FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 1.27.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinSaturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1943, an all-American force of fifty-five bombers strikes the German port city of Wilhelmshaven. 9th Wisconsin Light Artillery Battery musters in: ” It spent most of the war in the far West guarding forts and trains in Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas. In 1864 it returned east to Missouri and Arkansas and saw limited combat. In three years it lost only six men, all to disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Jeffrey Toobin contends The Answer to Whether Trump Obstructed Justice Now Seems Clear:

It is this question of corrupt intent that makes the Times’srecent blockbuster scoop so important. According to the article, the President tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, last June, but he stopped when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to resign if Trump insisted on the dismissal. Trump apparently offered three justifications to fire Mueller—that Mueller had left one of Trump’s golf clubs in a dispute about dues; that Mueller’s former law firm had represented Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law; and that Trump had interviewed Mueller as a possible interim replacement for Comey as F.B.I. director. McGahn’s threat to resign shows that he saw these purported reasons as pretexts. The golf-dues matter was obviously trivial; the law firm’s representation of Kushner, which did not involve Mueller at all, could only have biased the special counsel in favor of the President’s family; and Trump’s willingness to interview Mueller for the F.B.I. position showed how much the President trusted Mueller, not that he believed the former F.B.I. director harbored any animosity toward him.

McGahn recognized the key fact—that Trump wanted to fire Mueller for the wrong reasons. Trump wanted to fire Mueller because his investigation was threatening to him. This, of course, also illuminates the reasons behind Trump’s firing of Comey, which took place just a month before the President’s confrontation with McGahn regarding Mueller. Trump and his advisers have offered various tortured rationalizations for the firing of Comey—initially, for example, on the ground that Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself came clean in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. In both, Trump acknowledged that he fired Comey to stall or stop the Russia investigation—that is, the investigation of Trump himself and his campaign.

This was an improper purpose, and McGahn clearly saw that the same improper purpose underlay Trump’s determination to fire Mueller. So McGahn issued the ultimatum that prompted the President to back down.

Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public. But even on the available evidence, Trump’s position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation—of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump’s own White House counsel rebelled at the President’s rationale for his actions.

(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)

➤ Consider Trump’s many past assurances on Mueller’s job:

Before it came out that President Trump sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last June, Trump and his aides repeatedly said he wasn’t giving “any thought” to dismissing him.

(They lie when they speak.)

➤ Russell Brandom reports Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”

Reached by The Verge, Vigilant declined to confirm any contract with ICE. “As policy, Vigilant Solutions is not at liberty to share any contractual details,” the company said in a statement. “This is a standard agreement between our company, our partners, and our clients.”

While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

➤ Kim Willsher reports Paris zoo shut after 50 baboons escape:

The Paris Zoological Park has been evacuated and closed after dozens of baboons escaped their enclosure.

As zookeepers raced to round up the animals, armed police surrounded the popular attraction and sealed off nearby roads.

About 50 baboons were reported to have got out and congregated around the Grand Rocher, the fake rock centrepiece of the zoo, on Friday morning. Most had been rounded up and sent back to their shelters a few hours later, but four remained on the loose.

Officials at the zoo said the animals had not come in contact with the public as they had remained in areas inaccessible to visitors.

Members of the public had been evacuated as a precaution because baboons could be unpredictable “especially when stressed”. “They’re stronger than us,” they added.

The emergency services were called, and keepers, vets and a team carrying tranquilliser darts were on the scene in minutes and surrounded the animals.

(Stronger than people? Yes they are.)

➤ From the Aviemore Sled Dog Rally 2018:


Embed from Getty Images

Musher Richard Morgan with his husky during a training session at Feshiebridge ahead of the The Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain’s 35th Aviemore Sled Dog Rally being held this upcoming weekend on forest trails around Loch Morlich, in the shadow of the Cairngorm mountains.

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