FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 10.2.17

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 6:33 PM, for 11h 38m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold’s accomplice, British officer John André, is hanged for espionage. (Arnold escaped capture by traveling to occupied New York in HMS Vulture.) On this day in 1958, Janesville’s auto workers strike: “On this date 4,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals 95 (Fisher Body) and 121 (Chevrolet) at Janesville’s two GM plants walked off the job as part of a national strike over GM’s refusal to agree to a contract patterned after those reached with Ford and Chrysler. The desired contract demanded pay increases of 24 to 30 cents an hour and raises in supplemental unemployment benefits and severance pay.”

Recommended for reading in full —

James West reports Leaked White House Memo Details Puerto Rico Spin: “The Storm Caused These Problems, Not Our Response” (“Meanwhile, Trump is blaming “politically motivated ingrates” for criticism):

When White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert returned from a trip to Puerto Rico last week, he got to work telling his colleagues exactly how the Trump administration could put a positive spin on the government’s troubled hurricane relief efforts, according to a leaked memo obtained by Axios.

“I hope to turn the corner on our public communications,” he wrote to White House staff, before detailing new, more-upbeat “themes” he’d like to see the administration highlight over the next couple of days. “Planned hits, tweets, tv bookings and other work will limit the need for reactionary efforts,” he wrote.

One of Bossert’s talking points for responding to criticism of the relief efforts: “The storm caused these problems, not our response to it.” Here’s a longer excerpt from the memo (and go over to Axios for the full report):

I recommend that today and tomorrow we use the general theme of supporting the governor and standing with the people of Puerto Rico to get them food, water, shelter and emergency medical care. Monday and Tuesday we can pivot hopefully to a theme of stabilizing as we address temporary housing and sustaining the flow of commodities and basic government services, including temporary power. After that we focus on restoration of basic services throughout next week and next weekend. Then we start a theme of recovery planning for the bright future that lies ahead for Puerto Rico. Planned hits, tweets, tv bookings and other work will limit the need for reactionary efforts.

The storm caused these problems, not our response to it. We have pushed about as much stuff and people through a tiny hole in as short a timeframe as possible.

Meanwhile, it didn’t take my colleague AJ Vicens long to find a town in Puerto Rico entirely cut off from the help Bossert asserts is making such a difference on the island.

“You are the first person to come here,” a woman told him. According to residents Vicens interviewed, none of the 10,000 federal workers on the island had made it to Ciales, just 45 minutes from San Juan, by the time he got there yesterday. People in the town described a scene of utter desperation. (Follow Vicens on Twitter for regular updates from the island.)

Denise Clifton reports Fake News on Twitter Flooded Swing States That Helped Trump Win (“A new study reveals how junk content—including from Russia—hit Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and beyond”):

….Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”

The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.

The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.

Putin’s big investment in information warfare

In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers….

John Barlow writes How partisan is too partisan? Wrong question:

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to tackle one of the most divisive issues in election law: partisan gerrymandering. The June announcement that the court will review the problem in a case from Wisconsin has caused some to wonder: Do we really want the Supreme Court to decide how partisan is too partisan?

This misstates the problem. The question is not whether the courts should decide how partisan is too partisan. It is how to make it possible for voters to decide that for themselves.

Right now, due to a combination of polarized voting and partisan gerrymandering, primary voters rule the roost. As a result, a relatively small number of primary voters are vastly overrepresented in our legislative bodies while voters who show up only in general elections are vastly underrepresented. The most partisan voters end up deciding how partisan is too partisan. That’s the problem….

Bill Barrow reports GOP governors launch ‘news’ site critics call propaganda:

ATLANTA (AP) — Republican governors are getting into the “news” business.

The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.

Only after The Associated Press inquired about the site last week was a disclosure added to The Free Telegraph’s pages identifying the publication’s partisan source.

The governors association describes the website as routine political communication. Critics, including some Republicans, say it pushes the limits of honest campaign tactics in an era of increasingly partisan media and a proliferation of “fake news” sites, including those whose material became part of an apparent Russian propaganda effort during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“It’s propaganda for sure, even if they have objective standards and all the reporting is 100 percent accurate,” said Republican communications veteran Rick Tyler, whose resume includes Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign….

Fields of Sunflowers in Castilla-La Mancha:

Subscribe
Notify of

6 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Joe
6 years ago

This is getting serious.

Trump spent the weekend clacking marbles like Queeg on a meth-bender. It is hard to parse his behavior as anything less than psychotic. He is a man devoid of any shred of human decency, and seemingly has no grasp of actual, easily observable, facts. He is deep into the vortex, with no plausible way out. He is desperate and flailing. It will get uglier before it is all over.

Consider:
• He spent the weekend beating up the mayor of San Juan for having the temerity to ask for help after her island was planed flat. The blatant racism and unfeeling cruelty of his actions toward Puerto Rico are beyond belief. This is a level of assholic behavior never seen before in presidential history. Nobody else even comes close. And we know with certainty that he will eclipse his new record within days…

• He stood Rex Tillerson up on a stump in front of the white house, so all could see, and then castrated him with a dull knife for trying to broker some sort of non-atomic solution to the NorK issue. Tillerson, for a guy that used to run Exxon, doesn’t seem to have much dignity. I don’t expect him to last much longer. Who would stand for that sort of humiliation, particularly when applied via Twitter?

• The ranks in the rest of the cabinet are thinning, and likely to get even thinner. Price is gone, having failed to get 21 million Americans off health insurance. Good riddance to him. Even Tommy Thompson did a better job. Price is a low-rent grifter with a penchant for monetizing inside information about pharmaceutical rulings. The heat from that “little problem” may have had more to do with his demise than his sporting around on spendy airplanes. At least six others in the cabinet, or close to the cabinet, are on the hot-seat for tooling around the country on luxo-jets, too. Joe’s first law of Trump, which, roughly translated, is that if you get anywhere close to Trump, you will get fecally frosted, applies with Newtonian certainty. The cabinet is starting to look like a pan filled with fragrant fudgies.

• Mueller is closing in. Kushner has not been seen in weeks. Don Jr. is keeping a similarly low-profile. There is deep suspicion that Manafort and Flynn have rolled on both of them, and Trump as well. Spicer appears to have documented, contemporaneously, everything he saw with almost Haldemanic precision. I suggest that you try not to look in the direction of DC, as the glare from the political ‘shroom about to go off will blind you. Duck, and cover…
• Trump continues his war with black America. There is more kneeling going on in NFL stadiums than at the Vatican. I wonder if Tim Tebow is cashing in on this selling kneeling consultation? Trump has done one laudable thing. He has gotten Jerry Jones on the same page as his players. That alone should get Trump a Nobel.

There is a palpable feeling that this can’t keep up much longer. When the big fawhoomp happens, it is going to be truly epic. It already is….

Joe
Reply to  JOHN ADAMS
6 years ago

The Wisco-Kid has been lying low lately. He surfaces every now and then, to lob an insult at McConnell, but has been very quiet, otherwise. I wonder if Bryce is getting any traction? I see that he raised a megabuck in the last 3 months.

I also wonder if the frisky ultra-righters will depose Ryan. His major accomplishment is to squeak thru an Obama-care repeal favored by only 20% of the general electorate. That makes him a hero to the Freedom Caucus, but hardly anyone else. It would not surprise me to see a full-scale rip-roaring palace coup erupt. Mark Meadows for speaker and Louie Gohmert for whip! It’s a dream-team!

George Bailey
6 years ago

Yes to all of what Joe said… in the meantime, Putin’s “trouser-tent” can be observed from the International Space Station.