Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 44m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM. Whitewater’s Fire Department meets at 6:30 PM, in closed session not to reconvene.
On this day in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ends in an Allied victory as German forces are pushed back to lines held before their offensive began. On this day in 1932, dancing on Sunday in Janesville remains prohibited as that city’s council deadlocks 3-3 on permitting that entertainment.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Steve Verburg reports Preventing ‘brown water events’ in Wisconsin not a done deal:
The Natural Resources Board approved long-awaited new rules Wednesday aimed at keeping dairy manure out of drinking water in 15 eastern Wisconsin counties.
But board members acknowledged that elected officials haven’t supplied the money needed to put the rules into action.
The board heard testimony about “brown water events” — manure- and pathogen-tainted water flowing from faucets — that have been going on for more than a decade in Kewaunee and Door counties where farms spread dairy waste on shallow topsoil.
Department of Natural Resources staff members said new limits on spreading over vulnerable aquifers would take five years to work into pollution permits of all factory farms and the department hasn’t discussed moving more quickly, said Mary Anne Lowndes, DNR runoff management section chief.
There have been reductions in financial assistance needed to ensure smaller farms follow the rules, and decreased staffing levels at the DNR and at the county level where implementation and monitoring of compliance would take place.
➤ Pema Levy and Dan Friedman report Jeff Sessions Appears to Be Meddling in the Russia and Clinton Probes He Vowed to Avoid:
Yet Sessions appears to have backtracked on his pledges, and Democrats say he is violating his recusal. This criticism comes as, last week, Sessions became the first Cabinet member to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
Questions about Sessions’ recusal came early on, when he played a role in the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, whose ouster Trump acknowledged was directly related to the bureau’s investigation of his campaign’s contacts with Russia. But more recently, Sessions appears to have directed prosecutors to look into matters connected to Clinton’s campaign.
Sessions’ recusal infuriated Trump, and multiple White House staffers, including the president’s chief lawyer, Don McGahn, tried to talk him out of giving up oversight of the Russia investigation. Trump publicly rebuked Sessions’ decision in an interview with the New York Times. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump said. Democrats say Sessions is now bowing to political pressure from the White House and Trump, who has tweeted attacks on his own Justice Department and called on Sessions to go after Clinton, and they accuse Sessions of participating in an all-out effort to politicize his agency. This week, Axios reported that Sessions had pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire his deputy, Andrew McCabe, who had also been Comey’s No. 2. Trump, and his Republican allies have relentlessly targeted McCabe, whose wife was a Democratic candidate for state Senate in Virginia, to advance a narrative of anti-Trump bias within the FBI.
➤ Jonathan Chait contends Republicans Are Using the Russian Playbook on the FBI:
Republican senator Ron Johnson highlights a text of Strzok expressing reluctance to join Robert Mueller’s team, because “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” Johnson told a conservative talk-show host that this “jaw-dropping” comment amounted to a confession that Strzok knew that Trump was innocent and joined Mueller’s investigation to smear him. But maybe Strzok simply had an open mind and thought Mueller’s probe stood a strong chance of clearing Trump. Another Strzok “scandal” grew out of a text he sent expressing the opinion that Clinton would not be charged in the email investigation. The text “suggests they knew and, in turn, believed Loretta Lynch knew, that no charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton, even before the FBI had interviewed her over her unauthorized private email server,” reports Breitbart.
They knew! The fix was in! Or maybe they simply knew that the evidence of the private email server did not amount to a plausible federal case against Clinton.
Note that a Strzok text expressing his view that Trump would not be charged over Russia became evidence of a nefarious plot against Trump, and another Strzok text expressing a view that Clinton would not be charged over the emails became evidence of a nefarious plot to help Clinton. If Strzok had expressed a belief that Clinton or Trump were guilty, those messages would become scandals, too. This is the way the game works. When you begin with a suspicious of nefarious intent, a captured expression of candid thought can be turned into devastating evidence.
➤ Denise Clifton writes Sean Hannity Is Now a Favorite Weapon of Russian Trolls Attacking America:
Hannity did not respond to a request for comment about his rising popularity among the network of Russian-linked accounts.
“Because Russian accounts promote a certain political position is not evidence of coordination” between the trolls and Trump partisans advocating for the release of the memo, Schafer notes. The key takeaway with #releasethememo, he says, “is that Kremlin-oriented trolls have used that hashtag to promote divisiveness, distrust, and to negatively influence our public discourse.”
Former FBI special agent Clint Watts pointed out Tuesday that attacks on the FBI have been increasing as the Russian investigation continues to accelerate. After reports Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and James Comey had been interviewed by Mueller’s team, Watts tweeted: “Interviews are getting closer to the top & suddenly attacks by @GOP on FBI have increased.”
The 600 Kremlin-linked live Twitter accounts that Hamilton 68 monitors are separate from the 2,752 accounts Twitter revealed last fall that were operated before the 2016 presidential election by the Russian Internet Research Agency. Last Friday, Twitter updated that number to 3,814 IRA-linked accounts—plus more than 50,000 automated bot accounts linked to the Russian government. Twitter says it is sending emails to 677,000 users to notify them that they interacted with the Russian accounts.
(The Hamilton 68 dashboard is available online, as a service of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is currently funded by a group of American private individuals and small family foundations from across the political spectrum and housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States)
➤ What about That Time a Guy Parachuted Onto Devils Tower and No One Could Figure Out How to Get Him Down?: