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Daily Bread for 12.31.17

Good morning.

The year ends for Whitewater with mostly sunny skies and a high of nine degrees. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9:05:11 of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1879, Thomas Edison holds a successful public demonstration of an electric light bulb (after successful private tests months earlier). On this day in 1967, Green Bay Packers triumph in the ‘Ice Bowl’: “On this date the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys played in what many consider to be the greatest game in NFL history – The Ice Bowl. With the thermometer dipping to a shocking 13 below zero and a wind chill of minus 46, Bart Starr scored the winning touchdown from the 1-yard line with 13 seconds remaining, sealing a record third straight championship for the Packers, their fifth in seven years. Green Bay defeated Dallas, 21-17, to win the NFL Championship.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Sharon LaFraniere, Mark Mazzetti, and Matt Apuzzo report How the Russia Inquiry Began: A Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt:

WASHINGTON — During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

If Mr. Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation….

(It wasn’t the Steele dossier, it was a talkative Trump aide with knowledge of Russian hacking, that motivated the FBI.)

Julian Sanchez states plainly what this means:

Adam K. Raymond reports Mueller Probing Whether Trump Digital Team Aided Russian Disinformation Campaign:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election has begun to zero in on the joint digital operation that got Donald Trump elected, Yahoo News reports.

Mueller’s team is trying to determine if members of the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee, who worked together on the digital arm of Trump’s campaign, provided assistance to Russian trolls attempting to influence voters. It’s the latest scare for Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who managed the digital campaign and has already come under scrutiny by the special counsel for his foreign contacts.

Mueller’s move appears to concern the disproportionate targeting of swing districts by Russian trolls during the presidential campaign. CNN reported in October that ads placed by Russia-linked Facebook accounts targeted Michigan and Wisconsin in particular, with many “geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.”

Experts don’t think the trolls behind Russian Facebook accounts could have determined who to target on their own, but the question is whether the help they got came from Trump’s orbit. The leading suspects at this point are Kushner and Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital media director….

(To cooperate with America’s enemies – and Putin is an enemy of America – is to be a fifth columnist.)

Nusrat Choudhury writes Jeff Sessions Takes a Stand for Debtors’ Prisons:

During the holiday season, many of us think about what we can do to help people struggling with poverty. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, on the other hand, decided just before Christmas to rescind a guidance meant to protect low-income Americans.

The 2016 guidance, issued by former President Obama’s Justice Department, urged state and local courts nationwide to abide by constitutional principles prohibiting the jailing of poor people who cannot afford to pay court fines and fees. Jeff Sessions’ action makes clear that he and his Justice Department are unconcerned by courts trampling on the rights of poor people.

The Obama Justice Department issued the 2016 letter after reports and lawsuits by the ACLU and other groups revealed how modern-day debtors’ prisons function in more than a dozen states, despite the fact that the U.S. two centuries ago formally outlawed jailing people simply because they have unpaid debts.

These efforts revealed that poor people were being locked up in GeorgiaWashingtonMississippi, and elsewhere without court hearings or legal representation when they could not pay fines and fees for traffic tickets or other civil infractions or criminal offenses. These efforts also show that modern-day debtors’ prisons result from state laws allowing or requiring the suspension of driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines or fees without first requiring confirmation that the person could actually pay….

(Sessions is among the most consistent advocates for the most punitive measures – a patient, persistent reactionary.)

What about That Time People Put Frogs in Unrefrigerated Milk to Keep it From Spoiling?

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