Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 31m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1619, the first European-style legislative assembly in the Americas “convened for a six-day meeting at the church on Jamestown Island, Virginia. A council chosen by the Virginia Company as advisers to the governor, the Virginia Governor’s Council, met as a sort of “upper house,” while 22 locally elected representatives met as the House of Burgesses. Together, the House of Burgesses and the Council would be the Virginia General Assembly.”
Recommended for reading in full —
April Glaser observes that The New Wisconsin Foxconn Plant Will Probably Be Staffed By Robots—if It Ever Gets Built:
For one, Foxconn has a track record of promising factories to cities in need of jobs and not coming through. It happened in 2013 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when Foxconn promised a $30 million factory that would employ 500 workers. The announcement made headlines, adding to both Foxconn’s and the Pennsylvania politicians’ political capital, but it was never actually built, and there’s no sign it will ever happen. Very little was made of the deal’s quiet death. It also happened in Vietnam in 2007 and Indonesia in 2014.
Even if a plant gets built, it could fall short of expectations. In 2011, Foxconn promised a plant in Brazil that was projected to create 1000,000 jobs. In 2015, the factory reported it employed roughly 3,000 people, and the company never explained why it fell short of its projections, according to Reuters.
Last year, Foxconn boasted that it replaced 60,000 workers with robots at asingle factory in China. The company even makes its own industrial robots, dubbed Foxbots, that work on its assembly lines. Foxconn was making about 10,000 Foxbots a year in 2015.
Sarah Kendzior explains How Trump fulfilled a 30-year fantasy of becoming president, with a little help from the Kremlin:
As the Trump family faces political pressure and criminal inquiries, it is important to debunk the neophyte myth and take a look back at how Trump entered the political stage – because the same players who propelled him thirty years ago played a vital role in both the 2016 election and the Russian interference scandal.
That Trump uses ignorance as an excuse for negligence and criminal behavior is bad enough, but Trump is not ignorant. There is a grey area between moron and mastermind, and he occupies it. What he lacks in geopolitical acumen he makes up for in his ability to manipulate the political system to benefit himself – and he was groomed by some of the US’s most notorious operatives to do so.
A 1987 Newsweek cover story on Trump paints a damning portrait of Trump’s presidential ambitions, which he had announced that year. “He’d love to be president, but only if he were appointed,” one friend told the magazine. A second source warned of the consequences: “He is a dangerous man… he’s the type who’d make the trains run on time,” said John Moore, an attorney who fought a tenant dispute with Trump. A second friend accurately forecast Trump’s ceaseless ambition: “No achievement can satisfy what he wants. What he wants still is acceptance from his father. He is playing out his insecurities on an incredibly large canvas.”
Steve Rosenberg asks Could Putin prove to be Trump’s fatal attraction?:
When it began, Donald Trump’s presidency looked very pretty to Moscow. The Russians expected that America’s new leader would herald a new era in US-Russian cooperation.
At the time, a news anchor on Russian State TV described Trump as “an Alpha male… a real man.” The day after America’s presidential election, one Russian state official told me that she had celebrated Trump’s victory with a cigar and a bottle of champagne.
But, after six months of President Trump, US sanctions against Russia remain in place.
The two Russian diplomatic compounds, closed by President Obama last December, remain shut. And the idea of a “Grand Deal” with America, much hoped for here at the start of the Trump presidency, has disappeared from the pages of the Russian dailies.
Natasha Bertrand reports that Former officials say something ‘insidious’ is brewing between the White House and DOJ:
As Carrie Cordero, a former DOJ counsel, wrote recently, Trump’s feud with the Justice Department long predated Scaramucci’s appointment and the events of the past week.
Cordero noted that Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates in January when she refused to defend his executive order on immigration and that he dismissed Comey after he refused to state publicly that Trump was not personally under FBI investigation.
In an op-ed on Friday, Yates warned against the White House encroaching on the DOJ.
“The spectacle of President Trump’s now daily efforts to humiliate the attorney general into resigning has transfixed the country,” Yates wrote. “But while we are busy staring at the wreckage of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ relationship with the man he supported for the presidency, there is something more insidious happening.”
Deborah Acosta reports on Venezuela on the Brink: