Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:55 PM, for 10h 34m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 28.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this day in 1760, George William Frederick becomes king of Great Britain and Ireland. On this day in 1836, the first legislative session of the Wisconsin territory takes place: “At this time, the Territory of Wisconsin included all of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and part of the two Dakotas.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Matthew DeFour reports WEDC board member offers more detail on why Foxconn vote delayed:

In an interview Tuesday with the State Journal, Carpenter offered more detail, saying Hogan told board members last week that the way the deal was structured the agency couldn’t guarantee it could protect taxpayers if the company violated the agreement.

“We could have given them all this money and we wouldn’t have been able to get it back,” Carpenter said.

The state is planning to give the company $3 billion in refundable tax credits in exchange for a $10 billion LCD-screen factory in Racine County, creating up to 13,000 jobs.

Carpenter said Tuesday he decided to discuss the issue in greater detail after Alan Marcuvitz, a lawyer advising the village of Mount Pleasant, discussed the matter with the village board Monday night. Marcuvitz said there were “technical issues” with the contract “because one of the companies is from overseas” and the issue had been resolved, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Carpenter said the problem was “more than a technical issue”….

Erica Orden and Nicole Hong report Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort Faces Another Money-Laundering Probe (“Manhattan U.S. attorney’s inquiry comes as President Donald Trump is weighing candidates to run the office’):

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office is pursuing an investigation into possible money laundering by Paul Manafort, said three people familiar with the matter, adding to the federal and state probes concerning the former Trump campaign chairman.

The investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is being conducted in collaboration with a probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Mr. Manafort and possible money laundering, according to two of these people….

This is what POTUS calls a 10! Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today. pic.twitter.com/5pnK5dkkE6

— Alejandro (@agarciapadilla) October 21, 2017

Eleanor Cummins writes Sometimes All It Takes Is One Horrible Photo to Summarize a Catastrophe. This is Puerto Rico’s (“Surgery by flashlight is just the beginning of the public health crisis there”):

On Friday, former Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla tweeted a photo from inside a hospital, in which scrubbed-up doctors leaned over an operating table performing surgery lit only by a flashlight. “This is what POTUS calls a 10!” García Padilla wrote in the English version of his post. “Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today.”

The image quickly made the rounds on the internet; it currently has almost 9,000 retweets. That’s probably because this blurry picture feels like it’s worth a good deal more than 1,000 words. Closely cropped and the dictionary definition of “bleak,” it illuminates just a small sliver of the public health crisis Puerto Rico is currently facing.

Some 33 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, only 23 percent of residents have electricity, according to Status.pr, which provides daily updates on basic services on the island. While there are other, somewhat unrelated problems at play—gas stations have been slow to reopen, and roads are badly damaged—the power grid’s utter annihilation in the category 4 winds is not just a temporary inconvenience. A month later, the ways that lack of electricity can set off a cascade of other crises is becoming increasingly clear.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy and windy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM, for 10h 36m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1861, California Chief Justice Stephen Field sent “one of the first [transcontinental telegraph] messages from San Francisco to Abraham Lincoln, using the occasion to assure the president of California’s allegiance to the Union.^[6] ” On this day in 1933, Amelia Earhart visits Janesville: “Amelia Earhart spoke to the Janesville Woman’s History Club as part of the group’s 57th anniversary celebration. Four years later, Earhart disappeared as she attempted to fly across the Pacific Ocean.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jack Nicas reports Russia State News Outlet RT Thrives on YouTube, Facebook (“U.S. intelligence labels RT a top Kremlin propaganda tool; social media’s open approach to content enabling unreliable and highly partisan content to reach large audiences”):

Google, Facebook Inc. FB -2.12% and Twitter Inc. TWTR -2.80% have spent months trying to ferret out covert Russian influence on their sites.

Meanwhile, RT, the Russian state news organization that federal intelligence officials call “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet,” uses Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as the main distributors of its content.

RT’s main English-language YouTube channel has amassed 2.1 billion views and 2.2 million subscribers, roughly the same figures as CNN’s primary YouTube channel. Fox News’s main channel has 600 million views. RT has drawn an additional 3.3 billion views across roughly 20 other channels, making it among YouTube’s most-watched news networks. YouTube, by running ads before RT’s videos, also gives the Russian-government outlet ad revenue.

Twitter named RT in a report last month on alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, and the company noted that RT spent $274,100 to promote tweets to U.S. users. The Twitter dossier, submitted to a congressional committee investigation into Russian influence in the election, cited a federal intelligence report released earlier this year that claimed RT was a primary tool in Russia’s alleged efforts to swing the U.S. election toward President Donald Trump —a charge RT has denied. Yet RT maintains a thriving presence on Twitter with 10 million followers….

(Key point: RT’s speech is the speech from a foreign dictatorship’s propaganda tool. Americans who support it are, depending on the level of their support, either fellow travelers or fifth-columnists. At the least, this foreign state tool should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). See generally A Primer on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA doesn’t prohibit speech – it merely requires registration and reporting for specified foreign entities.)

Katie Zavadski, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, Spencer Ackerman report Russian Propaganda Hosted by Man on Staten Island, New York:

Russia’s propaganda campaign targeting Americans was hosted, at least in part, on American soil.

A company owned by a man on Staten Island, New York, provided internet infrastructure services to DoNotShoot.Us, a Kremlin propaganda site that pretended to be a voice for victims of police shootings, a Daily Beast investigation has found.

Every website needs to be “hosted”—given an Internet Protocol address and space on a physical computer—in order to be publicly viewed. DoNotShoot.Us is a website run out of the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” according to two sources familiar with the website, both of whom independently identified it to The Daily Beast as a Russian propaganda account. It was hosted on a server with the IP address 107.181.161.172.

That IP address was owned by Greenfloid LLC, a company registered to New Yorker Sergey Kashyrin and two others. Other Russian propaganda sites, like BlackMattersUs.com, were also hosted on servers with IP addresses owned by Greenfloid. The company’s ties to Russian propaganda sites were first reported by ThinkProgress.

The web services company owns under 250 IP addresses, some of which resolve to Russian propaganda sites and other fake news operations. Others are sites that could not be hosted at other providers, like “xxxrape.net.” There’s also a Russian trinket site called “soviet-power.com.” (The IP address that pointed to DoNotShoot.Us now resolves to a botnet and phishing operation, and is currently owned by Total Server Solutions LLC.)

(Any American owning or knowingly working for  Greenfloid LLC would be a true fifth columnist – that is, someone within America actively working for our foreign enemies, including Russian government-backed websites.)

Nicholas Fandos reports Hopes Dim for Congressional Russia Inquiries as Parties Clash:

….All three committees looking into Russian interference — one in the House, two in the Senate — have run into problems, from insufficient staffing to fights over when the committees should wrap up their investigations. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry has barely started, delayed in part by negotiations over the scope of the investigation. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while maintaining bipartisan comity, have sought to tamp down expectations about what they might find.

Nine months into the Trump administration, any notion that Capitol Hill would provide a comprehensive, authoritative and bipartisan accounting of the extraordinary efforts of a hostile power to disrupt American democracy appears to be dwindling….

From Fandos’s story, here’s Trey Gowdy:

WASHINGTON — In a secured room in the basement of the Capitol in July, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, fielded question after question from members of the House Intelligence Committee. Though the allotted time for the grilling had expired, he offered to stick around as long as they wanted.

But Representative Trey Gowdy, who spent nearly three years investigating Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was growing frustrated after two hours….

“Congressional investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,” said Mr. Gowdy, who made his name in Congress as a fearsome investigator of Democrats….

(Years investigating Benghazi, but now even two hours’ time to investigate Russia is too much for Gowdy….)

Here’s a time-lapse video of the installation of the Milwaukee Bucks replica floor (in the UWM Panther Arena):

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM, for 10h 39m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated.  Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission is scheduled to meet at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board is scheduled to meet in-office at 7 PM.

On this day in 1941, Disney Productions and RKO Pictures release Dumbo. On this day in 1921, the Packers play their first NFL game: “[t]he Packers defeated the Minneapolis Marines 7-6, for a crowd of 6,000 fans and completed their inaugural season with 3 wins, 2 losses, and 2 ties.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Rosie Gray reports from Steve Bannon’s ‘Season of War’ Roadshow:

ANAHEIM, Calif.—Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon continued his campaign against the Republican establishment in a speech to the California Republican Party convention on Friday—while also calling for greater unity within the party. His targets included the current party leadership, but also the previous Republican president of the United States.

Bannon, who rarely spoke publicly during his time as White House chief strategist, has made a series of appearances in recent weeks promoting primary Republican senators in the 2018 election cycle. Boosted by former judge Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate primary win over the establishment’s (and President Trump’s) pick Luther Strange, Bannon is spearheading an intra-party war with the aim of removing Mitch McConnell as majority leader. He has said that he wants to challenge every Republican incumbent apart from Ted Cruz. He personally campaigned for Moore and for Kelli Ward, who is running a primary challenge to Jeff Flake in Arizona. Last week he promised a “season of war” against the establishment in a speech to the Values Voter Summit in Washington….

David Von Drehle contends The party is over:

With control of Congress, the White House and a majority of state governments, the Republican Party can claim to be stronger than at any time since 1928. On the other hand, many Democrats believe that their party’s edge among younger voters and growing nonwhite demographic groups has them on the brink of a new reign of power.

The truth is, both parties are in crisis — and may be headed for worse.

The Republican ascendancy is riddled with asterisks. The party’s control of Congress has only exposed deep and bitter divisions, as the pirates of Breitbart and talk radio turn their guns on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Too riven to redeem its oft-sworn pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, the fractured majority is now struggling to unite around tax cuts, the golden calf of the GOP. As the saying goes, power is what power does — in this case, not much….

Jenna Johnson reports Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should:

….The divide in the Maddox household is one playing out across the country, as those who voted for the president debate how much support the federal government should give Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory without a voting member of Congress that is not allowed to vote in presidential elections.

Some supporters of the president, like Fred Maddox, agree with Trump that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was frail before the storm; that the crisis was worsened by a lack of leadership there; and that the federal government should limit its involvement in the rebuilding effort, which will likely cost billions of dollars. But others, like Mary Maddox, are appalled by how the president talks about Puerto Rico and say the United States has a moral obligation to take care of its citizens.

A survey released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans believe that the federal government has been too slow to respond in Puerto Rico and that the island still isn’t getting the help it needs. But the results largely broke along party lines: While nearly three-quarters of Democrats said the federal government isn’t doing enough, almost three-quarters of Republicans said it is….

Lawrence Summers writes Trump’s top economist’s tax analysis isn’t just wrong, it’s dishonest:

Kevin Hassett, the White House’s chief economist, accused me of an ad-hominem attack against his analysis of the Trump administration’s tax plan. I am proudly guilty of asserting that it is some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd. Television does not provide space to spell out the reasons why, so I am happy to provide them here….

Hassett throws around the terms scientific and peer-reviewed, yet there is no peer-reviewed support for his central claim that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would raise wages by $4,000 per worker.

The claim is absurd on its face. The cut in corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent would cost slightly less than $200 billion a year. There is a legitimate debate among economists about how much the cut would benefit capital and how much it would benefit labor. Hassett’s “conservative” claim that the cut would raise wages by $4,000 in an economy with 150 million workers is a claim that workers would benefit by $600 billion — or 300 percent of the tax cut! To my knowledge, such a claim is unprecedented in analyses of tax incidence. Hassett doubles down by holding out the further possibility that wages might rise by $9,000.

Tech Insider reports Scientists predict an unusually warm winter this year in most of the US — here’s why:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 6 PM, for 10h 42m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1962, Pres. Kennedy spoke to the nation about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, stating “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Kenedy’s imposition of a blockade sought – and successfully did achieve – America’s policy goal without loss of life. (“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, from whatever nation or port, will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.”)

On this day in 1938, Dick Post of Footville wins yet again: “Dick Post of Footville won his sixth county title by husking a record 24.5 bushels of corn in 80 minutes. Two days later, he husked 1,868 pounds in 80 minutes to win the state championship. Post finished fourth in the nationals at Sioux Falls, S.D.”

Recommended for reading in full —

The team of Marco Chown Oved, Robert Cribb, Jeremy Blackman, Sylvia Varnham O’Regan, Micha Maidenberg, and Susanne Rust report How every investor lost money on Trump Tower Toronto (but Donald Trump made millions anyway) (“Donald Trump called himself a “genius” for investing in Toronto’s Trump Tower. Behind the scenes, he had no money on the line. The inside story of an unlikely bankruptcy, and the investors who lost everything when they bet on the Trump brand”):

Let’s say you’re Donald Trump.

It’s 2002 and you’ve agreed to have your name emblazoned across the top of the tallest residential tower in Canada, a $500-million, five-star condo-hotel in downtown Toronto.

Here’s the thing: Only months into the project, your lead developer is publicly exposed in the pages of the Toronto Star as a fugitive fraudster on the run from U.S. justice. Your major institutional partner — the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company — bails shortly after.

Your remaining partners in the deal — a group of investors assembled by the criminal who was just outed — include a New York camera store owner, a former Chicago nursing-home administrator, two small-time landlords in Britain and a little-known Toronto billionaire who earned a fortune in the former Soviet Union.

The one thing they all have in common — no experience in condo tower development.

Do you pull out? For Trump, the answer was no. The billionaire dug in, repeatedly told the world he was investing his own money in the project — claims that would prove false — and gushed about its spectacular promise, knowing his profits were guaranteed.

“Nothing like this has ever been built in Toronto,” Trump said in 2004 as he relaunched the stalled project. “It is going to be the ultimate destination for business, pleasure and entertainment.”

Fast forward to 2016 and Trump’s Toronto tower is built but bankrupt — a rare failure in Toronto’s booming downtown condo market….

Emily Steele and Michael Schmidt report O’Reilly Settled New Harassment Claim, Then Fox Renewed His Contract (“In January, the Fox News host was said to have agreed to a $32 million settlement with a former network analyst, the largest of his known payouts”):

Last January, six months after Fox News ousted its chairman amid a sexual harassment scandal, the network’s top-rated host at the time, Bill O’Reilly, struck a $32 million agreement with a longtime network analyst to settle new sexual harassment allegations, according to two people briefed on the matter — an extraordinarily large amount for such cases.

Although the deal has not been previously made public, the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, acknowledges that it was aware of the woman’s complaints about Mr. O’Reilly. They included allegations of repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her, according to the people briefed on the matter.

It was at least the sixth agreement — and by far the largest — made by either Mr. O’Reilly or the company to settle harassment allegations against him. Despite that record, 21st Century Fox began contract negotiations with Mr. O’Reilly, and in February granted him a four-year extension that paid $25 million a year….

(Key elements of the reporting on the newly-disclosed settlement are the amount, that O’Reilly agreed himself to pay that amount over time, that Fox knew of O’Reilly’s private settlement Lis Wiehl, and that Fox thereafter renewed his network contract despite knowledge of a settlement between O’Reilly & Wiehl.)

Susan Hennessy and Benjamin Wittes write Jeff Sessions Just Confessed His Negligence on Russia (“The attorney general is aware of the threat Moscow poses to American elections — he just hasn’t done anything about it”):

With Midwestern gentility, the Nebraska senator [Sasse] told Sessions that he wasn’t going to grill him about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rather, he said, “I would like to continue talking about the Russians but in the context of the long-term objectives that Vladimir Putin has to undermine American institutions and the public trust.… We face a sophisticated long-term effort by a foreign adversary to undermine our foreign policy and our ability to lead in the world by trying to undermining confidence in American institutions.”

Russia will be back in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Sasse argued. “We live at a time where info ops and propaganda and misinformation are a far more cost-effective way for people to try to weaken the United States of America than by thinking they can outspend us at a military level.… So as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a supervisor of multiple components of our intelligence community … do you think we’re doing enough to prepare for future interference by Russia and other foreign adversaries in the information space?”

You’d think this question would be a golden opportunity for Sessions. After all, if you’re a man who has had some — ahem — inconvenient interactions with former Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, you might relish the chance to answer a question about what you are doing to prevent Russian interference in the future, as a chance to go on offense and show how serious you are about tackling a problem that has undermined your reputation.

But Sessions’s answer did not inspire confidence: “Probably not. We’re not. And the matter is so complex that for most of us, we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”

Sessions acknowledged “disruption and interference, it appears, by Russian officials” and noted that it “requires a real review.” But he said nothing about what the department is doing to ready itself.

Sasse followed up, giving him an explicit chance to spell it out. “So what steps has the department taken,” or should it take, “to learn the lessons of 2016 … in fighting foreign interference?” he asked.

Crickets from Sessions….

Matthew DeFour reports WEDC threatens legal action against Kestrel Aircraft as another deal goes south:

A day before Democrats submitted a petition to recall him in 2012, Gov. Scott Walker flew to Superior to announce a $20 million award for an aviation start-up promising to create 665 jobs and to invest more than $50 million in the state.

Five years later, Kestrel Aircraft has defaulted on its loan repayments after investing $1.4 million and creating 25 jobs, and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. says it is initiating legal action against the company.

The sour Kestrel deal is the latest reminder of how hasty decision-making and loose financial controls in WEDC’s early days have cost taxpayers. And though the agency has put in place several safeguards since 2013, the early missteps continue to dog WEDC as it negotiates the largest taxpayer-backed corporate incentive deal in U.S. history.

Last week the WEDC board delayed a scheduled vote on the nearly $3 billion award to Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn when an unspecified problem with the contract was identified shortly before the vote was to occur….

What was The Bloop? The Loudest Underwater Sound Ever Recorded Has No Scientific Explanation:

In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered an unusual, ultra-low-frequency sound emanating from a point off the southern coast of Chile. It was the loudest unidentified underwater sound ever recorded, detected by hydrophones 5,000 miles apart. It lasted for one minute and was never heard again.

The Bloop, a mesmerizing short documentary by Cara Cusumano, investigates this unknown phenomenon with Dr. Christopher Fox, Chief Scientist of the Acoustic Monitoring Project of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. “I took it to the very classified innards of the United States Navy intelligence,” says Dr. Fox in the film. “It wasn’t theirs. It’s captivating because we don’t know what it was. I am glad there are still mysteries on earth and in the universe.”

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:01 PM, for 10h 45m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1797, the USS Constitution, later nicknamed Old Ironsides, is launched in Boston Harbor, “Captain James Sever breaking a bottle of Madeira wine on her bowsprit.” On this day in 1897, the Yerkes Observatory is dedicated: “Founded by astronomer George Hale and located in Williams Bay, the Yerkes Observatory houses the world’s largest refracting optical telescope, with a lens of diameter 102 cm/40 inches. It was built through the largess of the tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, who rebuilt important parts of the Chicago transportation system after the fire. Situated in a 77-acre park on the shore of Lake Geneva, this observatory was the center for world astronomy in the early 20th century and invited a number of astronomers from around the world, including Japan, for scientific exchange. [Source: Yerkes Observatory Virtual Museum]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Andrew Kramer reports In Russia, a Bribery Case Lifts the Veil on Kremlin Intrigue:

MOSCOW — The Russian elite, the group of oligarchs and other loyalists around President Vladimir V. Putin who amassed great wealth over nearly two decades of hand-in-glove work with the government, is showing signs of cracking.

As the economy stagnates amid international sanctions and low oil prices, a high-profile bribery case has illustrated how the country’s most privileged players have taken to fighting over slices of a smaller economic pie, seeking an advantage over rivals through the courts and law enforcement officials who are widely seen as vulnerable to corruption.

In recordings read aloud by prosecutors in a case being heard in a Moscow courtroom, two men, both Kremlin insiders, are first heard in an assiduously polite conversation recorded by secret listening devices, even as one was preparing to doom the other to a long spell in prison….

There’s no honor among thieves, but Kramer notes something else, that some thieves are less insightful than others:

In the transcripts, published by MediaZona, a Russian news portal, Mr. Sechin appears to know that his nemesis will soon be arrested and vanish into the penal colonies, and seems to toy with him on pivotal issues that have divided the economic policy elite in Russia for years.

He discusses the success of Rosneft in terms of volumes of oil produced, falling back on a Soviet-era fascination with tons of production, whether steel, coal or oil, regardless of its market value.

Mr. Ulyukayev interjects that investors, who can buy shares in Rosneft on the London Stock Exchange, value the company at only a fraction of other oil companies.

“The asset is worth exactly half as much as comparable” companies, he says. In short, Russia’s most important company is not a market success.

Mr. Sechin brushes aside this objection, and then notes the gifts he has prepared. “Take the basket,” Mr. Sechin says, adding, “That’s all, good luck and thank you very much”….

(Although some Russians have grown so rich as to become oligrachs, the fundamental characteristics of a truly productive, and so propsperous, socilety are missng. Some still think in crude quanitative messaures rather than qualititativelu as a matter of relatively productivity, relative market value. Sechin thinks no more insightfully than a Soviet planner.)

Alexis Madrigal interviews U.S. Senator Mark Warner in Facebook’s Evidence of Russian Electoral Meddling Is Only ‘the Tip of the Iceberg’:

Alexis Madrigal: So, as of today, what do we know about the Russian disinformation campaign on Facebook and other social-media platforms?

Mark Warner: First of all, let’s step back and put the Russian involvement in 2016 in the overall context. It was approved at the highest level. It was coordinated in ways that were unprecedented. It included the things that have been much reported on, like hacking into both political parties and releasing information harmful to one candidate, Clinton, and helpful to Trump.

We know that Russians and even Trump’s Department of Homeland Security have acknowledged that 21 states had their electoral systems probed, if not fully hacked into. We know that this is part of a pattern that has been going on and continues after the election. And it included interventions in the French election, where Facebook was much more active.

I think our government and the platform companies were more than a little bit caught off guard. I don’t think anyone had seen anything of this scale before….

Madrigal: In your mind, what are the key outstanding questions?Warner: All these companies need to come fully clean about what happened in 2016. Don’t tell me they found 450 accounts linked to the American election when they found 50,000 in France. And don’t tell me they found all the ads.

The first pass from Twitter was worse. They took only things that were derivative of what Facebook found. And they found some stuff. But I said, you have to go back and dig in. So, we need to figure out, number one, what happened in 2016.

While I’m trying to not get into the whole editorial-content argument, this notion that we can’t curate at all just doesn’t hold water. They’ve had to do it every time there has been something that has created consequences. Child pornography for example, or terrorist activity, or information on how to create bombs.

A lot of that was forced by the European governments. Areas reach a tipping point, the [platform companies] step in and act. They have to, if you don’t want over-the-top regulation, or worse yet, we allow this to continue and we have some massive upheaval or loss of faith in the democratic process. Because people see how bad this was with relatively small amounts of dollars spent….

Shannon Bearman describes The Rise Of The Accidental Activist (“How millions of women like me became the backbone of the Resistance”):

It was September 1st, 2016. Time to start thinking in earnest about the new school year. Part of that routine that was new involved signing up on Twitter to follow the kid’s bus route delays, specific school events in real time, etc. This would be my first foray ever into social media, and I was really hesitant. But, to make life practical and more convenient for our family, I took the plunge and set up my Twitter account….

Without realizing it, I became an accidental activist. I was sending emails, signing petitions, making phone calls every day and suddenly very passionate about politics. Like many Americans, it’s become part of my daily routine: Have coffee, sign/send petitions, make phone calls- #Resist….

Now that the big, showy displays of massive protest are over, the bulk of the Resistance work involves joining forces online, taking action daily through PAC’s like “The Loyal Opposition” or “Demo Coalition”. These calls to resistance organize masses of followers into the equivalent of a national PTA phone tree, overpowering social media and sending congressional staffers scurrying.

Great Big Story explains How Mario Got His Mustache (and His Name!):

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 6:03 PM, for 10h 47m 48s of daytime. The moon is new, with .6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1944, Gen. Douglas MacArthur returns to the Philipines. On this day in 1856, Frederick Douglass speaks in Beaver Dam: “On this date Frederick Douglass arrived in Beaver Dam and spoke about the brutality and immorality of slavery. His speech was also intended to generate support for the abolitionist movement in Dodge Co. and Wisconsin. ”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ari Berman describes How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump (“And possibly handed him the whole election”):

….After the election, registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County were surveyed about why they didn’t cast a ballot. Eleven percent cited the voter ID law and said they didn’t have an acceptable ID; of those, more than half said the law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote. According to the study’s author, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Kenneth Mayer, that finding implies that between 12,000 and 23,000 registered voters in Madison and Milwaukee—and as many as 45,000 statewide—were deterred from voting by the ID law. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” he says.

“This particular election was very important to me. I felt like the right to vote was being stripped away from me.”

Its impact was particularly acute in Milwaukee, where nearly two-thirds of the state’s African Americans live, 37 percent of them below the poverty line. Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the nation, divided between low-income black areas and middle-class white ones. It was known as the “Selma of the North” in the 1960s because of fierce clashes over desegregation. George Wallace once said that if he had to leave Alabama, “I’d want to live on the south side of Milwaukee.”

Neil Albrecht, Milwaukee’s election director, believes that the voter ID law and other changes passed by the Republican Legislature contributed significantly to lower turnout. Albrecht is 55 but seems younger, with bookish tortoise-frame glasses and salt-and-pepper stubble. (“I looked 12 until I became an election administrator,” he joked.) At his office in City Hall with views of the Milwaukee River, Albrecht showed me a color-coded map of the city’s districts, pointing out the ones where turnout had declined the most, including Anthony’s. Next to his desk was a poster that listed “Acceptable Forms of Photo ID.”

“I would estimate that 25 to 35 percent of the 41,000 decrease in voters, or somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 voters, likely did not vote due to the photo ID requirement,” he said later. “It is very probable that between the photo ID law and the changes to voter registration, enough people were prevented from voting to have changed the outcome of the presidential election in Wisconsin”….

Rob Schultz reports New Madison police procedures: Officers should exhaust all options before using a gun:

The Madison Police Department has updated its guide on the use of deadly force, instructing officers to exhaust other options before using a gun in a change lauded by both a police union official and an attorney who has sued the city over the issue.

“When it comes to the rules our police officers are trained to follow, language matters,” said Andrea Farrell, a Madison attorney who earlier this year won a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city on behalf of the family of a woman killed by Madison police.

The police department was ordered by the City Council in May to change its standard operating procedures for how officers use deadly force, as well as one for how they use non-deadly force and to include language emphasizing an officer’s duty to intercede, de-escalate and preserve life. The changes were recommended by a special committee that studied police policy and practices….

(Here’s where we are: this guidance in Madison wasn’t uniformly and everywhere present. Most avenues are not enough avenues: only all avenues are enough avenues.)

Betsy Woodruff reports Exclusive: Senate ‘Russia Probe’ Is Not Investigating Russia:

The Senate Judiciary Committee has demanded documents on Russian meddling from the CIA, interviewed Donald Trump Jr. about his infamous Trump Tower meeting, and subpoenaed Paul Manafort, the president’s Kremlin-friendly former campaign chairman.

In May, the committee held a subcommittee hearing called “Russian Interference in 2016 United States Election.” In June, Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley issued a pair of press releases about his “Russia Probe.” One of them, produced with fellow committee Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, asked for documents from the FBI, citing the committee’s “investigations into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.”

But the Judiciary Committee is not, in fact, running a Trump-Russia investigation—at least, not a full-fledged one.

A staffer for Grassley, speaking on the condition of anonymity to give his candid assessment, told The Daily Beast that the committee is instead engaged in routine oversight of the Justice Department—though under extraordinary circumstances….

Ari Melber, Meredith Mandell, and  Mirjam Lablans report Putin Rival Ties Kushner Meeting to Kremlin Bankers:

A prominent exiled Russian oligarch said in an exclusive interview with NBC News that he is nearly certain Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to collaborate with the Trump campaign, and that he believes a top Russian banker was not “acting on his own behalf” when he held a controversial meeting with Jared Kushner last December.

The pointed remarks come from a longtime Putin rival, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil executive who was Russia’s richest man before he was imprisoned and exiled by the Kremlin.

“I am almost convinced that Putin’s people have tried to influence the U.S. election in some way,” Khodorkovsky told MSNBC’s Ari Melber in his first U.S. television interview since Trump took office.

Khodorkovsky says he believes the likelihood that Putin “personally” tried to cooperate with the Trump campaign to affect the election is a “9 out of 10.”

“Whether or not that proposal was accepted, I would let the people responsible for investigating the matter answer that question,” he added.

Khodorkovsky was freed and exiled from Russia in 2013, after spending 10 years in prison for tax evasion. Several international human rights groups have said the prosecution was political retribution for his public criticism of Putin….

Tech Insider lists 5 myths about sugar that you should stop believing:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:04 PM, for 10h 50m 33s of daytime. The moon is new today, with .1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The City of Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 5 PM, her Community Involvement Commission at 5 PM, and the Fire Department Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1781, American and French forces win a decisive victory at the Battle of Yorktown:

The fire on Yorktown from the allies was heavier than ever as new artillery pieces joined the line.^[64]Cornwallis talked with his officers that day and they agreed that their situation was hopeless.^[65]

On the morning of October 17, a drummer appeared followed by an officer waving a white handkerchief.^[66] The bombardment ceased, and the officer was blindfolded and led behind the French and American lines. Negotiations began at the Moore House on October 18 between Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Dundas and Major Alexander Ross (who represented the British) and Lieutenant Colonel Laurens (who represented the Americans) and the Marquis de Noailles (who represented the French).^[66] To make sure that nothing fell apart between the French and Americans at the last minute, Washington ordered that the French be given an equal share in every step of the surrender process.^[66]

The articles of capitulation were signed on October 19, 1781.^[66] Signatories included Washington, Rochambeau, the Comte de Barras (on behalf of the French Navy), Cornwallis, and Captain Thomas Symonds (the senior Royal Navy officer present).^[67] Cornwallis’ British men were declared prisoners of war, promised good treatment in American camps, and officers were permitted to return home after taking their parole. At 2:00 pm the allied army entered the British positions, with the French on the left and the Americans on the right.^[66]

The British had asked for the traditional honors of war, which would allow the army to march out with flags flying, bayonets fixed, and the band playing an American or French tune as a tribute to the victors. However, Washington firmly refused to grant the British the honors that they had denied the defeated American army the year before at the Siege of Charleston.^[68] Consequently, the British and Hessian troops marched with flags furled and muskets shouldered….

Recommended for reading in full — 

Betsy Woodruff, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, and Spencer Ackerman report Trump Campaign Staffers Pushed Russian Propaganda Days Before the Election (“Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. pushed messages from an account operated from Russia’s ‘troll farm’ — including allegations of voter fraud a week before Election Day”):

Some of the Trump campaign’s most prominent names and supporters, including Trump’s campaign manager, digital director and son, pushed tweets from professional trolls paid by the Russian government in the heat of the 2016 election campaign.

The Twitter account @Ten_GOP, which called itself the “Unofficial Twitter account of Tennessee Republicans,” was operated from the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” or Internet Research Agency, a source familiar with the account confirmed with The Daily Beast.

The account’s origins in the Internet Research Agency were originally reported by the independent Russian news outlet RBC. @Ten_GOP was created on November 19, 2015, and accumulated over 100 thousand followers before Twitter shut it down. The Daily Beast independently confirmed the reasons for @Ten_GOP’s account termination.

The discovery of the now-unavailable tweets presents the first evidence that several members of the Trump campaign pushed covert Russian propaganda on social media in the run-up to the 2016 election.

A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment, “for privacy and security reasons”….

Kevin Collier reports Twitter Was Warned Repeatedly About This Fake Account Run By A Russian Troll Farm And Refused To Take It Down (“The account was one of hundreds created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency and drew 136,000 followers by tweeting divisive messages in the name of the Tennessee Republican Party”):

Twitter took 11 months to close a Russian troll account that claimed to speak for the Tennessee Republican Party even after that state’s real GOP notified the social media company that the account was a fake.

The account, @TEN_GOP, was enormously popular, amassing at least 136,000 followers between its creation in November 2015 and when Twitter shut it down in August, according to a snapshot of the account captured by the Internet Archive just before the account was “permanently suspended.”

Some of its tweets were deliberately outrageous, the archive shows, such as one in December 2016 that claimed that unarmed black men killed by police officers deserved their fate. It also trafficked in deliberate fake news, claiming just before it was shut down that a photo of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ NBA championship parade was actually a crowd waiting to hear Donald Trump speak.

Twitter, already under fire, along with Facebook, for being slow to recognize its role in Russian election meddling, declined to comment. A spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the company does not comment on individual accounts….

Dan Friedman observes Jeff Sessions Again Changes His Story on Meetings With Russian Ambassador (“The attorney general nows says their discussions may have included campaign issues”):

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday offered a revised account of his contacts with Russians during the 2016 campaign. During his confirmation hearing in January, Sessions falsely claimed he had no contacts with Russian officials during the presidential campaign—when he was a prominent supporter of Donald Trump. After reports that he met with Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sessions changed his story, arguing that they did discuss any campaign-related issues. Yet while testifying before the Senate judiciary committee, Sessions tweaked his explanation again, noting that it was possible that Trump campaign positions did come up with the Russian ambassador….

In June, appearing before the Senate intelligence committee, Sessions altered his story again, saying, “I have never met with or had any conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials concerning any type of interference with any campaign or election in the United States.”

On Wednesday, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pressed Sessions on his contacts with Kislyak, the attorney general once more shifted his account, leaving open the possibility that campaign-related matters may have arisen. “I don’t think there was any discussion about the details of the campaign other than – it could have been in the meeting in my office or at the convention that some comment was made about what Trump’s positions were,” he said. “I think that’s possible.”

Sessions also told Leahy he “did not recall” if he discussed emails—the Vermont senator seemed to be referring to the emails hackers stole from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign—with any Russian officials. Leahy, a former prosecutor, said that Sessions has shifted from issuing flat denials of his contacts with Russians to saying that he could not recall his conversations. Leahy later told reporters that Sessions had changed his story and given “false testimony” in January….

Barry H. Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman Eisen present Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump:

President Trump’s firing of Comey and the subsequent revelations about President Trump’s earlier exchanges with Comey while he was FBI Director raise the question of whether President Trump obstructed justice by endeavoring to impede those investigations. In June, press reports indicated that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is indeed investigating the very question of whether President Trump obstructed justice.^[1] Mueller has since impaneled a grand jury in Washington D.C., issued subpoenas, and has begun seeking interviews with current and former White House officials.^[2]

In this paper, we break down and analyze the question of whether President Trump may have obstructed justice and explain the criminal and congressional actions that could follow from an obstruction investigation. Addressing the possibility of criminal behavior by President Trump and the complicated issues it raises is not a task that we take lightly. Dissecting allegations of criminality leveled against an individual who has been duly elected president and who has sworn to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution is an inherently solemn task. But it is our hope that by presenting a rigorous legal analysis of the potential case against the president, we will help the American people and their representatives understand the contours of the issues, regardless of whether it is eventually litigated in a court of law, the halls of Congress, or the court of public opinion….

Download “Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump.”

(This is a serious analysis, applying the law to published facts. Those who have supped on Fox News or Breitbart for their assessments of possible obstruction of justice claims have consumed only slop.)

In Australia, an infrared camera captured kangaroos duking it out: