with the next president.

“I did very, very well with evangelicals in the polls,” Trump interjected in the middle of the conversation — previously unreported comments that were described to me by both pastors.

They gently reminded Trump that neither of them was an evangelical.

“Well, what are you then?” Trump asked.

They explained they were mainline Protestants, the same Christian tradition in which Trump, a self-described Presbyterian, was raised and claims membership. Like many mainline pastors, they told the President-elect, they lead diverse congregations.

Trump nodded along, then posed another question to the two men: “But you’re all Christians?”

“Yes, we’re all Christians.”

(From Rev. Dr. Barber’s point of view, all Christians whether progressive or conservative are evangelicals, in the broadest sense; for the Presbyterian pastors, there’s a difference between mainline and evangelical Christians; but for Trump, astonishingly, there’s uncertainty even about the nature of his own self-professed, large Christian denomination.)

Susan Rice contends that To Be Great, America Must Be Good:

American corporations and civil society groups can assist by demonstrating that the United States remains committed to its integration into the global economy and to our democratic principles. In the absence of White House leadership, the American people should act as informal ambassadors, via contacts through tourism, study-abroad programs and cultural exchanges.

We can all contribute to showing other nations that we hold dear America’s place at the forefront of moral and political leadership in the world. And we must remain steadfast until, once again, we have a president willing to lead in accordance with American interests, traditions and values.

Brian Beutler writes that Ivanka Trump’s Political Brand Is Dead:

Now that Ivanka’s father has announced he will withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, and has taken steps toward allowing all employers to deny contraceptive coverage for their female employees, my unfounded hope is that she will either realize that the jig is up, and stop pretending she ever cared about these issues; or acknowledge that she’s a massive, world historical failure in public life, and stop trying to convince people otherwise.

Either of these outcomes would at least spare people the constant indignity of having their intelligence insulted. But the truth of the matter is clear, and explains why Ivanka’s not going to stop, and why credulous stories about her private struggle will appear every time her father’s administration offends the world: Ivanka isn’t a failure, but a swindler of global proportions who has supplemented her preposterous fortune by pretending—in a not particularly convincing way—to play an inside game she really has no interest in….

It may be Ivanka’s tragic circumstance that she was born to an ethically vacant parent, and that forging a bond with him required making herself in his self-image. But it is our tragic circumstance that the man in question is a moral obscenity, a mental flyspeck, a fraud, and president of the United States. In the context of his presidency, her commitment to their relationship requires her to piss down our backs and tell us it’s raining.

A solar eclipse is coming August — Here’s how to make the most of it:

NASA has online information about the August 21st eclipse:

On Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun. Anyone within the path of totality can see one of nature’s most awe inspiring sights – a total solar eclipse. This path, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun’s tenuous atmosphere – the corona – can be seen, will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun’s disk. NASA created this website to provide a guide to this amazing event. Here you will find activities, events, broadcasts, and resources from NASA and our partners across the nation.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of eighty-seven and an even chance of afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 11m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1965, Ed White becomes the first American to conduct a spacewalk:

The spacewalk started at 3:45 p.m. EDT on the third orbit when White opened the hatch and used the hand-held maneuvering oxygen-jet gun to push himself out of the capsule.

The EVA started over the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii and lasted 23 minutes, ending over the Gulf of Mexico. Initially, White propelled himself to the end of the 8-meter tether and back to the spacecraft three times using the hand-held gun. After the first three minutes the fuel ran out and White maneuvered by twisting his body and pulling on the tether.

In a photograph taken by Commander James McDivitt taken early in the EVA over a cloud-covered Pacific Ocean, the maneuvering gun is visible in White’s right hand. The visor of his helmet is gold-plated to protect him from the unfiltered rays of the sun.

Recommended for reading in full —

The New York Times editorial board describes The Problem With Jared Kushner:

Stupidity, paranoia, malevolence — it’s hard to distinguish among competing explanations for the behavior of people in this administration. In the case of Mr. Kushner’s meeting with Sergey Kislyak, the ambassador, and his meeting that month with Sergey Gorkov, a Russian banker with close ties to the Kremlin and Russian intelligence, even the most benign of the various working theories suggests that Mr. Kushner, who had no experience in politics or diplomacy before Mr. Trump’s campaign, is in way over his head….

The problem isn’t establishing a back channel; presidential administrations and transitions have used them throughout history as a way to keep a low profile during sensitive negotiations. But communicating through Russian facilities would have exposed Mr. Kushner and others to serious risks of extortion. And there’s the bizarre and repeated secrecy around meetings with the Russian ambassador (see, e.g., Michael Flynn, Jeff Sessions) that has already caused a lot of collateral damage to this administration.

Brian Ross and Matthew Mosk report that Lawmakers ask whether looming debt left Jared Kushner vulnerable to Russian influence:

Congressional investigators are seeking to determine whether President Trump’s son-in-law was vulnerable to Russian influence during and after the campaign because of financial stress facing his family firm’s signature real estate holding – a Manhattan skyscraper purchased at the height of the real estate boom.

And they are focused, officials told ABC News, on a December meeting Jared Kushner held with executives from a Russian bank.

“It’s very peculiar that of all the people he could be talking to in a transition period where you’ve got lots of balls in the air, that you end up talking to a Russian banker who is under sanction and who is related to Putin and has a KGB background,” said Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat who sits on the House Intelligence Committee. “I think the question has to be asked, was this about you trying to get financing for your troubled real estate that you have in New York City?”

Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima report that on a case of hypocrisy, in which the Nunes-led House Intelligence Committee asked for ‘unmaskings’ of Americans:

The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee asked U.S. spy agencies late last year to reveal the names of U.S. individuals or organizations contained in classified intelligence on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, engaging in the same practice that President Trump has accused the Obama administration of abusing, current and former officials said.

The chairman of the committee, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), has since cast the practice of “unmasking” of U.S. individuals and organizations mentioned in classified reports as an abuse of surveillance powers by the outgoing Obama administration.

Trump has argued that investigators should focus their attention on former officials leaking names from intelligence reports, rather than whether the Kremlin coordinated its activities with the Trump campaign, an allegation he has denied. “The big story is the ‘unmasking and surveillance’ of people that took place during the Obama administration,” Trump tweeted Thursday.

According to a tally by U.S. spy agencies, the House Intelligence Committee requested five to six unmaskings of U.S. organizations or individuals related to Trump or Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton between June 2016 and January 2017.

(Unmasking has never been the vital issue here – it has always been Russian subversion of the American electoral process. Yet if Trump’s defenders find unmasking so offensive, then they should see that the offense also rests with a GOP-controlled committee.)

Joel Kotkin writes of The Great Betrayal of Middle America:

In its incoherence and lack of organization, Trump’s victory less resembled a modern social movement than a peasant’s revolt from the Middle Ages. His campaign lacked a coherent program, although its messenger, a New York narcissist, possessed a sixth sense that people “out there” were angry. Trump’s message was negative largely because he had nothing positive to say, though that had the useful effect of driving his enemies slightly insane.

So while he’s succeeded in stirring the blue hornet’s nest, he’s created no productive movement. Successful social movements—the Jacksonians, the New Dealers, the Reaganites, and the European social democrats—directly appealed to the working class with policies that for better or worse, challenged the existing social and economic hierarchy.

What’s Up for June 2017?

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1981, Donkey Kong makes its American debut.

Recommended for reading in full —

John Schmid reports that Job creation slowed sharply in Wisconsin in 2016, raising questions and worries:

Wages and employment fell sharply in 2016 in Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector, the biggest piston in the state’s economy, in a year that also saw the state’s weakest overall job performance since the 2008-’09 recession.

The anemic jobs figures surprised economists at a time when the national economy evidently remains in expansion mode, and even have some beginning to wonder if a recession might be on the horizon.

The 2016 decline in manufacturing employment was all the more confounding after Madison lawmakers phased in a deep tax cut that took full effect last year and was designed as “a powerful incentive (that) will encourage manufacturers to expand in Wisconsin,” according to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s biggest business lobbying group.

Some analysts postulate that Wisconsinites are working fewer hours and less overtime as automation increasingly replaces humans in manufacturing plants. Other workers, meanwhile, appear to be accepting pay cuts, while employers create jobs at lower pay levels.

David Filipov, Amy Brittain, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger write that Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up:

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — The White House and a Russian state-owned bank have very different explanations for why the bank’s chief executive and Jared Kushner held a secret meeting during the presidential transition in December.

The bank maintained this week that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House says the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.

The contradiction is deepening confusion over Kushner’s interactions with the Russians as the president’s son-in-law emerges as a key figure in the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump team.

Josh Barro contends that Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord is performative isolationism:

The most tangible problem created by our withdrawal from the accord may be a decline in America’s global standing and leadership. But I tend to think that decline is largely a function of Trump’s presidency itself; America would hardly be seen as a leader on climate change under Trump if we had instead stayed in the accord and ignored our emissions targets.

To the extent our withdrawal alienates the world from us, that aligns with Trump’s intent in withdrawing, and does indeed make the US more isolated. But Trump has been reluctant to take more concrete and irrevocable isolating steps, for clear reasons.

(I think Barro’s on solid ground with his observation that “decline is largely a function of Trump’s presidency itself” – Trump’s own ignorance, mendacity, bigotry, and affection for dictators degrades America at home and abroad.)

In contrast to Barro, Uri Friedman, in Trump’s Most Drastic Statement Yet, sees Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement as more than performative:

Brentin Mock explains Why Jails Are Booming:

A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative examines the reasons behind this explosive growth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not driven by crime. Crime rates nationwide have dropped over the past few decades, as have conviction rates in court. So then why do jails keep swelling?

It basically comes down to two things, according to PPI: The number of people detained for pretrial purposes has been escalating, and federal and state authorities have been increasingly using local jails to house their inmates as well. These two sets of circumstances cover the bulk of people sitting in jail cells in the majority of states. Only a third of those jailed locally are there because they’ve actually been convicted of a crime, the report reads.

That local jail authorities have been farming out beds to wardens of the state and federal prison systems is particularly troubling, given that this system turns jailing into a side-hustle of sorts. Sheriffs and county jail directors can justify expanding these local detention centers, even if crime is dropping, by accounting for inmate traffic from state and federal partners.

A little magic for the end of the work week: