Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny as the day progresses with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 18m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1941, although not yet at war with the United States, a German U-boat sinks the USS Reuben James: “At daybreak on 31 October, she was torpedoed near Iceland^[2] by U-552 commanded by Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp. Reuben James had positioned herself between an ammunition ship in the convoy and the known position of a German “wolfpack“, a group of submarines poised to attack the convoy. Reuben James was hit forward by a torpedo meant for a merchant ship and her entire bow was blown off when a magazine exploded. The bow sank immediately. The aft section floated for five minutes before going down. Of a crew of seven officers and 136 enlisted men plus one enlisted passenger, 44 enlisted men and no officers survived.^{[1][2] “}

On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks win their first game: “the Milwaukee Bucks claimed their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons in the Milwaukee Arena. The Bucks were 0-5 at the time, and Wayne Embry led Milwaukee with 30 points. Embry became the first player in Bucks history to score 30 or more points in a regular season game.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes assess Robert Mueller’s Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis:

The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them.

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.“….

(Forget Fox News: these are serious matters.)

Tony Romm and Kurt Wagner report Facebook says 126 million people in the U.S. may have seen posts produced by Russian-government backed agents:

Facebook, Google and Twitter plan to tell congressional investigators this week that the scope of Russia’s campaign to spread disinformation on their sites — and to potentially disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential race — is much broader than the companies initially reported.

At Facebook, roughly 126 million users in the United States may have seen posts, stories or other content created by Russian government-backed trolls around Election Day, according to a source familiar with the company’s forthcoming testimony to Congress. Previously, Facebook had only shared information on ads purchased by Kremlin-tied accounts, revealing that they reached more than 10 million U.S. users….

(The more one learns, the clearer Putin’s reach into America media becomes.)

Anne Applebaum asks Did Russia teach Paul Manafort all its dirty tricks?:

Years from now, historians may study the documents indicting Paul Manafort to understand just how the Russification of American public life was accomplished. Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.

Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington. But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.

Manafort was first invited to work in Ukraine in 2004, by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. But Manafort left a real mark in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country. In 2008, he helped run an anti-NATO campaign, opposing Ukraine’s membership in the transatlantic alliance. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won….

(Posterity will be rightly harsh, and view these Trump men as opponents of America’s democratic tradition.)

Greg Sargent describes The Trump authoritarian cult:

The Glorious Republican Civil War of 2017 isn’t really a battle over policy or ideology. It isn’t even quite the clash of grand agendas we constantly read about — the supposed showdown between populist economic nationalism on one side, and limited government conservatism, free trade and internationalism on the other.

Instead, the GOP civil war is really a battle over whether Republican lawmakers should — or should not — genuflect before President Trump. The battle is over whether they should — or should not — applaud his racism, his authoritarianism and his obvious pleasure in dispensing abuse and sowing racial division. It’s also over whether Republicans should submit to Trump’s ongoing insistence that his lack of major accomplishments is fully the fault of Republicans who failed his greatness….

If you’re a Stranger Things fan, 13 details you might have missed in ‘Stranger Things’ season 2:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 21m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On Sunday evening, Orson Welles’s production of War of the Worlds, as the

17th episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast at 8 pm ET on Sunday, October 30, 1938.^{[2]:390, 394} The program’s format was a simulated live newscast of developing events. The setting was switched from 19th-century England to contemporary Grover’s Mill, an unincorporated village in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, in the United States.

The first two-thirds of the hour-long play is a contemporary retelling of events of the novel, presented as news bulletins interrupting another program. “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” Welles later said, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.^[5]

On this day in 1914, the first 4-H club in Wisconsin is organized: “the Linn Junior Farmers Club in Walworth County was organized. This club was started five months after Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service whereby federal, state, and county governments participate in the county agent system. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers].”

Recommended for reading in full —

Trump supporters are hyping the Uranium One deal, but their contentions are easily refuted:

.@JoyAnnReid expertly dismantles the Uranium One nonstory

“There’s actually nothing about the deal that is controversial”

Take notes @CNN pic.twitter.com/oj3n5Po6Ta

— Rantt News (@RanttNews) October 29, 2017

John Harwood debunks Trump’s claim that economic growth now is the best in the last eight years:

it did happen.

2014 Q2/Q3: 4.6%/5.2%

which actually is higher than:

2017 Q2/Q3: 3.1%/3.0%

magic https://t.co/TKlKQE24vZ

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 29, 2017

(Trump lies in the hope that his low-information voters won’t later learn the truth.)

Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo, and Jeremy Singer-Vine report Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed:

The most comprehensive study to date of the growing universe of partisan websites and Facebook pages about US politics reveals that in 2016 alone at least 187 new websites launched, and that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump has unleashed a golden age of aggressive, divisive political content that reaches a massive amount of people on Facebook.

Thanks to a trinity of the internet, Facebook, and online advertising, partisan news websites and their associated Facebook pages are almost certainly making more money for more people and reaching more Americans than at any time in history. In some cases, publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page.

At its root, the analysis of 667 websites and 452 associated Facebook pages reveals the extent to which American online political discourse is powered by a mix of money and outrage.

The result is hundreds of partisan news websites being run not only by dedicated American conservatives and liberals, but also by the now-famous Macedonian teens, by internet marketers, and by others who saw a business opportunity. As an example, BuzzFeed News’ analysis found that a conservative Facebook page being run by a 20-year-old Macedonian frequently outperforms some of the larger conservative pages operated by Americans.

The analysis also found that since Trump’s election, top liberal partisan Facebook pages and top-performing viral content from liberal websites are consistently generating more total engagement than their conservative counterparts….

(Propaganda arms of a  foreign power should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 22 U.S. Code § 611.)

Alex Finley writes The Recruitables: Why Trump’s Team Was Easy Prey for Putin:

From an intelligence point of view, the people surrounding Trump, and Trump himself, make easy targets for recruitment. This is not to say these people have definitely been recruited by Russian intelligence—and they’ve all denied it repeatedly—but you can be sure that Russia’s intelligence services took these factors into consideration when they approached the campaign.

So, what pressure points might Russian intelligence officers have used to get their desired outcome with Trump’s Recruitables?….

Paul Manafort: Money
Anyone who has lobbied on behalf of leaders ranging from Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko to the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang likely has no set ideology or moral compass and is motivated primarily by making money. People like this make very good targets. There is no emotion involved. Getting the person to do something is a fairly straightforward transaction. For example, getting someone to buy real estate to help launder Russian funds, in return for a handsome fee, would be a pretty simple transaction. As soon as the person has done it one time, it is much easier to get them to do something else for you…..

Michael Flynn: Money, Ideology, Ego
Flynn was at the top of his game as director of intelligence at JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. During his tenure, JSOC became a lean fighting machine, able to execute a hit on a target in a war zone and immediately process any actionable intelligence in order to hit the next target immediately, before the bad guys could move on. He moved up the intelligence ladder and landed the top spot at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012. Here, the Peter Principle quickly set in. Castigated for his lack of vision for the agency, his inability to manage a large organization, his unconventional approach to counterterrorism, and his “Flynn facts,” it became evident in Washington circles that Flynn was over his head. President Barack Obama fired him….

Jared Kushner: Money, Coercion
Kushner had a rocky entrée into Manhattan real estate. His purchase of 666 Fifth Ave. at $1.8 billion in 2007—that is, just before the market tanked—was perhaps not the strongest display of business acumen. And now, with payments due and business going badly, he was in a pickle. Perhaps the Russians had a great way for him to get out of that pickle. So they introduced him in December 2016 to Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state investment bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, who would have made it clear that he was in a position to help….

A short video offers an overview of The Facts on America’s Opioid Epidemic:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 10h 23m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

It’s a Black Tuesday on this day in 1929, on which the United States suffers the worst stock market crash in her history, with the twelve-year Great Depression following. On this day in 1864, the 38th Wisconsin Infantry participates in a reconnaissance mission to Harper’s Run, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Susan Hennessey, Benjamin Wittes ponder Seven Frequently Asked Mueller Indictment Questions for Which We Don’t Have the Answers:

Let’s start with what we know about the indictment in the Mueller investigation.

Late last night, CNN broke the bombshell story that Friday afternoon, the first charges in the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were filed:

A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.

The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal confirmed the report shortly thereafter.

In short, someone under investigation in the Mueller investigation appears to have been indicted for something and may be arrested at some point.

End of list.

And while that alone is a genuine bombshell, the much more important point at this stage here is how little we do know and, thus, how few conclusions we can reasonably draw at this point. Below is effort to walk through the many unanswered questions that are kicking around today. Our intention here to emphasize how little we can responsibly say about it and guide people away from getting too far ahead of the story.

Toward that end, here are seven frequently asked questions we don’t know the answer to [list follows]….

(Dine well: Hennessey and Wittes, and their colleagues at Lawfare offer a healthful meal; Trump and his ilk peddle & consume a foul analytical cusine, variously the worst of America or Russia.)

Paul Rosenzweig, also of Lawfare, offers Unpacking Uranium One: Hype and Law:

The latest instance of “what-aboutism” is the House Republican decision to open an investigation of the Uranium One transaction—the allegation that Hillary Clinton transferred control of 20% of America’s uranium mining output to a Russian company, in exchange for substantial contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the executives of that same Russian company. Perhaps fearing future revelations of Trump’s closeness to Russia, the evident purpose of the investigation is to establish a “Hillary too” counterpoint. Based on what is currently in the public record, little, if anything about the allegation is plausible. In this post, I want to summarize the legal context and known facts regarding the transfer and put the allegations of impropriety in context. (I focus exclusively on the transfer and the U.S. government’s approval of it. I am not, in this post, considering the evidence—such as it is—of donations to the Clinton Foundation. My reasoning is simple: if there is no “quo” to be given, the question of a “quid” is moot..)….

(Trumpism uses no rhetorical trick more often than whataboutism, the Soviet and Russian technique of diverting attention to one’s own wrongs by accusing another of misconduct rather than denying or refuting the original charges.)

Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew E. Kramer report Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin:

Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said….

(A connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, wishing to remain a connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, would not have met members of Trump’s family without prior Kremlin support.)

Russia’s had an easy time of polluting Twitter with bots filled with Putin’s lies:

As Twitter prepares to face Congress next week, see how easy it was for Russians to deploy bot armies in 2016 @MSNBC https://t.co/iiVHuDotmd

— Jo Ling Kent (@jolingkent) October 27, 2017

(Nota bene: Putin’s lies become Trump’s talking points, and indeed Trump knows Russian techniques so well they come reflexively to him.)

Consider How Da Vinci ‘Augmented Reality’ — More Than 500 Years Ago:

We may think of Leonardo Da Vinci as an artist, but he was also a scientist. By incorporating anatomy, chemistry, and optics into his artistic process, Da Vinci created an augmented reality experience centuries before the concept even existed. This video details how Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa interactive using innovative painting techniques and the physiology of the human eye.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 26m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1726, the first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is published as two volumes. On this day in 1892, a fire strikes Milwaukee’s Third Ward: “an exploding oil barrel started a small fire in Milwaukee. It spread rapidly and by morning four people had died, 440 buildings were destroyed, and more than 1,900 people in the Irish neighborhood were left homeless. It was the most disastrous fire in Milwaukee’s history.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jack Shafer writes Week 23: Mueller Bombs Trump’s Big Week (“The president was thrilled to turn the tables on the Democrats, but news the grand jury had filed charges made the celebration look premature”):

Fortified by news in the Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS to produce the Steele Dossier, President Donald Trump overran his opponents’ positions this week. Splattering them with half-truths and hyperbole, Trump charged that “the whole Russian thing” was a “hoax” and an excuse for Democrats unwilling to accept that they lost the election. Then he rolled in a grenade, calling the dossier “fake.” Finally, he sparked his flamethrower to life and hosed his political foes with rhetorical fire by invoking the uranium deal in none-dare-call-it-conspiracy style, describing Uranium One’s sale to a Russian company during the Obama era as the equal of Watergate.

At least that’s how it looked in Trump’s version of the war movie until late Friday, when it turned out that the president was rushing to take the wrong hill. First, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website—funded by a billionaire from the never-Trump movement—’fessed to having paid for Fusion GPS’s original anti-Trump work before the Clinton Democrats took over the payments. Then CNN reported that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III had fired a bunker buster, bringing his first indictment in the probe. The identity of the person charged is under seal still, CNN reported, and will remain so until the person is arrested, possibly as soon as Monday. Will it be Paul Manafort, whom prosecutors reportedly all but promised to indict? It will be a long weekend of rampant speculation until the scoop is confirmed.

(Be not distracted: Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, etc. will say anything, however absurd the accusations, to distract from the methodical and lawful investigation Mueller leads. Obsessive, ignorant Fox viewers feast on lies, diversionary accusations, and contempt for – so to speak – the regular order of American political and legal tradition. Centuries of that evolving regular order are more powerful than their many lies.)

Josh Gerstein reports Manafort realtor called to testify before grand jury in Russia probe (“The realtor, who helped Manafort buy the Alexandria apartment recently raided by the FBI, was called last week by prosecutors working under special counsel Robert Mueller”):

The realtor who helped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort buy the Virginia condo that was recently raided by the FBI testified last week before the federal grand jury hearing testimony in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, POLITICO has learned.

The real estate agent, Wayne Holland of Alexandria, Virginia-based McEnearney Associates, appeared before the Washington-based grand jury after a federal judge rejected the firm’s lawyer’s bid to quash subpoenas for testimony and records about various real estate transactions.

The broker’s appearance before the grand jury is one of few concrete indications of the leads Mueller’s prosecutors are pursuing as they investigate Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. The investigation encompasses lobbying work done by Manafort as well as possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials….

(Manafort, Flynn, Kushner, Trump, Putin: those are the real subjects of concern. Hillary Clintion colluding with Russia? Uranium One? No, those are distrations for deplorables, diversions for the dim-witted.)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports Cambridge Analytica used data from Facebook and Politico to help Trump (“Speech by company executive contradicts denial by Trump campaign that claimed the company used its own data and Facebook data to help the campaign”):

….This week, the group became the focus of a new controversy after the Daily Beast reported that the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had contacted Julian Assange last year. Nix allegedly asked the WikiLeaks founder whether he could assist in releasing thousands of emails that had gone missing on a private server that had been used by Hillary Clinton. Assange confirmed the contact but said the offer was rejected.

The news prompted a top former campaign official, Michael Glassner, who was executive director of the Trump election campaign, to minimise the role Cambridge Analytica played in electing Trump, despite the fact that it paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars in fees.

In a statement on Wednesday, Glassner said that the Trump campaign relied on voter data owned by the Republican National Committee to help elect the president.

“Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” he said.

But that claim is contradicted by a detailed description of the company’s role in the 2016 election given in May by a senior Cambridge Analytica executive.

Speaking at a conference in Germany, Molly Schweickert, the head of digital at Cambridge Analytica, said that Cambridge Analytica models, which melded the company’s own massive database and new voter surveys, were instrumental in day-to-day campaign decisions, including in helping determine Trump’s travel schedule.

The company’s models also helped drive decisions on advertising and how to reach out to financial donors.

Schweickert said Cambridge Analytica started working with the Trump campaign in June 2016….

(Of course Cambridge Analytica helped Trump. Bannon, Kushner, the Mercers: they were all leaderrs or key funders, for goodness’ sake.)

Rebecca Ballhaus reports Trump Donor Asked Data Firm If It Could Better Organize Hacked Emails (“August 2016 exchange between Rebekah Mercer and Cambridge Analytica’s CEO shows efforts to leverage Clinton-related messages”):

Trump donor Rebekah Mercer in August 2016 asked the chief executive of a data-analytics firm working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign whether the company could better organize the Hillary Clinton-related emails being released by WikiLeaks, according to a person familiar with their email exchange.

The previously undisclosed details from the exchange between Ms. Mercer and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix show how an influential Trump supporter was looking to leverage the hacked Clinton-related messages to boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Nix emailed Ms. Mercer and some company employees that he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to offer help organizing the Clinton-related emails the website was releasing. The new details shed light on the timing of Mr. Nix’s outreach to Mr. Assange, which came before his company began working for the Trump campaign….

(Cambridge Analytica even sought Russian catspaw Julian Assange’s help on behalf of Trump.)

Great Big Story tells of The Last of the French Cowboys:

Since the 1500s, the residents of Camargue, France, have been caring for and tending to the rare, all-white horses local to the area. The horses come from a long and storied legacy, thought to date back to prehistoric times. Marie Pagès, one of the Guardians of the Camargue, has been nurturing her horses for the past 28 years. Sadly, as the population of Camargue horses diminishes, so goes with it the tradition of the horsemen. Still, Marie hopes that the passion that she and her fellow cowboys share for their stewardship will keep their legacy alive.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:53 PM, for 10h 28m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1787, the first of The Federalist Papers is published:

….The Federalist articles appeared in three New York newspapers: The Independent Journal, the New-York Packet, and the Daily Advertiser, beginning on October 27, 1787. Although written and published with haste, The Federalist articles were widely read and greatly influenced the shape of American political institutions.^[13]Between them, Hamilton, Madison and Jay kept up a rapid pace, with at times three or four new essays by Publius appearing in the papers in a week. Garry Wills observes that the pace of production “overwhelmed” any possible response: “Who, given ample time could have answered such a battery of arguments? And no time was given.”^[14] Hamilton also encouraged the reprinting of the essay in newspapers outside New York state, and indeed they were published in several other states where the ratification debate was taking place. However, they were only irregularly published outside New York, and in other parts of the country they were often overshadowed by local writers.^[15]….

It’s worth noting – today, tomorrow, forever – that from America’s earliest days on this continent, we have had a robust tradition of anonymous and pseudonymous speech. One does not embrace this tradition in the belief that one is anything like the great men who centuries ago embodied this tradition – one embraces it imperfectly and humbly as homage to the far greater men and women than oneself who have come before, and in the confident hope that far greater men and women than oneself are yet to come. 

On this day in 1864, Wisconsinite William Cushing serves the Union well and ably:

On this date William Cushing led an expedition to sink the Confederate ram, the Albermarle, which had imposed a blockade near Plymouth, North Carolina and had been sinking Union ships. Cushing’s plan was extremely dangerous and only he and one other soldier escaped drowning or capture. Cushing pulled very close to the Confederate ironclad and exploded a torpedo under it while under heavy fire. Cushing’s crew abandonded ship as it began to sink. The Albemarle also sunk. Cushing received a “letter of thanks” from Congress and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. He died in 1874 due to ill health and is buried in the Naval Cemetery at Annapolis, Maryland.

Recommended for reading in full —

The National (a Canadian publication) has a short documentary on The Magnitsky Act: How Canada set out to punish Russia’s human rights abusers:

The death of tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Russian prison inspired legislation in Canada and the United States to punish foreign officials responsible for gross human rights violations.

Erik Wemple observes The Hill’s flimsy Russia-uranium story lands with maximum effect:

None of this was news. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, did extensive stories about the investigation into Mikerin. So the Hill performed an elaborate and creative repackaging exercise — marshaling already-known information into a newsy-sounding headline: “FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow.” It worked, at least as far as Fox News was concerned. The leading cable-news network lent a great deal of programming to the Hill piece, all rigged to engineer further suspicion of Clinton. In an interview with Hill Editor in Chief Bob Cusack last Thursday, Fox News host Jon Scott said, “Obviously your outlet has done some digging but it seems like a huge story that ought to be blared from the mountaintops and it has not gotten a lot of attention.”

Maybe that’s because mainstream outlets have smoked out the preposterous conspiracy-mongering in the Hill’s story. Over a few paragraphs, the story managed to suggest that the Justice Department, which successfully prosecuted Mikerin for his crimes, somehow sought to play down its achievements on this front — perhaps to suppress the news and prevent Clinton from suffering embarrassment over the Uranium One transaction (and it appears she was not personally involved). Here is the astonishing passage from the Solomon-Spann story:

Bringing down a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme that had both compromised a sensitive uranium transportation asset inside the U.S. and facilitated international money laundering would seem a major feather in any law enforcement agency’s cap.

But the Justice Department and FBI took little credit in 2014 when Mikerin, the Russian financier and the trucking firm executives were arrested and charged.

The only public statement occurred a year later when the Justice Department put out a little-noticed press release in August 2015, just days before Labor Day. The release noted that the various defendants had reached plea deals.

Oh really! Pause for a second and ponder the illogic in the text here. The Hill is writing that the issuance of a press release counts as evidence that the Justice Department was taking “little credit” for its work. Wouldn’t the act of not issuing a press release be better evidence thereof? Or how about just not pursuing the case at all?

(Flimsy is the key description here: all this has been reported before, and better, elsewhere – The Hill’s offered by design a deceptive talking point for Fox, Trump, and the House GOP.)

Matthew Dallek writes of Gen. John Kelly’s authoritarian bent as WH chief of staff:

….But not everyone who puts on, and takes off, a general’s uniform is another George Washington. Indeed, Kelly’s performance makes it clear that those who have been placing their hopes in Trump’s trio of generals-turned-advisers are making a mistake.

Kelly’s strain of military thinking puts him at odds with a society in which, as he points out, only a tiny fraction serves, or even knows anyone who serves, and in which few men and women in uniform come from the ranks of the United States’ elite professions, which dominate the nation’s most influential institutions. Kelly, then, embodies a clash of cultures, a lifelong military man now playing a hotly contested political civilian role, who looks askance at the nation’s civilian democratic culture.

That is an unhealthy tendency, and, at times, Kelly’s remarks suggested an authoritarian streak that he seems to share with his boss, the president. He lamented the loss of a mythic time in which “women were sacred and looked upon with great honor,” a time, he reminisced, when Gold Star families and religion were treated as “sacred” topics to be upheld and venerated by all Americans.

Kelly conveyed the sense that because he and others in the military have worn the uniform, served in combat and risked their lives (and in Kelly’s case, sacrificed a son), he feels entitled to make up stories about a member of Congress, an African-American woman, and to exclude civilians in a setting, the White House briefing room, that is of course paid for by and meant to serve every citizen. Behind his calm demeanor, he showed the country a frustration, anger and grievance that complements Trump’s us-against-the-world mentality and political style.

Countless military commanders have been able to make the leap from uniform to serve in elective or appointed political office, and they have done so in ways that uphold and even enhance America’s civilian democratic traditions. Washington showed the way when he shed his uniform and embraced a civilian role, leading the United States as a democratic republic, with a healthy respect for liberty….

Reuters reports that Putin says Trump should be respected:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday [10.17] President Donald Trump should be respected because he has a democratic mandate.

“He has been elected by the American people and at least because of this he should be respected, even if we disagree with his position,” Putin said at a forum with scholars.

(Putin – dictator, murderer, imperialist, and liar – thinks that we should respect the man he helped elect, Trump – authoritarian, nativist, ignoramus, and liar). The answer is no, and no again.

So, What Makes Peanut Butter Stick to the Top of Your Mouth?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 31m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing cresent with 37% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM, and her Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1881, the Earps and Doc Holliday battle the Clanton Gang at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral:

…a 30-second shootout between lawmen and members of a loosely organized group of outlaws called the Cowboys that took place at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It is generally regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the American Wild West. The gunfight was the result of a long-simmering feud, with Cowboys Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLauryon one side and town MarshalVirgil Earp, Special PolicemanMorgan Earp, Special Policeman Wyatt Earp, and temporary policeman Doc Holliday on the other side. All three Earp brothers had been the target of repeated death threats made by the Cowboys, who objected to the Earps’ interference in their illegal activities. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Ike Clanton claimed that he was unarmed and ran from the fight, along with Billy Claiborne. Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday were wounded, but Wyatt Earp was unharmed. The shootout has come to represent a period of the American Old West when the frontier was virtually an open range for outlaws, largely unopposed by law enforcement officers who were spread thin over vast territories….

On this date in 1863, Wisconsin’s governor receives authority to recruit black soliders in the defense of the Union:

Wisconsin Governor Edward Salomon received authority from the War Department to raise a regiment of African-American soldiers from Wisconsin. Colonel John A. Bross of Chicago sent African-American recruiting agents from Chicago into Wisconsin and succeeded in enlisting about 250 African-American soldiers. The 29th U.S. Colored Troops were eventually organized at Quincy, Illinois in April 1864.

Recommended for reading in full —

Raphael Satter reports [Russian software mogul] Kaspersky: We uploaded US documents [from our National Security Agency] but quickly deleted them:

PARIS (AP) — Sometime in 2014, a group of analysts walked into the office of Eugene Kaspersky, the ebullient founder of Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, to deliver some sobering news.

Kaspersky’s anti-virus software had automatically scraped powerful digital surveillance tools off a computer in the United States and the analysts were worried: The data’s headers clearly identified the files as classified.

“They immediately came to my office,” Kaspersky recalled, “and they told me that they have a problem.”

He said there was no hesitation about what to do with the cache.

“It must be deleted,” Kaspersky says he told them.

The incident, recounted by Kaspersky during a brief telephone interview on Tuesday and supplemented by a timeline and other information provided by company officials, could not immediately be corroborated. But it’s the first public acknowledgement of a story that has been building for the past three weeks — that Kaspersky’s popular anti-virus program uploaded powerful digital espionage tools belonging to the National Security Agency from a computer in the United States and sent them to servers in Moscow.

The account provides new perspective on the U.S. government’s recent move to blacklist Kaspersky from federal computer networks, even if it still leaves important questions unanswered….

(Kaspersky would be nothing more than a ratcatcher without Putin’s approval. Nothing more. For it all, these are the men with whom Trump believes “we could have a good relationship.”)

Peter Baker reports Pitched as Calming Force, John Kelly Instead Mirrors Boss’s Priorities:

WASHINGTON — This past summer, the Trump administration debated lowering the annual cap on refugees admitted to the United States. Should it stay at 110,000, be cut to 50,000 or fall somewhere in between? John F. Kelly offered his opinion. If it were up to him, he said, the number would be between zero and one.

Mr. Kelly’s comment made its way around the White House, according to an administration official, and reinforced what is only now becoming clear to many on the outside. While some officials had predicted Mr. Kelly would be a calming chief of staff for an impulsive president, recent days have made clear that he is more aligned with President Trump than anticipated.

For all of the talk of Mr. Kelly as a moderating force and the so-called grown-up in the room, it turns out that he harbors strong feelings on patriotism, national security and immigration that mirror the hard-line views of his outspoken boss. With his attack on a congresswoman who had criticized Mr. Trump’s condolence call to a slain soldier’s widow last week, Mr. Kelly showed that he was willing to escalate a politically distracting, racially charged public fight even with false assertions….

(Kelly is, in meaningful measure, what Trump is – he wouldn’t be near Trump otherwise.)

Logan Wroge writes Wisconsin has largest well-being gap between white and black children, report says:

African-American children in Wisconsin are facing the biggest gap across the nation in well-being compared to their white counterparts, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Race for Results report, prepared by nonprofit The Annie E. Casey Foundation, used 12 indexes to determine the overall well-being of children across the United States based on a composite score of 1,000. Wisconsin had the biggest disparity between black and white children, the report said….

Of 44 states for which data was available, Wisconsin ranked 41st for African-American children with a score of 279. Across all states, white Wisconsin children ranked 10th with a well-being score of 762. The 483-point difference was the largest among the 44 states with data for white and black children…

Kevin Crowe and Ashley Luthern report The cost of police misconduct in Milwaukee: $21 million – and growing:

Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget.

That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.

In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces.

And they likely will keep rising.

The price of police misconduct has come under scrutiny as city officials face a daunting budget and consider closing six fire stations and cutting jobs in the police and fire departments. At budget hearings, Common Council members have repeatedly pressed police officials and the city attorney’s office on what more could be done to ward off lawsuits.

“Better training, better screening of applicants, all kinds of factors that could enter into the picture,” Ald. Robert Bauman said in an interview.

“But clearly, for acts that have already occurred, we’re on the hook,” he said. “Just have the police stop violating civil rights, and we’d have plenty of money for fire houses”….

What did fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them? Like this —