Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of eighty-two, and a one-third chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 37m 31s of daytime. We’ve a new moon. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Birge Fountain Committee is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and her Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas begin the first of seven debates during their United States Senate race. On this day in 1864, the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, near Petersburg, Virgina ends, with Wisconsinites distinguishing themselves: “On this day, the 7th Wisconsin Infantry repulsed a fierce attack. It then captured the 16th Mississippi Infantry and all its officers. This was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Dan Zak describes Whataboutism: The Cold War tactic, thawed by Putin, is brandished by Donald Trump:
….His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic. Tuesday’s bonkers news conference in New York was Trump’s latest act of “whataboutism,” the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting moral equivalency between two things that aren’t necessarily comparable. In this case, the president wondered whether the removal of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville — where white supremacists clashed this weekend with counterprotesters — would lead to the teardown of others….
For a nanosecond, especially to an uncritical listener, this stab at logic might seem interesting, even thought-provoking, and that’s why it’s a useful political tool. Whataboutism appears to broaden context, to offer a counterpoint, when really it’s diverting blame, muddying the waters and confusing the hell out of rational listeners.
“Not only does it help to deflect your original argument but it also throws you off balance,” says Alexey Kovalev, an independent Russian journalist, on the phone from Moscow. “You’re expecting to be in a civilized argument that doesn’t use cheap tricks like that. You are playing chess and your opponent — while making a lousy move — he just punches you on the nose.”
Gabe Sherman writes that Steve Bannon Readies His Revenge:
….Bannon has media ambitions to compete with Fox News from the right. Last week in New York, he huddled with his billionaire benefactor, Robert Mercer, and discussed ways to expand Breitbart into TV, sources said. “Television is definitely on the table,” a Bannon adviser told me. A partnership with Sinclair remains a possibility. In recent days, Sinclair’s chief political analyst Boris Epshteyn has spoken with Breitbart editors about ways to form an alliance, one Breitbart staffer said. “All the Sinclair guys are super tight with Breitbart. Imagine if we got together Hannity and O’Reilly and started something?”
Meanwhile, the next phase has already begun. On Sunday, the website’s lead story was based on a Daily Mail report that said Ivanka was behind Bannon’s removal. “Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed out Bannon because of his ‘far-right views’ clashing with her Jewish faith,” the article noted. Another piece was headlined: “6 TIMES JAVANKA’S DISPLEASURE WITH POTUS LEAKED TO PRESS.” In his feud with Kushner, Bannon may have a powerful ally: Reince Priebus, also recently departed from the White House with a quiver of grudges. Recently, according to several sources, Bannon has told friends he wants Priebus to give his account of the James Comey firing to special prosecutor Robert Mueller. According to a source close to Priebus, the former chief of staff believes that the decision was made during an early May weekend in Bedminster, where Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller were with the president. Trump returned to the Oval Office on Monday, May 8 and told other aides he intended to fire Comey….
Colin Binkley reports that Math experts join brainpower to help address gerrymandering:
….”Mathematicians are coming late to this problem,” said [Tufts University mathematics professor] Duchin, who started studying the shapes of electoral districts after teaching a course on voting during the presidential primary last year. “We think we can see underlying mathematical principles that weren’t visible before.”
Gerrymandering isn’t new, and it isn’t always illegal. States are given wide latitude to draw their own voting districts, and since at least the 1800s politicians have sought to cement their power by creating districts in which certain voting groups are spread thinly over many districts or clumped heavily into only a few. Either way, it dilutes their power.
Drawing districts along racial lines has been ruled unconstitutional, as in North Carolina, where a federal court struck down 28 districts last year because state Republicans relied too heavily on race when drawing them. Gerrymandering along partisan lines has survived legal challenges, but the Supreme Court will revisit the topic this year in a Wisconsin lawsuit that experts say could be a landmark case.
Mathematicians hope to help by offering new measurements to evaluate whether a district has been drawn unfairly. Until recently many courts have relied on relatively unscientific methods, experts say, often using the so-called “eyeball test” to see if a district’s shape looks reasonably compact and regular….
Alan Feuer reports that Far Right Plans Its Next Moves With a New Energy:
The white supremacists and right-wing extremists who came together over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., are now headed home, many of them ready and energized, they said, to set their sights on bigger prizes.
Some were making arrangements to appear at future marches. Some were planning to run for public office. Others, taking a cue from the Charlottesville event — a protest, nominally, of the removal of a Confederate-era statue — were organizing efforts to preserve what they referred to as “white heritage” symbols in their home regions.
Calling it “an opportune time,” Preston Wiginton, a Texas-based white nationalist, declared on Saturday that he planned to hold a “White Lives Matter” march on Sept. 11 on the campus of Texas A&M — with a keynote speaker, Richard B. Spencer, who was featured at the Charlottesville event….
And yet, and yet, Boston was a disappointment for them:
This is the first video I’ve seen that really shows the disparity between the “free speech” rally and the thousands of counter-demonstrators pic.twitter.com/Lca2J3vhsc
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) August 19, 2017
Today I Found Out describes stories from its WWII Files – Pigeon Guided Missiles and Literal Bat Bombs: