Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a four-in-ten chance of afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset is 8:13 PM, for 14h 44m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 65% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred ninetieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1954, the United States Supreme Court hands down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education. On this day in 1673, the Jolliet and Marquette expedition gets underway.
Recommended for reading in full —
The staff of the thorough, respected Lawfare website (Helen Klein Murillo, Jack Goldsmith, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, Matthew Kahn, Paul Rosenzweig, Benjamin Wittes) collectively offer Initial Thoughts on Trump Asking Comey to Kill the Flynn Investigation:
Historically, obstruction of justice articles of impeachment do elaborate a pattern of conduct. The first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon, for instance, included making false statements to investigators, withholding evidence, counseling witnesses to lie or give misleading testimony, and “interfering or endeavoring to interfere with the conduct of investigations by the Department of Justice of the United States [and] the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
The critical point is that impeachment for obstruction of justice is ultimately not just a legal question; it’s also a political question, albeit a political question highly inflected by the law and often discussed in the language of the law. The boundaries of the impeachable offense are not coextensive with the boundaries of the criminal law. There are things that are not criminal that are certainly impeachable, and there are crimes that are generally regarded as too trivial to trigger the Constitution’s standard in Article II § 4 of “Treason, Bribery, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The great constitutional scholar Charles Black, in an excellent volume entitled, Impeachment: A Handbook written during the Watergate era, describes this point in vivid detail.
Michelle Goldberg offers Free Advice to Trump Aides: Quit While You Can:
Out in America, Mr. Trump still has plenty of genuine admirers, people who view him as a brilliant, iconoclastic businessman. But there is scant evidence of such respect among the people who actually work with him in Washington. The New York Times recently reported that there are “deep resentments among his scarred staff,” and The Washington Post writes of aides “bewildered and alarmed by how Trump arrives at his decisions.” These men and women are suffering personally while propping up a presidency they appear to hold in contempt. They are allowing themselves to be permanently tarnished through their association with a man whose name is destined to become the root of a political epithet signifying disgrace, like McCarthyite or Nixonian.
They aren’t just selling out their country. They’re selling out themselves.
Andrew Roth reports that so deep is Trump’s connection to Russia that Putin offers to provide Congress with details of Trump disclosures to Russian envoys:
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday he would be willing to provide the U.S. Congress a record of President Trump’s meeting with top Russian envoys, bringing scoffs on Capitol Hill that the Kremlin could help shed light on the disclosures of reportedly highly classified intelligence.
The provocative offer for the Kremlin to share evidence with U.S. oversight committees about the Oval Office meeting came with the caveat that the request for the transcript would have to come from the Trump administration….
(So Trump needs Putin to bail him out, and Putin thinks there are Americans stupid or deluded enough – other than Trump, himself – to think Russia’s offer could possibly be an honest, accurate one.)
Daniel Bice reports that Walker’s commission bankrolled by Bradley Foundation:
When Gov. Scott Walker laid out a plan in his state budget address urging people to take steps to avoid welfare, it mirrored a platform of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which has pushed for greater personal responsibility and more stringent welfare requirements.
Documents hacked from the Bradley Foundation’s computer server show the connection is not just philosophical — it’s financial.
A Bradley Foundation staffer sat on the Future of the Family Commission, which came up with Walker’s plan. Two experts who advised the state panel are major Bradley grant recipients, with one running a center that has received $11 million over the years. A key study used by the commission was paid for by Bradley.
The foundation even awarded a $100,000 grant to the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families to underwrite the commission itself — an unusual, if not unique, step in government. Neither the source of the commission’s money nor the foundation’s stake in the outcome was disclosed. The state spent about $62,000 of the grant before making its recommendation to the governor.
So, of what are Velveeta and Kraft Singles are actually made?