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Monthly Archives: September 2017

Daily Bread for 9.25.17

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 58m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the School Board at 7:00 PM.


Video above is from the 50th anniversary of the school’s integration; it’s now sixty years on.

On this day in 1957, federal soldiers escort nine black students to assure the legally-required and morally-necessary beginning of integration at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”

On this day in 1961, “Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson signed into law a bill that required all 1962 cars sold in Wisconsin to be equipped with seat belts.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Barnes writes that a Supreme Court case offers window into how representatives choose their constituents:

 Behind the locked doors of a “map room,” in a politically connected law firm’s offices across from the historic Capitol, three men worked in secret to ensure the future of the state’s newly triumphant Republican Party.

They were drawing the legislative districts in which members of the Wisconsin Senate and State Assembly would be elected. When the men — two aides to legislative leaders and a lobbyist brought in to help — finished in the early summer of 2011, they headed across the street to present their work.

“The maps we pass will determine who’s here 10 years from now,” read the notes for the meeting, which were made public as part of a lawsuit. “We have an opportunity and an obligation to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.”

The maps are now at the center of a Supreme Court case to be argued next month that could change the dynamics of American politics — if the justices decide for the first time that a legislative map is so infected with political favoritism that it violates the Constitution….

Josh Dawsey reports that Kushner used private email to conduct White House business (“The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business”):

Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”….

Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report that Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook:

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race….

Jennifer Agiesta reports that in a CNN poll: 54% say Russia-backed content on social media moved 2016 election:

Although President Donald Trump insists otherwise, most Americans say it’s likely that Russian-backed content on social media did affect the outcome of the 2016 election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

The poll result comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement that it would turn over to Congressional investigators information related to more than 3,000 ads the company says were sold to accounts linked to a Russian troll farm between June 2015 and May 2017. And Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he’s planning to hold a public hearing next month on Russian election interference through Facebook and other social media platforms.

Related: Full poll results

Overall, 54% say it’s very or somewhat likely that such Russian-backed content on Facebook or other social media affected the 2016 presidential vote, 43% say that’s not too or not at all likely. More appear to see this social media effort as having affected the outcome of the election than said so about information released due to Russian hacking. According to a CNN poll back in January, just 40% said that information was significant enough to change the outcome of the election….

If diets changed, then the climate might, too:

In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent articleThe Atlantic writer James Hamblin shows how one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.

Daily Bread for 9.24.17

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM, for 12h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred nineteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1789, the first Congress under the Constitution adopts Judiciary Act of 1789. On this day in 1864, the 41st Wisconsin Infantry musters out.

Recommended for reading in full —

Callum Borchers writes What we know about the 21 states targeted by Russian hackers:

The Department of Homeland Security was short on details when it said Friday that it had notified 21 states of Russian efforts to hack their election systems in 2016. For one thing, the department didn’t publicly identify the states. For another, it didn’t say how many of the hacking attempts were successful — or to what degree.

Based on reporting by The Washington Post, Associated Press and other news outlets — plus statements issued by some state officials — we now have a complete list of the affected states. The Fix has mapped and categorized them, according to what we know about the success or failure of the cyberattacks.

[Russian hacking timeline]

One trend that emerges in officials’ remarks is a desire to strike a balance between projecting confidence in the integrity of vote tallies and concern about future threats.

For example: Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette (D) told me on Saturday that although a cyberattack on his state was unsuccessful, hacking is “for sure” a greater concern than voter fraud, which President Trump has called a “big problem.”

“We need Congress and the president to help states with their security systems for elections and ensure funding for more secure equipment where needed, and we need it to happen now,” Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill (D) said. “Rather than investigating this attack on our democracy from a hostile foreign power, the Trump administration has formed a commission to prove that he won the popular vote, an idea that has been entirely discredited by numerous studies.

“Meanwhile, the cyber threat to our election systems remains and state election officials needed to know what was really going on so that we could respond and put in place any possible additional security measures.”

Asha Rangappa considers What the FISA Warrants Against Paul Manafort Tell Us About Mueller’s Investigation:

….According to reporting, the initial FISA surveillance ceased after a court found that the FBI was no longer collecting foreign intelligence based on that order. This likely would have occurred at one of the 90-day renewal points after the surveillance began. Now, one conclusion might be that there was no foreign intelligence activity actually happening – or perhaps that the basis for this order itself was somewhat flimsy. However, if the order had been renewed at least once since it commenced, which would be likely even if it began in late 2014 or early 2015, that was probably not the case: After all, in order to renew the order at any point prior to it ceasing, the FBI would have had to produce ongoing foreign intelligence collection.

I invite you to consider another possibility. If Manafort was already being developed by Russian intelligence since 2014, and was approached in a more concrete, operational way around summer 2016, then they would likely want him to begin communicating with them through other means than he was already using. If this happened, collection on the lines, accounts, or facilities targeted by the initial FISA order would go dry, and would explain why the surveillance ceased. In other words, there was no longer any foreign intelligence activity happening on the first FISA – but that’s because it was happening somewhere else….

That the first FISA order ceased because Manafort became “operational” is admittedly purely speculative.  But based on my experience working against foreign intelligence targets, this would be consistent with the timeline in several respects.  First, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting has been characterized by many intelligence experts as a “test run” – an experiment to see how open members of the Trump campaign might be to engaging in some potentially illegal behavior in order to benefit the campaign. Having Manafort already on board would make sense in this scenario: Even if this might have been only an initial approach to Donald Trump, Jr. and Jared Kushner, the Russians would know they had at least one person in the campaign – Manafort – at that point who was “all in,” and could make the meeting less threatening for the newbies….

(Rangappa offers more reasons in support of her theory; it’s a compelling analysis.)

Kenneth Vogel and Andrew Kramer report that Law Firm Faces Questions for Ukraine Work With Manafort:

WASHINGTON — Five years ago, Paul Manafort arranged for a prominent New York-based law firm to draft a report that was used by allies of his client, Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, to justify the jailing of a political rival. And now the report is coming back to haunt it.

The Justice Department, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation, recently asked the firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, for information and documents related to its work on behalf of Mr. Yanukovych’s government, which crumbled after he fled to Russia under pressure.

The request comes at a time when Mr. Manafort, his work for Mr. Yanukovych’s party and for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs as well as the handling of payments for that work have become focal points in the investigation of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, and connections between Russia, Mr. Trump and his associates….

From the Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 project, here are the top domains tweeted from 600 monitored Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations (last 48 hours):

Great Big Story goes Inside the Hypnotic Art of Card Juggling:

Daily Bread for 9.23.17

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety-two. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 04m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 11.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1846, Johann Gottfried Galle identifies Neptune as a planet: “…a German astronomer from Radis, Germany, at the Berlin Observatory who, on 23 September 1846, with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, was the first person to view the planet Neptune and know what he was looking at. Urbain Le Verrier had predicted the existence and position of Neptune, and sent the coordinates to Galle, asking him to verify. Galle found Neptune in the same night he received Le Verrier’s letter, within 1° of the predicted position. The discovery of Neptune is widely regarded as a dramatic validation of celestial mechanics, and is one of the most remarkable moments of 19th-century science.”

 

 

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley and Jason Stein report that Russians tried to hack election systems of 21 states in 2016, officials say:

MADISON, Wis. — Russians attempted to hack elections systems in 21 states in the run-up to last year’s presidential election, officials said Friday.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security notified states of the attempted breaches on Friday, said Michael Haas, director of the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The attempt in Wisconsin was unsuccessful, he said.

Homeland Security officials said the effort was conducted by “Russian government cyber actors,” according to Haas. He said he did not know which states other than Wisconsin were part of the hacking attempt.

According to the Associated Press, states that were targeted included some key political battlegrounds, such as Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The AP contacted every state election office to determine which ones had been informed that their election systems had been targeted. The others confirming were Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas and Washington….

Kevin Collier reports that States Outraged DHS Waited A Year To Tell Them Russians Tried To Hack Their Computers:

State election officials are demanding to know why it took the Department of Homeland Security a year to inform them that their state’s voter registration systems had been probed by Russian hackers ahead of the 2016 election.

On Friday, DHS notified the chief election officer or secretary of state of 21 states that Russian hackers had tried to probe their voter registration systems. That was nearly a full year after ABC News first reported that “more than 20” states’ systems had been targeted….

The late notification angered state officials.

“My boss, Michael Haas, testified on June 21 at that Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. At that hearing, somebody from DHS went before him and mentioned 21 states,” Wisconsin Election Commission Public Information Officer Reid Magney told BuzzFeed News, referring to Manfra’s June testimony. Yet neither Manfra nor anyone else told anyone at the Wisconsin Election Commission the department was aware the state had been targeted until Friday….

Bethania Palma reports that Trolls, Bots, ‘Useful Idiots’ Attack New Committee Aimed at Exposing Russian Propaganda Campaigns (“The newly-formed Committee to Investigate Russia quickly came under the exact type of propaganda attack it is trying to expose”):

On 20 September 2017, just hours after a consortium of high-profile figures from the American entertainment industry, news media and intelligence community formally announced the formation of the Committee to Investigate Russia (CIR), social media bots, paid trolls, and “useful idiots” kicked into high gear.

The newly-formed organization was launched by director and actor Rob Reiner, with aims to “help Americans recognize and understand the gravity of Russia’s continuing attacks on our democracy”. The web site aggregates relevant information about the Russian active measures, hacking and collusion investigations into one place and offers links to relevant news stories, timelines, and a list of key players.

Its inaugural video features Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman cautioning Americans in his famous baritone about Russian influence operations and saying in regards to Russian interference in the 2016 election, “We were attacked. We are at war.” But even as the organization aims to point the spotlight on the Kremlin’s attempts to influence Americans’ political and social behavior, predictably, Russia-linked bots and trolls retaliated with social media-driven attacks that followed now-familiar patterns.

Andrew Weisburd, non-resident fellow at Alliance for Securing Democracy (a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States) and one of the researchers behind Hamilton68, a real-time tool that tracks Russian influence operations on Twitter, told us that the reaction seems driven in part by the success of countermeasures like CIR, which are elevating the American public’s awareness of a hostile world power’s efforts to influence them:

“It is certainly *a* type of attack, not the only one, but one that to me suggests it they are increasingly sensitive to being held accountable for their own actions.

Keeping in mind that I’m not privy to Kremlin discussions of the matter, it seems clear to me that repeated public exposure of active measures campaigns, continually driving home the same basic point, that the Kremlin has harmed the United States and is continuing to do so, is very effective. I also suspect that Russians may put more stock in what celebrities say than many Americans do. If Steven Seagal’s opinion matters, so does Morgan Freeman’s. Certainly, as dedicated propagandists, they would see the value in Freeman delivering the CIR message.”

(Seagal, while perhaps most famous for starring in 1992’s Under Siege, has in recent years occupied himself with making a string of low-budget, direct-to-video action movies — and with building a friendship with President Vladimir Putin, who offered him Russian citizenship in November 2016.)

In a rambling speech last night, from the three-million-vote-lagging, second-place candidate in the last election, now holding federal power:

As the crowd laughed, the president asked: “Any Russians in the audience? Are there any Russians in the audience, please? I don’t see too many Russians. I didn’t see too many Russians in Pennsylvania. I didn’t see too many Russians.”

(A simple test of a remark like this: if it seems persuasive, then the person persuaded is either ignorant or a dolt. Most people are very sharp, but it’s not most people one finds at a Trump rally. Trump dishes slop for those who find slop tasty.)

Florian Ledoux recently recorded humpback whales by drone:

Daily Bread for 9.22.17

Good morning.

Fall begins in Whitewater with sunny skies and a high of ninety-two. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 07m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 5.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventeenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. On this day in 1863, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry participates in skirmishes at Missionary Ridge and Shallow Ford Gap in Tennessee.

Recommended for reading in full —

Shane Harris reports that U.S. Monitored Manafort After He Left Trump Campaign (“The surveillance came as part of a counterintelligence probe into Russian interference with presidential election”):

U.S. authorities placed Paul Manafort under surveillance after he was ousted as Donald Trump’s campaign manager last summer, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the matter.

The surveillance, which was part of a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference with the presidential election, didn’t involve listening to Mr. Manafort’s phone communications in real-time, the officials said.

But armed with a warrant, investigators still could have conducted clandestine surveillance of Mr. Manafort, possibly by obtaining copies of his emails and other electronically stored communications, or by having agents follow him or conduct physical searches of his property.

The surveillance began after Mr. Manafort left the Trump campaign in August, but it is not clear when it was suspended. Mr. Manafort resigned after a spate of publicity about his consulting work in Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s allies….

Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman report that Mueller casts broad net in requesting extensive records from Trump White House:

The special counsel investigating Russian election meddling has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the White House, covering areas including the president’s private discussions about firing his FBI director and his response to news that the then-national security adviser was under investigation, according to two people briefed on the requests.

White House lawyers are now working to turn over internal documents that span 13 categories that investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe, the people said. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, appointed in May in the wake of Trump’s firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, took over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russians in that effort….

The requests broadly ask for any document or email related to a series of highly publicized incidents since Trump became president, including the ouster of national security adviser Michael Flynn and firing of Comey, the people said.

The list demonstrates Mueller’s focus on key moments and actions by the president and close advisers that could shed light on whether Trump sought to block the FBI investigations of Flynn and of Russian interference….

Josh Dawsey reports that Manafort used Trump campaign account to email Ukrainian operative (“Manafort sent the emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine”):

Former Donald Trump aide [Adams: campaign manager, actually] Paul Manafort used his presidential campaign email account to correspond with a Ukrainian political operative with suspected Russian ties, according to people familiar with the correspondence.

Manafort sent emails to seek repayment for previous work he did in Ukraine and to discuss potential new opportunities in the country, even as he chaired Trump’s presidential campaign, these people said.

Manafort had been a longtime consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president until 2014, and his Party of Regions. During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Ukrainian investigators said they had discovered evidence that Manafort received millions of dollars in off-the-books payments for his work there.

In the emails to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort protégé who has previously been reported to have suspected ties to Russian intelligence, the longtime GOP operative made clear his significant sway in Trump’s campaign, one of the people familiar with the communications said. He and Kilimnik also met in the United States while Manafort worked for the Trump campaign, which he chaired until an August 2016 shake-up….

Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig and Adam Entous report that Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign:

Less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign chairman offered to provide briefings on the race to a Russian billionaire closely aligned with the Kremlin, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Paul Manafort made the offer in an email to an overseas intermediary, asking that a message be sent to Oleg Deripaska, an aluminum magnate with whom Manafort had done business in the past, these people said.

“If he needs private briefings we can accommodate,” Manafort wrote in the July 7, 2016, email, portions of which were read to The Washington Post along with other Manafort correspondence from that time.

The emails are among tens of thousands of documents that have been turned over to congressional investigators and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team as they probe whether Trump associates coordinated with Russia as part of Moscow’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election.

Here are 5 great features added to Apple iOS 11 for iPhone:

Podcast: Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara

There’s a new podcast from Atty. Preet Bharara, former United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

I’ve embedded the first episode, below, and readers can subscribe to this and future episodes via iTunes or Stitcher.

On March 11, 2017 President Donald Trump fired US Attorney Preet Bharara. Preet tells the story in detail for the first time. Then, a conversation with former Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director Leon Panetta about how to clean up a chaotic White House, trade Russian spies, and stand up for what’s right, even if it means defying a president.

Priorities: Fighting Bigotry Over Babbittry

local sceneCommon men and women can learn from the examples of great men and women. In this way, one can learn how to prioritize between concurrent challenges, applying lessons from a prior and intense conflict even to present but lesser conflicts. Some threats are worse than others, and so our it’s reasonable that one places more effort there.

It makes sense to me that the most intense focus should be on the most intense challenges, and that those challenges are national ones first, local ones embodying national ones second, and purely local ones third.

The national challenges of Trumpism (viz., authoritarianism, bigotry, nativism, mendacity, conflicts of interest, ignorance, and subservience and dependency on Putin’s dictatorship) are a greater threat to communities than purely local buffoonery and grandiosity.

In this way, one would, so to speak, prioritize the fight against bigotry over babbittry. (One sees well, to be sure, that years of local babbittry erode the standards of a community, making it more susceptible of national illnesses. Only scorn is owed to those who wasted a generation glad-handing through town.)

Three confident assumptions undergird my thinking —

First, Trumpism should go, consigned to a political outer darkness, and the ruin of that way will be a thorough good. The next generation will ask: What did you do to oppose Trump? Those who supported him will then be silent; those who were silent will then be ashamed. Those who openly defended centuries of liberty and constitutionalism on this continent, however small their own efforts, will enjoy settled consciences and the thanks of a free people.

Second, there will still be time, during this national conflict, to combat local embodiments of the national challenges that face us. There are, for example, lumpen nativists, local show-us-your-papers men,  who deserve more criticism than they’ve yet received. That’s a fight worthy fighting, and one happily joined.

Third, most of those responsible for our local challenges have no future in any event — they were irreversibly in decline in Whitewater even before Trump came to power. If the pharaohs, with all their wealth poured into the pyramids, could not thereby prevent the decline of their way of life, then one can be sure that today’s local grandiosity and boosterism will not do the trick.

Fight and prevail through collective, nationwide efforts in the greater challenge, and the local challenge will be even more easily won.

Daily Bread for 9.21.17

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 10m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred sixteenth 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 Development Authority Board at 5:30 PM, and there’s a scheduled Public Information Meeting on the relocation of the city’s dog park from 4-6 PM.

On this day in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien publishes The Hobbit. On this day in 1863, “1st Wisconsin Cavalry participated in an action at Dry Valley, and the 1st, 10th and 21st Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in a skirmish at Rossville Gap.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Ben Collins, Gideon Resnick, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report an Exclusive: Russians Appear to Use Facebook to Push Trump Rallies in 17 U.S. Cities (“‘Being Patriotic,’ a Facebook group uncovered by The Daily Beast, is the first evidence of suspected Russian provocateurs explicitly mobilizing Trump supporters in real life”):

Suspected Russia propagandists on Facebook tried to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during last year’s election, The Daily Beast has learned.

The demonstrations—at least one of which was promoted online by local pro-Trump activists— brought dozens of supporters together in real life. They appear to be the first case of Russian provocateurs successfully mobilizing Americans over Facebook in direct support of Donald Trump.

The Aug. 20, 2016, events were collectively called “Florida Goes Trump!” and they were billed as a “patriotic state-wide flash mob,” unfolding simultaneously in 17 different cities and towns in the battleground state. It’s difficult to determine how many of those locations actually witnessed any turnout, in part because Facebook’s recent deletion of hundreds of Russian accounts hid much of the evidence. But videos and photos from two of the locations—Fort Lauderdale and Coral Springs—were reposted to a Facebook page run by the local Trump campaign chair, where they remain to this day.

“On August 20, we want to gather patriots on the streets of Floridian towns and cities and march to unite America and support Donald Trump!” read the Facebook event page for the demonstrations. “Our flash mob will occur in several places at the same time; more details about locations will be added later. Go Donald”….

Bill Buzenberg reports that Putin’s Pro-Trump Operation May Have Been Far Bigger Than We Yet Know:

It’s been nearly a year since the US intelligence community publicly announced its determination that the Russian government took covert actions to sway the 2016 US election. We now know that Russia did so in part by buying Facebook ads and weaponizing bots, trolls, and other social media tools created by US tech giants. But there is still much that eludes the public about these attacks, as New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg pointed out on Monday: We don’t know what these Facebook ads looked like, we don’t know who they were targeting, and we don’t know how many millions of Americans may have been exposed to them. As the Washington Post reported, congressional investigators “have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign.”

We do know an elaborate plan for influencing the election reportedly was drawn up in 2016 by the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank controlled by the Kremlin, according to reporting by Reuters. One document “recommended the Kremlin launch a propaganda campaign on social media and Russian state-backed global news outlets to encourage U.S. voters to elect a president who would take a softer line toward Russia than the administration of then-President Barack Obama,” according to seven US officials cited.

Another document that came from that Russian think tank last October, according to Reuters, “warned that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was likely to win the election. For that reason, it argued, it was better for Russia to end its pro-Trump propaganda and instead intensify its messaging about voter fraud to undermine the U.S. electoral system’s legitimacy and damage Clinton’s reputation in an effort to undermine her presidency”….

Matt Gertz explains How Matt Drudge became the pipeline for Russian propaganda (“Drudge Report has linked nearly 400 times to RT, Sputnik News, TASS since 2012”):

On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing 298 passengers and crew. The next day, President Barack Obama alleged that the responsible parties were Russian-backed separatists seizing territory in the region following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Obama’s statement came amid a furious effort by Russian propaganda outlets to foster confusion about the act. In their telling, the tragedy had actually been a failed attempt by Ukrainians to shoot down President Vladimir Putin’s plane.

The Russian propaganda effort received a substantial boost when right-wing internet journalist Matt Drudge highlighted a story on the topic from RT.com, the website of the Russian government-backed English-language news channel RT. Drudge titled the resulting item on the Drudge Report, his highly trafficked link aggregation website, “RT: Putin’s plane might have been target…” in bright red text.

After Drudge propelled the RT story to his massive audience, it was picked up by right-wing U.S. conspiracy websites. (Others on the right warned that Drudge had gone too far by aiding a Russian disinformation campaign.)

This was not an anomaly. Drudge has for years used his site as a web traffic pipeline for Russian propaganda sites, directing his massive audience to nearly 400 stories from RT.com and fellow Russian-government-run English-language news sites SputnikNews.com and TASS.com since the beginning of 2012, according to a Media Matters review. Those numbers spiked in 2016, when Drudge collectively linked to the three sites 122 times.

Drudge’s increasing affinity for and proliferation of Russian propaganda comes amid what The New York Times calls “a new information war Russia is waging against the West”….

James Kirchick contends that RT wants to spread Moscow’s propaganda here. Let’s treat it that way (“It should register as an agent of a foreign government”):

Last week, the Russian government-funded cable network RT announced that its American arm had been asked by the Justice Department to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Formerly known as Russia Today, RT was singled out this year in an intelligence community report on Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The rapid expansion of RT’s operations and budget and recent candid statements by RT’s leadership point to the channel’s importance to the Kremlin as a messaging tool and indicate a Kremlin directed campaign to undermine faith in the U.S. government and fuel political protest,” the report concluded.

Originally passed in 1938 to address the scourge of Nazi propaganda, FARA requires any individual or entity acting “at the order, request, or under direction or control, of a foreign principal” to register with the Justice Department. The agent must then periodically disclose the nature of its financial arrangements with the foreign principal and provide detailed, regular reports about the distribution of “informational materials” on its behalf. FARA does not in any way circumscribe what foreign agents may say or publish; the law merely requires that the information they disseminate be clearly labeled as originating from a foreign government.

The first entity convicted of failing to comply with FARA was a news service operated by the Nazi regime, and the law has remained relevant ever since. The New York bureau of the Soviet news agency TASS registered from the 1940s onward, as did a variety of other Soviet media outlets including Pravda and Izvestiya. Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was recently made to retroactively register as a foreign agent on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party after failing to do so from 2012 to 2014. Applying FARA to RT (and possibly Sputnik, a Kremlin-funded Internet “news” service also being investigated by the FBI) is long overdue….

(RT would be free to speak, but identified candidly as the state-controlled tool of the Putin regime that it, in fact, is.)

Here are The Strangest Sights Cassini Saw: Postcards From Saturn (via NPR’s Skunk Bear):

Committee to Investigate Russia: ‘This is No Movie Script’

In the video above, Morgan Freeman reminds Americans that Russian interference in our electoral process is ‘no movie script’; Vladimir Putin is a dictator, murderer, and inveterate enemy of America and our democratic traditions.

The newly-formed Committee to Investigate Russia (https://investigaterussia.org) made its début yesterday. The CIR is a nonpartisan group – with both conservative, liberal, and libertarian members:

Nearly a year after Russia successfully interfered in the 2016 election, one thing remains abundantly clear: America can never let its guard down when it comes to the Russian threat to our democratic process. While we still don’t have definitive answers on much of what elapsed during the lead-up to the election — or, frankly, have a plan for what we can do to prevent this sort of thing going forward — what we do have is an issue that individuals on both sides of the aisle are desperate to get to the bottom of. It’s against this backdrop that the nonprofit, nonpartisan Committee to Investigate Russiawas launched on Sept. 19.

Via Committee to Investigate Russia.

Hotel Preliminaries

local scene

Whitewater’s full-service grocery closed in 2015, and then the UW-Whitewater Foundation bought the property. (Premier Bank, successor to Commercial Bank, has a 5% interest in the property.) A developer from Minnesota, having been unsuccessful in a project near the center of town, now proposes purchasing the former grocery building & lot, and constructing a Fairfield Marriott on the property, while renovating the existing (now empty) grocery building (meeting space, office space, etc.).

Because the developer wants two buildings on the lot, he (through the existing owners) sought conditional use approval for his plan. Conditional use approval leaves many details left unaddressed, but it was a necessary first step.

A few remarks.

1. City of Whitewater obligations. If it should be true that Whitewater will incur no expenses for studies, water main relocations, or other costs – that these will be borne by the parties – then the project is of limited concern. There is no reason that the residents of this city should subsidize a hotel, but if they’ve not the burden of subsidizing one, then let the private parties do what they want.

If the UW-Foundation and Premier bank want to sell, with the expectation of a donation of a portion back later, let them. They are not unsophisticated parties – they should be free to buy and sell as they wish. If the deal goes bad, the risk would be (and should be) theirs alone.

2. Building on the lot. The parties want two buildings on the lot, but if they should want three or thirty, I’d not stop them. Practicality is a greater constraint than law. Many uses are permitted, but only some succeed.

3. Building height. There’s a funny moment when the city planner recognizes that the planned height of the hotel is 45′ not 145′. It’s true that a project of this size would not be 145′ high, but that’s not what’s funny. What’s funny is the idea that a 145′ building would be too tall for Whitewater.

Why? There are much worse things than a tall, privately-constructed building.

4. Economic benefits. This session was about whether the applicants would be granted conditional use approval. Along the way, the developer included a supposed list of economic gains. Much of it is simply unsupported, and looks suspiciously like grandiose claims meant to impress gullible or over-eager residents.

If these parties are spending their own money, and not burdening this city, then the economic benefits are their private matter. There is something risible, however, about reading the same boilerplate used elsewhere that’s meant to impress, but impresses only the ignorant or weak-minded.

It would have been faster for the parties to call residents of the city gullible than to waste time typing unsupported economic claims. (Much faster: gullible is only one word, while the developer’s memo, beginning at memo paragraph three in the packet below, uses 325 words for its economic claims.)

5. Gratitude. There’s an unfortunate moment midway in this discussion, when the council member on the Planning Commission tells the developer that “well, we’ve been hoping for a new hotel for a long time, so we’re grateful for, I would say, I’m grateful for the effort that you’re putting into this proposal…”

When one has told the developer that one is grateful for the effort, the developer understandably gets the signal that oversight will be minimal. Now, I’m not so concerned about oversight as long as this city’s residents aren’t paying for the project. Still, from a regulatory perspective – as required by law – expressions of gratitude are hardly a signal of scrutiny in the public interest.

6. Devil’s in the details. There’s another meeting of Planning Commission in October….

The 9.11.17 Plannning Commission packet, with agenda and relevant part (Item 9), appears below —

Daily Bread for 9.20.17

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be cloudy with a four-in-ten chance of afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 6:54 PM, for 12h 13m 13s of daytime. The moon is new, with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Spencer Ackerman observes that Trump Uses Putin’s Arguments to Undermine the World (“If you liked the #MAGA speech that the American president just delivered to the UN, you’ll love the original version—the one spoken by the Russian president delivered in 2015”):

The leader stepped to the podium of the United Nations General Assembly, as close to a literal world stage as exists, and issued a stringent defense of the principle of national sovereignty.

“What is the state sovereignty, after all, that has been mentioned by our colleagues here? It is basically about freedom and the right to choose freely one’s own future for every person, nation and state,” he said, attacking what he identified as the hypocrisy of those who seek to violate sovereignty in the name of stopping mass murder.

“Aggressive foreign interference,” the leader continued, “has resulted in a brazen destruction of national institutions and the lifestyle itself. Instead of the triumph of democracy and progress, we got violence, poverty and social disaster.”

The leader was not Donald Trump on Tuesday, but Vladimir Putin in 2015. Whatever nexus between Putin and Trump exists for Robert Mueller to discover, the evidence of their compatible visions of foreign affairs was on display at the United Nations clearer than ever, with Trump’s aggressive incantation of “sovereignty, security and prosperity” as the path to world peace. “There can be no substitute for strong, sovereign, and independent nations, nations that are rooted in the histories and invested in their destiny,” Trump said, hitting his familiar blood-and-soil themes that echo from the darker moments in European history….

Anna Nemtsova writes Here Are Just a Few of Russia’s Dirty Tricks Going Into Germany’s Elections (“Even if Chancellor Angela Merkel is re-elected by a landslide on Sunday, Moscow could get a toehold in the Bundestag through the far-right AfD party”):

….Moscow’s attempts to inflame and exploit the emotions of some 4 million Russian-speaking German citizens have been obvious.

Victor Bashkatov, a 35-year-old politician, was astonished to see a crowd of far-right and Russian-German citizens protesting outside his office in the Bundestag last year. Hundreds of people came out on that chilly gray day with banners in Russian and German, furious about immigrants allegedly kidnapping and raping a 13-year-old girl—protesters demanded an investigation into the crime against “our Russian girl.”

The older generation of German citizens from former Soviet countries tend to watch Kremlin-controlled TV channels, and the story about “Lisa,” the little girl, eventually turned out to be fake. She had run away from home, stayed with an older male friend, and made up the story. But it inspired many of the Russian-speaking Germans to support the far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD, which often is compared to France’s xenophobic National Front or Geert Wilders’ anti-Muslim movement in the Netherlands….

(Putin will choose either extreme right or extreme left, or both, so long as that choice undermines the constitutional order in his target country. So in America, both Trump and Jill Stein were good picks – both pro-Putin, both contemptuous of America’s democratic traditions in their own ways.)

Reuters reports that Trump using campaign, RNC funds to pay Russia probe legal bills:

U.S. President Donald Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the
Republican National Committee to pay for his lawyers in the probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Following Reuters exclusive report on Tuesday, CNN reported that the Republican National Committee paid in August more than $230,000 to cover some of Trump’s legal fees related to the probe.

RNC spokesperson Cassie Smedile confirmed to Reuters that Trump’s lead lawyer, John Dowd, received $100,000 from the RNC and that the RNC also paid $131,250 to the Constitutional Litigation and Advocacy Group, the law firm where Jay Sekulow, another of Trump’s lawyers, is a partner….

While previous presidential campaigns have used these funds to pay for routine legal matters such as ballot access disputes and compliance requirements, Trump would be the first U.S. president in the modern campaign finance era to use such funds to cover the costs of responding to a criminal probe, said election law experts.

See generally (on the quality of Trump’s legal team) What’s the matter with Trump’s lawyers?

(If GOP donors want to fund a criminal defense of Trump, it’s lawful to do so. Trump’s the first man to proclaim himself worth ‘TEN BILLION DOLLARS‘ (his capitalization) who felt the need to bang a tin cup.)

Chris Geidner reports More Than Seven Lawyers Working On Michael Flynn’s Defense Team:

Michael Flynn’s family has set up a legal defense fund and is now soliciting donations as multiple investigations scrutinize the actions of the former Trump national security adviser.

The family is setting up the fund because “[t]he enormous expense of attorneys’ fees and other related expenses far exceed their ability to pay,” according to a statement from Joe Flynn and Barbara Redgate, Flynn’s brother and sister, respectively.

A source familiar with his legal representation said Flynn’s “core team” is seven attorneys from Covington — including partners, counsel, and associates — with “numerous” others involved at certain points. The fees will “certainly be into the seven figures,” according to the source.

Flynn, who played key roles in Trump’s campaign and is a retired Army lieutenant general, has been under scrutiny in the various investigations relating to Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, including special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Flynn tweeted out the news about the legal defense fund first thing Monday….

Many animals losing some of their hearing over time, but not barn owls. Here’s the secret to why barn owls don’t lose their hearing:

Be jealous of barn owls: Even in old age, they don’t lose their hearing, according to a new study. In the first hearing test of its kind, researchers trained the birds (Tyto alba) to sit on a perch and fly to a second perch only after hearing a sound cue. Then, they analyzed how young and old barn owls responded to sounds at different intensities, ranging from levels that would be completely inaudible to humans to sounds corresponding to soft whispers. Older owls showed little or no hearing loss compared with their younger brethren, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This is because, unlike mammals, birds can regenerate lost hair cells in the innermost part of the ear that is responsible for detecting sounds, the scientists say. Understanding how birds retain good hearing, they add, may lead to new treatments for humans.

Lauren Duca humbly presents…

Chris Cillizza, formerly of the Washington Post, presently of CNN, eternally a buffoon, wrote today that he thought Trump’s United Nations address was “much more poetic” than Trump’s prior speeches. From this, one can say that CNN wastes at least as much money as Cillizza’s salary & benefits.

(There are, probably, vile limericks that are more poetic than anything Trump has said. There are, with an equal chance, scribblings on bathroom walls more elegantly composed than anything thirty-something operative Stephen Miller has drafted for Trump.)

Lauren Duca, who would like more young women to write about politics, sees Cillizza’s remarks as an oppotunity to encourage others. Although I’m not much for the term idiot, in her observation about Cillizza, Duca’s on the mark…

Daily Bread for 9.19.17

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:56 PM, for 12h 16m 06s of daytime. The moon is new, with just 0.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Common Council meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1959, during a trip to the United States, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev becomes angry when he is told that he will not be allowed to visit Disneyland. On this day in 1832, the Sauk and Fox cede Iowa lands: “On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. (Some sources place the date as September 21.)”

Recommended for reading in full —

Susan Hennessey, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes assess The Latest Scoops from CNN and the New York Times: A Quick and Dirty Analysis:

CNN and the New York Times this evening published dueling scoops on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

As Jim Comey might put it: Lordy, there appear to be tapes.

First, CNN reported that U.S. government investigators wiretapped Paul Manafort, the onetime Trump campaign chairman, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. According to CNN, the court that provides judicial oversight for the administration of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authorized an FBI investigation into Manafort in 2014 focused on “work done by a group of Washington consulting firms for Ukraine’s former ruling party.” Manafort’s firm, among notable others, had failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) for work with the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. This first investigation was reportedly halted in 2016 by Justice Department prosecutors because of lack of evidence, but a second warrant was later issued in service of the FBI’s investigation into Russian influence of the election and potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives.

CNN reported that interest in Manafort was “reignited” because of “intercepted communications between Manafort and suspected Russian operatives, and among the Russians themselves.” The FBI also conducted physical searches: one of a storage facility belonging to Manafort and a more widely reported search of his Alexandria home in late July. Manafort was not under surveillance when he became chairman of Trump’s campaign, CNN sources suggested, because of the gap between the two warrants….

So was Trump right to say that he was “wire tapped”?

No.

Nothing in this report vindicates Trump’s claims that he or Trump Tower were wiretapped.

Trump accused President Obama of wiretapping him.

This story reports that Manafort was a target of collection and that Trump was talking with him at the time Manafort was under surveillance. It does not report that Trump Tower, where Manafort did have an apartment, was the location of that targeting.

Press reports have indicated for months that at least one, and potentially multiple, close associates of Donald Trump were subject to FISA warrants. It is possible now—as has been noted many times since Trump tweeted his accusation in March—that if the U.S. president was in communication with these individuals, his communications might have been incidentally collected. That isn’t the same as being wiretapped—and being subject to incidental collection as part of lawful collection against a third party really is not the same thing as being wiretapped by President Obama. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes has already attempted to spin incidental collection into presidential vindication in a bizarre series of press conferences unveiling intelligence revelations—which later turned out to have been fed to him by the White House itself….

Carol D. Leonnig, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report that Facebook’s openness on Russia questioned by congressional investigators:

House and Senate investigators have grown increasingly concerned that Facebook is withholding key information that could illuminate the shape and extent of a Russian propaganda campaign aimed at tilting the U.S. presidential election, according to people familiar with the probe.

Among the information Capitol Hill investigators are seeking is the full internal draft report from an inquiry the company conducted this spring into Russian election meddling but did not release at the time, said these people who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss matters under investigation.

A 13-page “white paper” that Facebook published in April drew from this fuller internal report but left out critical details about how the Russian operation worked and how Facebook discovered it, according to people briefed on its contents.

Investigators believe the company has not fully examined all potential ways that Russians could have manipulated Facebook’s sprawling social media platform….

Compare Facebook Gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller More Details on Russian Ad Buys Than Congress.

Ann Ravel writes How the FEC Turned a Blind Eye to Foreign Meddling (“For years, my fellow FEC commissioners refused to apply campaign finance rules to the internet. Now Russia is running amok on Facebook”) :

….policymakers for years have ignored or outright opposed the need to hold the internet advertising industry to the same standards the country has already agreed on for television and radio. Our campaign finance rules are outdated for the internet age, and rules on the books aren’t enforced. Now, with the revelation that Russia, too, sees the political value in America’s online advertising market, the chickens have come home to roost.

I warned that Vladimir Putin could meddle in our elections nearly three years ago, as vice chair of the Federal Election Commission, the federal agency charged with not only protecting the integrity of our election process, but ensuring disclosure of the sources of money in politics. Our vulnerabilities seemed obvious: The FEC’s antiquated policies refer to fax machines and teletypes, but barely mention modern technological phenomena like social media, YouTube and bots. The inadequacy of the FEC’s current regulations makes it practically impossible for both regulators and citizens to determine if the funding for a political advertisement online came from a domestic source or an enemy abroad. We had left the window wide open for foreign interference.

I suggested to the commission that the FEC consult with internet and tech experts to discuss how the agency’s current approach may or may not fit with future innovations. Starting this conversation should have been noncontroversial, especially at an agency whose very mission is to inform the public about the sources behind campaign spending.

But my comments were greeted with harassment and death threats stoked by claims by the three Republican commissioners that increased transparency in internet political advertising was censorship. Requiring financial disclosure, they argued, “could threaten the continued development of the internet’s virtual free marketplace of political ideas and democratic debate.” One commissioner went so far as to tell me that even talking about this subject at the commission would itself “chill speech”….

(American free speech concerns would not – and indeed should not – bar inquiry into a Russian dictator’s  propaganda and electoral interference.)

Aaron Blake asks What’s the matter with Trump’s lawyers?:

They say a man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client. President Trump isn’t representing himself, but sometimes it feels like he has a bunch of Donald Trumps on retainer.

While lawyers generally operate behind the scenes and try to keep their public comments limited and calculated, Trump’s lawyers have routinely done things outside the norm. They’ve gotten into spats with reporters and trolls, talked about internal deliberations and their odds of success and, most recently, discussed the Russia investigation within earshot of a New York Times reporter.

That last one is the most recent development in the increasingly strange saga of Trump’s legal team. The New York Times reported Sunday that they had overheard a conversation between Trump lawyers Ty Cobb and John Dowd last week at Washington’s popular BLT Steak restaurant, which is both near the White House and very close to the Times’s Washington bureau. Oops….

A quick recap [of other recent embarrassments]:

(Some of these incidents would be difficult to accept even from a young lawyer, and these men – they’re all men from the examples – are not young. Encountering even one of these incidents or remarks would lead me to suggest intra-firm coaching & corrective action, including a written warning before possible dismissal, as well as a more careful review – sad but needed in cases like this – of the care with which the firm’s hiring committee was choosing new associates, if these were cases among young lawyers.)

Where Did the Saying I’ll Eat My Hat Come From? Today I Found Out explains: