Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 45m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1919, Tennessee ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”), providing the necessary number of ratifying states to bring the amendment into law. On this day in 1864, the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad begins: “2nd, 6th, 7th, 37th, and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments [take] part in the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, also known as the Battle of Globe Tavern, near Petersburg, Virginia. This was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign. By destroying the railway while under heavy attack, Union troops forced Confederates to carry their provision 30 miles by wagon around Union lines to supply the city.”

Recommended for reading in full —

James Hohmann observes that Trump acts like the president of the Red States of America:

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump often behaves, first and foremost, as if he is the president of the states and people who voted for him.

That’s at odds with the American tradition, and it’s problematic as a governing philosophy — especially in a moment of crisis. Trump’s initially tone-deaf response to Charlottesville underscores why.

Animated by grievance and congenitally disinclined to extend olive branches, Trump lashes out at his “enemies” — his 2020 reelection campaign even used that word in a commercial released on Sunday — while remaining reticent to explicitly call out his fans — no matter how odious, extreme or violent.

Channeling his inner-Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list of his own, candidate Trump often claimed to speak for “a silent majority.” After failing to win the popular vote, President Trump has instead governed on behalf of an increasingly vocal but diminishing minority….

Rhonda Colvin writes that Resistance efforts are taking root in pro-Trump country — and women are leading the charge:

When Susan Kroger decided to help launch a political activism group for women in her largely rural, pro-Trump region, she expected a few dozen liberal neighbors to show up.

But when she opened the doors at the group’s first community meeting in Sioux Falls, S.D., 100 people flooded into the room. Now nine months later, Kroger says the group has quickly grown to 2,300 active members.

It’s a story emerging across Trump country, where left-leaning grass-roots groups have popped up in some of the reddest parts of the nation — a sign that “the resistance” has gone rural.

Most surprisingly, Kroger said, some of her newest members are disappointed Trump voters. The uncertainty over health-care policy has become a top issue driving first-time activists to join their ranks, Kroger and other grass-roots organizers said.

(Some have said that those who oppose Trump belong in blue states; on the contrary, there’s much benefit to being here, in a red state. Whitewater is beautiful, a citizen may freely choose where he wishes to live, and there is not the slightest reason to yield this space to others)….

David Corn and Dan Friedman report that A Putin-Friendly Oligarch’s Top US Executive Donated $285,000 to Trump:

Earlier this year, as Donald Trump, then the president-elect, was trying to counter news reports that Russia had hacked the 2016 election to help him win, the head of the American subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate owned by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin made a huge donation to Trump.

On January 6—the day the US intelligence community reported that Putin had approved a covert operation to subvert the presidential campaign to assist Trump—Andrew Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund.

Intrater is the CEO of Columbus Nova, the lone American subsidiary of Renova Group, a giant holding company owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg with interests in the metals, mining, chemical, construction, transport, energy, telecommunication, and financial sectors in Russia and abroad. Intrater, an American citizen, is Vekselberg’s cousin, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Intrater also made a $35,000 contribution to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee.

Intrater has no public history as a major political funder; his Trump donations dwarf his previous contributions. According to Federal Election Commission records, his only past political donations were $2,600 in 2014 to a business associate running as a Republican for Congress, $1,200 to Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign, and $250 to the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts in 1995. Intrater’s hefty gift to the inauguration fund earned him special access to inaugural events, including a dinner billed as “an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,” according to a fundraising brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity….

Alberrto Nardelli reports that This Is What European Diplomats Really Think About Donald Trump:

….On one level, the officials said, he is something of a laughing stock among Europeans at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.

But behind the mocking, there is growing fear among international governments that Trump is a serious threat to international peace and stability.

“He has no historical view. He is only dealing with these issues now, and seems to think the world started when he took office,” a diplomat told BuzzFeed News, pointing to Trump’s remarks and tweets about defence spending. “He thinks that NATO existed only to keep the communists out of Europe. He has a similar attitude in Asia-Pacific with Japan, ignoring that the US basically wrote their constitution.” During his presidential campaign, Trump called out Japan to pay more for the security US provides, including for hosting the US troops in the country. Japan’s constitution restricts its military options….

So, why do jets leave white trails in the sky? Here’s why:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with an even chance of afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 48m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM, her Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission at 5:30 PM, and her Police & Fire Commission at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1864, soldiers of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry bury Confederate war dead: “A soldier in the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry wrote home this day describing the aftermath of the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia. He criticizes Confederate officers for withdrawing under cover of darkness and forcing Union soldiers to inter their enemies: “Instead of burying his dead, we found the plains, the hills, the villages strewn with dead and dying rebels. Oh! the sight was sickening, and beggars description. Here an arm, there a leg, yonder half of what was once a man…”

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo report  that Trump Lawyer Forwards Email Echoing Secessionist Rhetoric:

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”

The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.

Mr. Dowd received the email on Tuesday night and forwarded it on Wednesday morning to more than two dozen recipients, including a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and journalists at Fox News and The Washington Times. There is no evidence that any of the journalists used the contents of the email in their coverage. One of the recipients provided a copy to The New York Times.

“You’re sticking your nose in my personal email?” Mr. Dowd told The Times in a brief telephone interview. “People send me things. I forward them.” He then hung up.

(Obvious points: 1. This is shoddy lawyering that draws attention to the lawyer rather than supportive points of the client’s defense. 2. Dodd sent a letter to news organizations, then expects it to be a merely private matter? Joke, right? 3. He has a habit of abruptly ending phone conversations. 4. Matthew Miller’s right that “Dowd is both the perfect lawyer for Trump and an absolutely abysmal choice for someone who is the subject of a serious investigation” and “It remains mind-boggling that the president of the United States can’t find a real criminal defense attorney to represent him.”)

Kristine Philips reports on the view of Historians: No, Mr. President, Washington and Jefferson are not the same as Confederate generals:

….To make an equivalency between two of the Founding Fathers and Confederacy leaders is not only “absurd,” but also “unacceptable for the president of the United States,” said Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

“They accomplished something very important. Washington and Jefferson were central to the creation of a nation … Lee and Stonewall were not being honored for those types of accomplishment,” Grossman said. “They were being honored for creating and defending the Confederacy, which existed for one reason, and that was to protect the right of people to own other people.”

Trump has said that he’s a fan of history yet he does not seem to trust historians.

Douglas Blackmon, an author and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he’s sympathetic to white nationalist views….

Andrew Kramer and Andrew Higgins find In Ukraine, a Malware Expert Who Could Blow the Whistle on Russian Hacking:

KIEV, Ukraine — The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the dark web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.

Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in Russian hacking in the United States. American intelligence agencies have determined Russian hackers were behind the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee.

But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.

Adam Davidson writes of Trump’s Business of Corruption (“What secrets will Mueller find when he investigates the President’s foreign deals?”):

President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.” Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.

Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.

One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump. (Sekulow said that “the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope,” adding, “Georgia is not Russia.”)

(Neither subjects of criminal investigations nor their lawyers are entitled peremptorily to set the terms of an investigation.)

It’s a Corgi, chicken, and duck romp —

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see a probability of evening thundershowers and a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 13h 50m 43s of daytime. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1777, America is victorious at the Battle of Bennington, fought at  Walloomsac, New York, and near Bennington, Vermont. On this day in 1864, the 1st Wisconsin Light Artillery successfully repulses two attempts to seize Union artillery pieces during the Cumberland Campaign.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jennifer Rubin asks What did you expect from Trump?:

We  should be clear on several points. First, it is morally reprehensible to serve in this White House, supporting a president so utterly unfit to lead a great country. Second, John F. Kelly has utterly failed as chief of staff; the past two weeks have been the worst of Trump’s presidency, many would agree. He can at this point only serve his country by resigning and warning the country that Trump is a cancer on the presidency, to borrow a phrase. Third, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have no excuses and get no free passes. They are as responsible as anyone by continuing to enable the president. Finally, Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible.

Ilya Somin contends Why slippery slope arguments should not stop us from removing Confederate monuments:

In fairness, the slippery slope argument is sometimes advanced by more intellectually serious advocates than Trump. It is wrong, even so. The argument fails because there are obviously relevant distinctions that can be made between Washington and Jefferson on the one hand and Confederate leaders on the other.

One crucial distinction it misses is that few if any monuments to Washington, Jefferson and other slaveowning Founders were erected for the specific purpose of honoring their slaveholding. By contrast, the vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery. I noted another key distinction here:

Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.

Endorsing the slippery slope case against removing Confederate monuments also creates a problematic slippery slope of its own. If we should not remove monuments to perpetrators of evil for fear that it might lead to the removal of monuments to more worthy honorees, that implies that eastern European nations were wrong to remove monuments to communist mass murderers like Lenin and Stalin, and Germany and Italy were wrong to remove monuments to Nazi and Fascist leaders. After all, there is no telling where such removals might lead! By Trump’s logic, taking down German monuments to Hitler and Goebbels might lead to the removal of monuments to Immanuel Kant, who expressed racist sentiments in some of his writings. Getting rid of monuments to Lenin and Stalin might lead people to take down monuments to Picasso, who was also a communist. Where will it all stop?

(Trump is a weak thinker, with an apparently stunted intellect, limited vocabulary, and general ignorance of historical distinctions: when he advances arguments, they’re scarcely arguments at all, but merely shallow attempts at such.)

Rosie Gray reports that some are ‘Really Proud of Him’: Alt-Right Leaders Praise Trump’s Comments:

White nationalist and alt-right activists are cheering President Trump for defending white-nationalist protesters and placing equal blame on counterprotesters for the violence that ensued in Charlottesville this past weekend at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.

“Really proud of him,” the alt-right leader Richard Spencer said in a text message. “He bucked the narrative of Alt-Right violence, and made a statement that is fair and down to earth. C’ville could have hosted a peaceful rally — just like our event in May — if the police and mayor had done their jobs. Charlottesville needed to police the streets and police the antifa, whose organizations are dedicated to violence.”

Spencer said he didn’t necessarily view Trump’s remarks as an endorsement of the protesters’ goal; the Unite the Right rally was held to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “He was calling it like he saw it,” Spencer, who was one of the leaders of the protest, said. “He endorsed nothing. He was being honest.” Spencer held a press conference in his office and home in Alexandria on Monday in which he said he did not believe Trump had condemned white nationalists in his comments on Monday, in which the president said “racism is evil” and specifically called out white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. Trump made those remarks after intense criticism for failing to specifically condemn white-nationalist groups in his initial response.

Byran Behar, on Twitter, succinctly describes Trump:

What a scam. The make America great again prez is most un-American, pro-Russia, pro-Confederate, pro-Nazi leader we’ve ever had.

— Bryan Behar (@bryanbehar) August 15, 2017

NPR’s Skunk Bear science program with Adam Cole explains How Eclipses Changed History:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:02 Am and sunset 7:55 PM, for 13h 53m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 44% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventy-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1969, the Woodstock festival opens on a dairy farm in New York. On this day in 1862, the 24th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry musters in: “The 24th was organized in late 1862 from the Milwaukee and the surrounding areas under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Herman L. Page. The regiment was encamped at Camp Sigel in Milwaukee. Page resigned one day after the muster in and Charles H. Larrabee was appointed Colonel. On September 5th, the regiment left Wisconsin for Kentucky. At Louisville they were assigned to the 37th Brigade, under Colonel Gruesel, of the 11th Division, under General Phillip Sheridan. The 24th was mustered out on June 10, 1865. [Source: 24th Wisconsin Infantry page].”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Adam Serwer demolishes The Myth of the Kindly General Lee (“The legend of the Confederate leader’s heroism and decency is based in the fiction of a person who never existed.”):

….There is little truth in this. Lee was a devout Christian, and historians regard him as an accomplished tactician. But despite his ability to win individual battles, his decision to fight a conventional war against the more densely populated and industrialized North is considered by many historians to have been a fatal strategic error.

But even if one conceded Lee’s military prowess, he would still be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in defense of the South’s authority to own millions of human beings as property because they are black. Lee’s elevation is a key part of a 150-year-old propaganda campaign designed to erase slavery as the cause of the war and whitewash the Confederate cause as a noble one. That ideology is known as the Lost Cause, and as historian David Blight writes, it provided a “foundation on which Southerners built the Jim Crow system.”

Lee was a slaveowner—his own views on slavery were explicated in an 1856 letter that it often misquoted to give the impression that Lee was some kind of an abolitionist. In the letter, he describes slavery as “a moral & political evil,” but goes on to explain that:

I think it however a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy.

The argument here is that slavery is bad for white people, good for black people, and most importantly, it is better than abolitionism; emancipation must wait for divine intervention. That black people might not want to be slaves does not enter into the equation; their opinion on the subject of their own bondage is not even an afterthought to Lee….

(Lost Causers, Redeemers, and neo-Confederates — similar if not identical species — are like an American form of Holocaust deniers: they hide the full truth, and offer distorted truths and outright lies in its place.)

Matt Ford writes of The Statues of Unliberty:

….Thanks to segregationist Southern state legislatures in the early 20th century, eight statues of Confederate leaders currently reside in the National Statuary Hall Collection on Capitol Hill. They include Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Vice President Alexander Stephens, and Lee, whose Charlottesville monument was the focal point of this weekend’s strife. These bronze and marble figures, standing in the center of American democracy, pay tribute to the same authoritarian forces that congressional leaders eagerly denounced.

States can voluntarily swap out their statues for new ones at will, thanks to a 2000 amendment to the original federal law authorizing the collection. But Congress is ultimately responsible for what can and can’t be kept within the Capitol; the senators and representatives who condemned the marchers in Charlottesville have the power to clean their own house by banning Confederate statues….

(Every man so memorialized with these statues was a traitor to his own people.)

McKay Coppins describes how little loyalty Trump has in From Trump Aide to Single Mom (“Last November, A.J. Delgado played a vital role on a winning campaign. Then everything fell apart”):

A.J. Delgado and Jason miller stood in the New York Hilton ballroom on the night of the 2016 election, watching the man they helped elect president deliver the unlikeliest of victory speeches. It was a heady moment for the small band of aides and operatives who had been working toward this dream for months—and few had worked harder than Delgado and Miller. As prominent spokespeople for Donald Trump, they had become key figures in his campaign, and that night they both looked poised to join the ranks of America’s most powerful politicos. They were also engaged in a romance that had been forged in the frenetic final weeks of the race.

Nine months later, their paths have diverged dramatically.

Miller lives with his young family near Washington, D.C., where he works at a high-powered consulting firm, offers political analysis on CNN, and reportedly speaks regularly with the president and his inner-circle. Delgado, meanwhile, is living with her mother in Miami, without a job in politics, largely abandoned by the movement she helped lead to victory—and raising her and Miller’s son on her own….

Lachlan Markay and Spencer Ackerman report that Paul Manafort Sought $850 Million Deal With Putin Ally and Alleged Gangster:

Paul Manafort partnered on an $850 million New York real-estate deal with an ally of Vladimir Putin and a Ukrainian moneyman whom the Justice Department recently described as an “organized-crime member.”

That’s according a 2008 memo written by Rick Gates, Manafort’s business partner and fellow alumnus of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. In it, Gates enthused about finalizing with the financing necessary to acquire New York’s louche Drake Hotel.

Two former federal prosecutors told The Daily Beast that the hotel deal was likely to be an item of focus for special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin.

Leah Varjacques explains What Scientists Have Learned from Eclipses:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see an even chance of scattered thunderstorms and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:01 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 13h 55m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 55.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill announce in a joint declaration the Atlantic Charter. On this day in 1864, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry joins Union forces in an expedition to Jasper, Georgia.

Recommended for reading in full —

In November, before the election, Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes wrote of CVE [Countering Violent Extremism] for White People: The Trumpist Movement and the Radicalization Process:

….But Trumpism doesn’t simply provide—like certain Islamisms—an ideational platform on which radicalization can take place. It also provides key aspects of the crucial social networks for very large numbers of people. Nazis and white supremacists have always been able to find each other online, but unless you visited their particular corners of the web, they had very little way to reach you. They were a relatively small group of people speaking almost entirely to themselves.

Trump has changed that. Now white supremacists and alt-righters are a small group of people in a giant stadium, doing the wave in the bleachers with Sieg Heils. Everyone in the stadium gets to see them, particularly because the Trump campaign often puts them on the Jumbotron by retweeting them or refusing to repudiate them. Notoriously, in January, Trump retweeted a message from a user with the Twitter handle “@WhiteGenocideTM,” a reference to a widespread white supremacist meme. Later in the campaign, Trump also refused for days to conclusively repudiate David Duke’s endorsement of his candidacy.

What’s more, if you follow Donald Trump’s own Twitter feed, you inevitably get exposed to a steady diet of the hardest-core white supremacists as they fawningly reply to him. Even if you don’t follow Trump, you see those people attacking the journalists and commentators you do follow. And if you attend Trump’s rallies or watch clips of them online, you can find other Trump supporters chanting slogans like “Jew-S-A.” A recent video shows one rally attendee in Cleveland coaching another through calling reporters members of the “Lügenpresse”—a Nazi phrase meaning “lying press”….

T. Rees Shapiro, Alice Crites, Laura Vozzella and John Woodrow Cox reports that the Alleged driver of car that plowed into Charlottesville crowd was a Nazi sympathizer, former teacher says:

The alleged driver, James Alex Fields Jr., a 20-year-old who traveled to Virginia from Ohio, had espoused extremist ideals at least since high school, according to Derek Weimer, a history teacher.

Weimer said he taught Fields during his junior and senior years at Randall K. Cooper High School in Kentucky. For a class called “America’s Modern Wars,” Fields wrote a deeply researched paper about the Nazi military during World War II, Weimer recalled.

“It was obvious that he had this fascination with Nazism and a big idolatry of Adolf Hitler,” the teacher said. “He had white supremacist views. He really believed in that stuff.”

Fields’s research project into the Nazi military was well written, Weimer said, but it appeared to be a “big lovefest for the German military and the Waffen-SS.”

Jena McGregor reports that Trump fires back after the CEO of Merck resigned from his manufacturing council:

The chief executive of Merck said Monday in a tweet that he was resigning from President Trump’s American Manufacturing Council, saying he was doing so “as CEO of Merck and as a matter of personal conscience” and that “America’s leaders must honor our fundamental values by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy.”

In the statement, Kenneth C. Frazier, one of the few African American CEOs in the Fortune 500, said “I feel a responsibility to take a stand against intolerance and extremism” and touted the power of diversity. “Our country’s strength stems from its diversity and the contributions made by men and women of different faiths, races, sexual orientations and political beliefs.”

Within an hour after the statement was first issued, Trump tweeted his response. “Now that Ken Frazier of Merck Pharma has resigned from President’s Manufacturing Council, he will have more time to LOWER RIPOFF DRUG PRICES!”….

(Trump’s chances of finding a way to lower drug prices are about the same as his chances of flying to the moon by flapping his arms; his tweets are persuasive only to those who are gullible, ignorant, or dense. Frazier did the right thing.)

The New York Times, in an editorial, sees Trump rightly for The Hate He Dares Not Speak Of:

Let’s discard the fiction that President Trump wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly to the neo-Nazi violence that killed Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old counterdemonstrator in Charlottesville, Va., on Saturday. The neo-Nazis heard his message loud and clear….

Mr. Trump is alone in modern presidential history in his willingness to summon demons of bigotry and intolerance in service to himself. He began his political career on a lie about President Barack Obama’s citizenship and has failed to firmly condemn the words and deeds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan leaders and other bigots who rallied behind him. A number of these people, including David Duke, the former Klan imperial wizard, and Richard Spencer, self-styled theorist of the alt-right, were part of the amen chorus of bigots in Charlottesville.

“We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,” said Mr. Duke, whose support Mr. Trump has only reluctantly disavowed in the past. “That’s what we believed in. That’s why we voted for Donald Trump”….

Here are the biggest myth about sharks, debunked:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 13h 58m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventy-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1961, East Germany’s communist government begins construction of the Berlin Wall. On this day in 1936, a freight train derails near Janesville, “18 cars, 13 of them oil tankers, burned in the ensuing spectacular blaze. Although monetary loss was estimated at $150,000, no one was injured.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Vann Newkirk asks When Does a Fringe Movement Stop Being Fringe?:

….Where euphemism, newly-coined terms, and lack of historical perspective all leave the country confused as to just how the violence in Charlottesville came to be, the truth is there in plain sight. What happened there in Emancipation Park and what is happening not only in the streets of Charlottesville, but streets across the country, is that the rhetoric and policy of white supremacy, which is still fostered and abetted widely, is again being converted into the kinds of overt interpersonal violence by which most people recognize it. And for the people who stand to lose the most from that kind of violence, the question might be when—not if—it transforms from a political peripheral into a regime.

History says that those transformations are relatively fast, and often act as conflagrations that destroy decades of progress in flashes. The paramilitary racist Red Shirts in South Carolina appeared on the scene just two years before their armed resistance helped bring an end to Reconstruction and the establishment of a new white-supremacist Jim Crow government. The third Klan arose in strength in the South in the 1950s, and by the end of the decade had embarked on one of the most extensive bombing and terrorism campaigns in American history. Its predecessor in the second Klan existed as a tiny membership group for years after the 1915 release of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, but fielded a 50,000-strong march through the nation’s capital in 1925.

The emerging lessons in Charlottesville are somber. White supremacy can and will flourish when given fuel; white-supremacist rhetoric will tend towards violence; and it’s often only in the rear-view mirror that Americans can clearly see the events that lead to that violence spreading….

Colbert King reminds These are your people, President Trump:

President Trump’s mealy-mouthed mutterings on the terrorism let loose in Charlottesville on Saturday are worthy of the hypocrite and instigator of hate that he has proved himself to be. Trump knows what was at work on those streets and who was behind it. As well he should. They are some of the same forces that helped to put him in the White House.

On hand giving the clan of white nationalists a verbal boost was former Ku Klux Klan leader and preeminent white nationalist David Duke. Just as the bigoted Duke was on hand on election night exclaiming on social media that Trump’s victory was “one of the most exciting nights of my life.” Duke tweeted at the time, “Make no mistake about it, our people have played a HUGE role in electing Trump.”

And Duke’s people — Trump’s people, also — were out in force in Charlottesville with their hate-filled minds, their guns, and a weaponized automobile….

(There have been, and are, many reasons to oppose Trump: his autocracy, bigotry, serial mendacity, ignorance, subservience to Putinism, and intemperance. He’s so much of these vices, that any one of them would be enough to reject him from any significant position, let alone the presidency. Trump is unfit even to care briefly for one’s dog; no reasonable person would trust him to do so. It is an old adage that bad doesn’t get better, it gets worse. So it is with Trump: the longer he holds power, the worse will be the damage he causes.)

Jennifer Rubin argues Enough of the Confederate statues, the alt-right heroes and Trump’s moral idiocy:

….If Republicans are now truly disgusted by the president they supported, they can condemn his embarrassing comments, support the FBI and Justice Department investigation, and urge that Confederate statues throughout the country be taken down. We’ve now erased the fictions that these monuments are about “Southern heritage.” No, they are giant concrete shrines to white nationalism.

“It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, they fought against it,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a memorable speech explaining his city’s decision to remove the statues. “They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for.”

If the president doesn’t grasp this, the rest of the country should. It’s time to get rid of the statues and get rid of the alt-right heroes in the White House. As for Trump, the country cannot get rid of him soon enough.

Sarah Kaplan writes of Doggy glasses, doomsday omens and other eclipse myths — debunked:

….Myth: The sun emits harmful radiation during the eclipse.

Fact: Because there have been so many strongly worded warnings about the hazards of watching the eclipse, some folks worry that there’s something dangerous about the sun itself at this time. Others have heard that eclipses are associated with particularly harmful radiation that can poison food or cause birth defects. And astrologers have been saying that eclipses are associated with chaos, disruption, violence — you name it.

These claims have no scientific basis, though, and there’s nothing particularly dangerous about the sunlight during an eclipse. It’s the same sun we always enjoy, the one that lights our days, fuels our plants and makes our planet habitable, but momentarily just stuck behind the moon. The situation is analogous to a cloud passing in front of the sun, only in this case, the cloud is made of rock and is floating 240,000 miles above the ground. The light you see during totality — when the moon completely covers the main part of the sun and makes it possible to see the sun’s outer atmosphere, called the corona — is a little eerie and sometimes has a greenish tinge.

You don’t need to cover your windows, hide indoors or protect your unborn children from the light. You just need to make sure that anyone watching the event takes the appropriate measures to protect their eyes….

Great Big Story takes viewers on a Dive Into Budapest’s Hidden Underwater World:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:59 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 00m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventy-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1981, IBM introduces the IBM Personal Computer (Model 5150):

By the end of 1982 IBM was selling one PC every minute of the business day.^[27] It estimated that 50 to 70% of PCs sold in retail stores went to the home,^[96] and the publicity from selling a popular product to consumers caused IBM to, a spokesman said, “enter the world” by familiarizing them with the Colossus of Armonk. Although the PC only provided two to three percent of sales^[2] the company found that it had underestimated demand by as much as 800%. Because its prices were based on forecasts of much lower volume—250,000 over five years, which would have made the PC a very successful IBM product—the PC became very profitable; at times the company sold almost that many computers per month.^[36][44][21] Estridge claimed in 1983 that from October 1982 to March 1983 customer demand quadrupled. He stated that the company had increased production three times in one year, and warned of a component shortage if demand continued to increase.^[49] Many small suppliers’ sales to IBM grew rapidly, both pleasing their executives and causing them to worry about being overdependent on it. Miniscribe, for example, in 1983 received 61% of its hard drive orders from IBM; the company’s stock price fell by more than one third in one day after IBM reduced orders in January 1984. Suppliers often found, however, that the prestige of having IBM as a customer led to additional sales elsewhere.^[48]

On this day in 1939, the Wizard of Oz holds a world premiere:

According to the fan site, thewizardofoz.info, “The first publicized showing of the final, edited film was at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin on August 12, 1939. No one is sure exactly why a small town in the Midwest received that honor.” It showed the next day in Sheboygan, Appleton and Rhinelander, according to local newspapers. “The official premiere was at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on August 15, attended by most of the cast and crew and a number of Hollywood celebrities.” [Source: thewizardofoz.info/.]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Dave McKinney reports for Reuters what Wisconsinites have know for years, that Audits show lax oversight by Wisconsin agency counting Foxconn jobs:

CHICAGO (Reuters) – The Wisconsin agency tasked with holding Foxconn accountable for delivering up to 13,000 jobs in exchange for $1.5 billion in state payroll tax credits has a history of failing to verify job-creation claims and rewarding companies that fall short of quotas, according to state audits.

The deal to secure Foxconn’s proposed LCD screen plant announced late last month is one of the largest economic development agreements in U.S. history and counts President Donald Trump, who rode into office on promises of creating manufacturing jobs, as one of its proponents.

A May audit found the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) did not independently verify jobs numbers claimed by recipients of tax credits and posted inaccurate jobs figures online. Earlier such reports by the non-partisan Legislative Audit Bureau identified similar shortcomings in 2013 and 2015….

Oliver Darcy describes The chaos behind the scenes of Fox News’ now-retracted Seth Rich story:

For more than two months, Fox News has declined to explain the story behind one of its most high-profile journalistic disasters — the publication of an article that aimed to tie slain Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich to Wikileaks. Now CNN has learned the details and is disclosing them for the first time.

Rod Wheeler, a Fox News contributor and former detective hired to investigate Rich’s death on behalf of the slain man’s family, sued the network last week, claiming that quotes in the story attributed to him were fabricated, and that the whole effort had been a collaboration with the White House to advance a storyline aimed at discrediting allegations President Trump colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. (The White House has denied being involved with the story.)

But CNN’s reporting into what happened behind the scenes at Fox News shows that Wheeler’s own actions likely played a central role. In the day leading up to the article’s publication, Wheeler went rogue. In doing so, he sent the network’s editorial process into chaos, and as a result the article was rushed to the site without undergoing the kind of editorial scrutiny it should have received….

Benjamin Wittes describes why he filed The Friendliest Lawsuit Ever Filed Against the Justice Department:

I filed it because I believe President Trump lied before Congress about data kept by his Justice Department, and I want to find out whether I’m right.

Back in February, speaking before a Joint Session of Congress, President Trump declared that: “according to data provided by the Department of Justice, the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism and terrorism-related offenses since 9/11 came here from outside of our country.”

There’s a lot of reason to believe this statement is a compound lie—both to believe that the vast majority of individuals convicted of terrorism-related crimes did notcome here from elsewhere and to believe that the men and women of the Department of Justice did not provide any data suggesting otherwise….

Alex Whiting ponders the FBI Search of Paul Manafort’s Home: What Does It Really Mean?:

On Wednesday news broke that at the end of last month, FBI agents searched one of Paul Manafort’s homes for documents as part of the Russia collusion investigation, directed by special counsel Robert Mueller. What is the significance of this news, and why didn’t Mueller just obtain the documents by grand jury subpoena?

Mueller’s use of a search warrant tells us that he was able to establish on the basis of evidence, and to the satisfaction of a United States Magistrate-Judge, that there was probable cause to believe that evidence of a specific crime or crimes existed in the location to be searched. That standard is significantly higher than what is required to obtain a grand jury subpoena, which can be used to obtain any evidence that a grand jury (under the direction of a prosecutor) decides will be helpful to their investigation. Mueller’s resort to a search warrant shows, therefore, that his investigation has advanced, has identified specific potential crimes, and is zeroing in on key evidence. Since it was Manafort’s house that was searched, it is likely that he is implicated in the crimes, but that is not necessarily the case. Further, it should be clear that just because Mueller has now reached this stage in the investigation, it does not necessarily mean that Manafort or anybody else will be ultimately charged with crimes.

Now why did Mueller use a search warrant instead of a subpoena, particularly since Manafort’s attorney says that they have been cooperating with the investigation all along? I can think of four possible reasons for Mueller’s move (none of which are mutually exclusive) [reasons follow]….

Here’s what it’s like to ride the thrilling Coney Island Cyclone: