Whitewater High School has the advantage of a new principal and assistant principal. I’ve written before that I’ve no particular advice for Messrs. Lovenberg and O’Shaughnessy. See For Your Consideration, Dr. Jonas Salk. (Indeed, in that post I offered only a question, but – to be sure – one that implied how very much their efforts are needed and welcome here.)
An optimistic view of recent administrative changes is widely shared in this community. There’s undoubtedly satisfaction – and for some outright & legitimate relief – that Whitewater High has a new team.
Those committed to high standards and fair practices should expect from a collectively-run school board a collective commitment to Whitewater’s current team. There’s something particularly risible about a single member whose candidacy was based on ‘planning for the future’ but whose outlook is to the past and whose direction is one of retrograde motion. In any event, one could confidently refute each and every contention that single member might make in this regard; it’s no more than a reckless presumption that invites such a refutation.
Longtime readers know that – to be mild – I’m not without occasional words of criticism. (Nor, in now saying so mildly, without a sense of humor and awareness.) And yet, and yet, one criticizes truly from love and hope. It’s this community one loves, this community to which one is forever committed, and this community for which one is hopeful.
We would do well to put nostalgia aside.
To move backward will prove quickly destructive, to remain motionless slowly debilitating, but forward – of all other directions, however unfamiliar by comparison – alone offers a hopeful future.
Midweek in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 6:17 PM, for 11h 12m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1942, the Battle of Cape Esperance begins (concluding with an American victory the next day): “The naval battle was the second of four major surface engagements during the Guadalcanal campaign and took place at the entrance to the strait between Savo Island and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Cape Esperance (9°15’S 159°42’E) is the northernmost point on Guadalcanal, and the battle took its name from this point.”
MADISON – The leaders of a Department of Corrections internal affairs unit that was recently shut down by Gov. Scott Walker’s administration said changes were ordered because they had done too good a job at exposing problems at the state’s juvenile prison.
A Department of Corrections spokesman discounted that contention, saying the decision to close the unit was unrelated to the wide-ranging internal investigation into Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.
The department’s Office of Special Operations in 2014 launched a review of those two juvenile prisons, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. It uncovered extensive problems that grew into a criminal investigation that has been ongoing for nearly three years.
Walker’s administration shut down the Office of Special Operations in June, contending doing so would allow it to concentrate its resources on investigating and preventing sexual assault behind bars….
Steve Wierenga, the head of the office, and Cheryl Frey, the special investigations chief, said they believe “they have done ‘too good a job’ … and are now being pulled from employee investigations because they ‘found out too much’ at (Lincoln Hills) and ‘made the DOC look bad’ ”….
In 2015, Israeli government hackers saw something suspicious in the computers of a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm: hacking tools that could only have come from the National Security Agency.
Israel notified the NSA, where alarmed officials immediately began a hunt for the breach, according to people familiar with the matter, who said an investigation by the agency revealed that the tools were in the possession of the Russian government.
Israeli spies had found the hacking material on the network of Kaspersky Lab, the global anti-virus firm under a spotlight in the United States because of suspicions that its products facilitate Russian espionage.
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security instructed federal civilian agencies to identify Kaspersky Lab software on their networks and remove it on the grounds that “the risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security.” The directive followed a decision by the General Services Administration to remove Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering a governmentwide ban….
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.
According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned….
(Trump is so ignorant that he cannot see an increase of this kind would be limited by existing treaties, and that in any event our current force is more advanced and capable than any on Earth.)
….Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea. Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more. Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?
There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)
In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary”….
It’s no surprise, truly, that white nationalists who returned to Charlottesville chanted three main slogans: ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Russia is our friend,’ and ‘the South will rise again.’
Each is false, and little more than a dark hope: the South they want (of slavery, bigotry, and treason) will never rise again, they have already been replaced by a more diverse and competitive population, and Russia (under either the Soviets or Putin) has never been America’s friend.
Putin has returned Russia to dictatorship after the briefest thaw, a return to brutality at home and abroad. Consider only a small video of opposition politician Alexei Navalny’s struggle in Russia, and know that while you consider him, vast numbers more are denied basic rights. The man who makes Russia oppressive for his own people delights in having lifted Trump to power in America, that Trump might in his own way degrade our way of life as Putin in his way has degraded life for his own people.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:19 PM, for 11h 15m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Google has a doodle today to commemorate the 156th birthday of Fridtjof Nansen, a “a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate” who when younger was “a champion skier and ice skater. ” In his later years, “Nansen devoted himself primarily to the League of Nations, following his appointment in 1921 as the League’s High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the displaced victims of the First World War and related conflicts. Among the initiatives he introduced was the “Nansen passport” for stateless persons, a certificate that used to be recognised by more than 50 countries. He worked on behalf of refugees until his sudden death in 1930, after which the League established the Nansen International Office for Refugees to ensure that his work continued. This office received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1938. His name is commemorated in numerous geographical features, particularly in the polar regions.”
All of these were recorded, posted or written by Americans. Yet all ended up becoming grist for a network of Facebook pages linked to a shadowy Russian company that has carried out propaganda campaigns for the Kremlin, and which is now believed to be at the center of a far-reaching Russian program to influence the 2016 presidential election.
A New York Times examination of hundreds of those posts shows that one of the most powerful weapons that Russian agents used to reshape American politics was the anger, passion and misinformation that real Americans were broadcasting across social media platforms.
The Russian pages — with names like “Being Patriotic,” “Secured Borders” and “Blacktivist” — cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine. They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.
Other posts on the Russian pages used stilted language or phrases rarely found in American English. Yet their use of borrowed ideas and arguments from Americans, which were already resonating among conservatives and liberals, demonstrated a deft understanding of the political terrain. The Russians also paid Facebook to promote their posts in the feeds of American Facebook users, helping them test what content would circulate most widely, and among which audiences….
….The reasons for New York’s voting laws are different than the racially targeted statutes and purges in places like Texas or Wisconsin, but the effect on the democratic process is nonetheless disruptive. At the time of its election last April, New York had the second-lowest turnout of any state primary in the United States last year (behind only Louisiana), and nothing seems to have changed since; in September’s Democratic municipal elections in New York City, turnout was 14 percent.
When Sanders supporters complained about New York’s voter registration law during the primary, long-time Democrats, whose patience with the candidate’s insurgency was already wearing thin, had little sympathy for voters who had forsaken their party to begin with. It is understandable that Democrats believe that Democratic candidates should be chosen by Democrats, as is the case in other states with considerably less restrictive re-registration deadlines, but that’s not what the New York system is designed to do—instead it tends to squeeze Democrats out. (Sometimes even the children of candidates miss the cut; Eric and Ivanka Trump were unable to vote for their father in last year’s primary because they had neglected to re-register as Republicans in time.)
Since last year’s primary, there have been efforts to change this. Last spring, a group of state legislators introduced legislation that would have moved up the deadline to change party registration before a primary, while still keeping the primary closed to people who didn’t agree to join the party. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive who was elected four years ago with a lot of help from the pseudo-third-party Working Families Party, urged the state legislature to pass it….
(Harder to vote isn’t a principle of a free society, anywhere.)
The United States is gripped by two interlocking constitutional crises: one spectacularly visible and noisy; the other unfolding more quietly. Senator Bob Corker’s Sunday remarks to The New York Times brought the quiet crisis into full public view….
Good news: The people containing the commander-in-chief have to a considerable extent succeeded. The United States has not launched a preemptive attack on North Korea, abandoned Estonia to the Russians, canceled NAFTA, or started a trade war with China—each and every one of those outcomes a seemingly live possibility if you heeded Trump’s own words.
Bad news: The national-security services are apparently coping with Donald Trump in ways that circumvent the president’s constitutional role as commander-in-chief. One example spotlights the ways Trump’s orders are shirked by his nominal subordinates. Trump tweeted in July that the “United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.” The actual policy set forth in executive orders in August will be very different: It leaves discretion to the secretary of defense to determine whether “military readiness” will be assisted or impaired by allowing transgender soldiers to continue their service….
According to the YouTube page for “Williams and Kalvin,” the Clintons are “serial killers who are going to rape the whole nation.” Donald Trump can’t be racist because he’s a “businessman.” Hillary Clinton’s campaign was “fund[ed] by the Muslim.”
These are a sample of the videos put together by two black video bloggers calling themselves Williams and Kalvin Johnson, whose social media pages investigators say are part of the broad Russian campaign to influence American politics. Across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, they purported to offer “a word of truth” to African-American audiences.
“We, the black people, we stand in one unity. We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate,” one of the men says in a November video that warned Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim. We don’t stand for her.”
Williams and Kalvin’s content was pulled from Facebook in August after it was identified as a Russian government-backed propaganda account, The Daily Beast has confirmed with multiple sources familiar with the account and the reasons for its removal. Williams and Kalvin’s account was also suspended from Twitter in August. But the YouTube page for Williams and Kalvin remains live at press time [10.8.17]….
Among the most serious harms are those to liberty and physical well-being. One can compensate adequately for many injuries, but damages at law are slight compensation for lost liberties and physical injuries.
We’ve a new national environment, in which actions once impermissible are now encouraged, and redress once required is now no longer recognized. If asked to list the three gravest concerns for this small town, these come to mind, in no fixed order:
Harm inflicted intentionally against immigrants peacefully settled in their communities,
Harm inflicted through overzealousness against other residents (often disadvantaged) but peacefully situated in their communities, and
Unacknowledged harm from sexual assaults against residents on campuses or nearby.
There’s an obvious difference between risk (the chance that something might happen) and harm (what results if it does happen). The harms that might befall some in this community have always been clear; the risks of these harms has grown as Trumpism encourages force where it was once properly discouraged, and discourages peaceful resolution where it was once encouraged.
These greater risks did not begin with Trump. In towns across America, including Whitewater, one can see That Which Paved the Way. Those who have ignored or denied past wrongs have left their communities vulnerable to those who would, with satisfaction & delight, commit new and worse injustices, all the while declaring their actions the very height of order and propriety.
The worst risks, of the worst harms, fall on some of our fellow residents more than others. The moral burden of lessening risks, and of redressing harms, falls on all of us.
This Tuesday, October 10th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Wonder Woman @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Wonder Woman (2017) tells of the famed comic book heroine: “Diana is the principled warrior-daughter of the female ruler of Paradise Island, sheltered from men and the outside world’s evils. Then, an American pilot crashes on the island, telling her of The War to End All Wars. Wonder Woman enters the fray: World War I! This was the summer’s most popular film, garnering great reviews, as well.”
Patty Jenkins directs the two hour, twenty-one minute film, starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, and David Thewlis. The film carries a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:21 PM, for 11h 18m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1861, the 1st Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “The 1st Wisconsin Infantry mustered in on October 9, 1861. It left Wisconsin for Louisville, Kentucky, and moved gradually through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia during the war. It would participate in the battles of Perryville and Chickamauga and the Siege of Atlanta. It would lose 300 men during its service. Six officers and 151 enlisted men were killed in combat and one officer and 142 enlisted men died from disease.”
SHUSHARY, Russia — She rode into a pitch-black truck stop on a scooter, stepped out of the pouring rain into a gas station cafe on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and recounted her quest to bring down Russia’s infamous “troll farm.”
Lyudmila Savchuk is one of a disparate handful of Russian journalists, activists and legal experts who have tried to shed light on the shadowy operation that has become a focal point of U.S. investigations into Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
And like most people who challenge the established order in today’s Russia, Savchuk and the others are jousting against a nebulous entity with apparent Kremlin ties and evident protection from government and law-enforcement agencies. For them, this is a task that entails significant risks and little chance of success.
How much the trolls affected the outcome of the U.S. election is unclear. But their omnipresence is evident on Twitter, where one recent study suggested that trolling by pro-Putin bots trolling dominates political talk about Russia, and in the comments section of publications like The Washington Post, where trolls can be found criticizing the premises, lambasting other posters and accusing one another of being trolls.
While the troll farm’s operations have stirred concerns about the reach of Kremlin propaganda across Europe and the United States, Savchuk and her cohorts are concerned about their own country….
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia—White supremacist Richard Spencer suddenly reappeared on Saturday night with torch-bearing supporters, two months after he organized an infamous hate march here.
Spencer and his 50 or so followers gathered around a statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park chanting white supremacist slogans.
“They were shouting ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Russia is our friend,’ ‘the South will rise again,’ ‘we’ll be back,’” said a University of Virginia faculty member, who wished not to be named for fear of retribution….
….The demands were developed by a half-dozen agencies and departments, officials said. But among the officials behind the demands are Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have long advocated extremely aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack down on undocumented immigrants already here.
The demands represented a concerted effort to broaden the expected congressional debate about the Dreamers to one about overhauling the entire American immigration system — on terms that hard-line conservatives have been pursuing for decades….
James Fallows writes that It’s What Bob Corker Does Next That Counts (“After the senator warned that Trump’s reckless threats may set the nation ‘on the path to World War III,’ the question is whether the Tennessee Republican intends to do anything about it”):
Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, deserves credit for saying in public this evening to The New York Times what most prominent Republicans have known and many have said (in careful privacy) over the past two years.
Namely: that Donald Trump is irrational, ill-informed, impulsive, unfit for command, and increasingly a danger to the country and the world. The man who has ultimate authority over the world’s most powerful military, including its nuclear weaponry, is recklessly issuing threats to North Korea and others that set the nation “on the path to World War III,” according to Corker—who, for the record, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” he told Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler of the Times.
This situation is not normal. It is not safe. And the group which for now has a monopoly on legislative and investigative power in Washington, Corker’s own Republican Party, has an obligation to the country’s past and its future to do something about it. Talk is better than nothing, but action is what counts….
Scaling the world’s tallest mountains is a feat in and of its own—doing it while blind is extraordinary. Erik Weihenmayer is the first blind rock climber to summit the tallest peak in every continent, Mount Everest included. At a young age, Weihenmayer was diagnosed with retinoschisis, a rare eye disease that left him sightless by age 13. But he didn’t let that hold him back from seeking out adventure, proving that what others may see as a hinderance can oftentimes be your greatest asset. Now, he’s using his incredible spirit to inspire others to live a life with no barriers.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 6:22 PM, for 11h 21m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire, a blaze that killed hundreds, “started at about 9:00 p.m. on October 8, in or around a small barn belonging to the O’Leary family that bordered the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street.[2] The shed next to the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire, but city officials never determined the exact cause of the blaze.[3] There has, however, been much speculation over the years. The most popular tale blames Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, who allegedly knocked over a lantern; others state that a group of men were gambling inside the barn and knocked over a lantern.[4] Still other speculation suggests that the blaze was related to other fires in the Midwest that day.[5] ” Also on this day in 1871, Peshtigo, Wisconsin “was devastated by a fire which took 1,200 lives. The fire caused over $2 million in damages and destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest. This was the greatest human loss due to fire in the history of the United States.”
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, urged the Trump administration to weaken a key federal voting law, according to documents released by a federal court on Thursday. Kobach called for amending the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to offer voter registration at the DMV and other federal agencies, to allow states to require proof of citizenship in order to register—a requirement that has blocked tens of thousands from the polls in Kansas.
On November 20, 2016, Kobach met with Trump at the president-elect’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Kobach was a top adviser to Trump on immigration and voting issues and at the time was under consideration to lead the Department of Homeland Security. As he greeted Trump, Kobach was photographed holding a white paper outlining the “Kobach Strategic Plan for the Next 365 Days.”
Though partially obscured, the document revealed a wish-list of radical policies for the Trump era that included “extreme vetting” and tracking of “all aliens from high-risk areas,” reducing the “intake of Syrian refugees to zero,” deporting a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year,” and the “rapid build” of a wall along the US-Mexico border.
At the bottom of the document was a section called “Stop Aliens From Voting,” where Kobach said he wanted to “Draft Amendment to National Voter Registration Act to promote proof-of-citizenship requirements.” On Thursday, in response to a lawsuit from the ACLU, a federal court ordered Kobach to release the document to the public, along with a draft of his proposed amendment. Those documents show how Kobach would alter one of the country’s most important voting rights laws by adding a new requirement that would make it much more difficult for Americans to register.(Kobach wrote to Trump’s transition team the day after the election and made the same policy recommendation.)
Kobach’s proposal is modeled after a law in Kansas requiring citizenship documents to register to vote, such as a birth certificate, a passport, or naturalization papers. Since the law went into effect in 2013, one in seven Kansans trying to register has been prevented from doing so. Nearly half of those 30,000 people have been under the age of 30. A federal appeals court blocked a key part of the law last year, ruling that “there was an almost certain risk that thousands of otherwise qualified Kansans would be unable to vote in November.” Kobach has appealed that ruling….
Ed Gillespie masterminded the devastating 2010 GOP strategy to retake Washington by winning crucial state and local elections that brought the power to redistrict the U.S. House.
His plan, aptly dubbed REDMAP, worked so well that Republicans captured almost 700 state legislature seats in an epic rebuke of Barack Obama and Democrats nationwide. The true spoils of that victory came the following year. New GOP majorities in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania reinvented the gerrymander as a blunt-force partisan weapon.
It took Democrats many years to realize how long-lasting the consequences of 2010 would be. Now—just as the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in Gill v Whitford, a landmark case that could create the first-ever constitutional standard to define when a partisan gerrymander goes too far—Democrats have realized that the future of their party will be determined down-ballot. Gillespie, the godfather of the GOP gerrymander and the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, is their most crucial target.
A Gillespie win, combined with well-cemented Republican majorities in the state assembly and senate, would lock in GOP control when new legislative districts for statewide and congressional races are drawn in 2021….
At a packed press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, provided a progress report on his panel’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Naturally, this is a touchy and dicey matter for a Republican, and Burr tried to make some points that appeared designed to limit President Donald Trump’s political vulnerabilities on this front.
First, Burr declared that although Russian hackers had probed or penetrated the election systems of at least 21 states, he could confidently state that the Russian meddling in the 2016 election resulted in no changes to the vote tallies. That is, there’s no reason to question Trump’s Electoral College win. And second, Burr said that Russia’s use of Facebook ads during the presidential campaign seemed “indiscriminate” and not designed to help a particular candidate—meaning the recent revelations do not bolster the case that Trump was the Kremlin’s choice.
“The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering. I do not agree with this judgment.”
But Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.), a feisty member of the intelligence committee, says both assertions are bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones on Thursday, Wyden argued that Burr’s confidence in the election system was unwarranted. “The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering,” said Wyden. “I do not agree with this judgment. I don’t think it is possible to know that. There was no systematic analysis of the voting or forensic evaluations of the voting machines.”
Wyden pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security has noted that its assessment that there was no finagling with the vote count was made with only “moderate confidence.” For Wyden, that’s not good enough for such a sensitive and significant matter—and it sends the misguided signal that the voting system is doing just fine. Wyden believes that’s the wrong message. This week he sent a letter to the major manufacturers of voting machines demanding information about how they protect themselves from cyberattacks.
Wyden also said that Burr erred in declaring that the Russian Facebook ads—some of which targeted swing states—did not favor a presidential candidate. (Presumably Wyden has seen or been briefed on the content of the ads.) “That’s one reason why the ads need to be released to the American people,” Wyden remarked, “so Americans can make up their minds”….
“Young, gifted and black.” “Melanin and muscles.” “Our sons matter.” The slogans on the clothing that a group called “Blacktivist” offered for sale through Facebook were supposed to look like they came from American Black Lives Matter activists. But they were in fact being promoted by a Russian-linked group working to amplify political discord in the U.S. before the presidential election.
CNN first reported last week that “Blacktivist” accounts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage in an apparent attempt to amplify racial tensions during the U.S. presidential election. The accounts have been suspended and are among those handed over to Congress as part of its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The page appears to have sold fewer than 100 items of Blacktivist-branded merchandise, but the actual amount of clothing sold is less significant than what the effort represented: A move by the people behind Blacktivist to go beyond social media and spread their influence into the physical world. The Blacktivist Facebook page also promoted at least seven rallies and demonstrations around the U.S. in 2016.
Jonathon Morgan, the founder of New Knowledge, a company that tracks the spread of misinformation online, says the promotion of events and the sale of merchandise is straight out of the Russian misinformation handbook, and that it “fits a pattern of Russian propagandists’ attempts at appearing as authentic Americans participating in politics”….
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 24m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1765, the Stamp Act Congress (First Congress of the American Colonies) convenes in New York, with elected representatives from nine colonies meeting to form a common opposition to the Stamp Act. On this day in 1774, Wisconsin becomes part of Quebec: “On this date Britain passed the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec. Enacted by George III, the act restored the French form of civil law to the region. The Thirteen Colonies considered the Quebec Act as one of the “Intolerable Acts,” as it nullified Western claims of the coast colonies by extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi River on the west. [Source: Avalon Project at the Yale Law School].”
….We’ve taken that data for the past week or so and created a tool that will show you not only the status of each of the metrics tracked by Status.pr but also how those numbers have improved (or haven’t) over time. It updates every hour, showing the most recent numbers for any given day.
Experts predict that it will take months to repair the electrical grid enough that most residents of the island have power. For months, then, the numbers above will be below 100 percent, a constant reminder of how much work the administration still has to do before Puerto Rican society has been restored to where it was before Hurricane Maria hit.
FEMA would rather not broadcast that slow progress. So we will.
(FEMA denies intentional removal to conceal bad news that contradicts Trump’s assertions, but offers no explanation why data relevant to FEMA’s role was not included on its 10.6.17 website update.)
David A Graham asks Why Did FEMA Remove Stats About Puerto Rico’s Recovery? (“As in the case of data about climate change and occupational safety, the Trump administration has quietly pulled down bleak numbers about electricity and drinking water after Hurricane Maria”):
….With the post-Hurricane Maria relief effort in Puerto Rico still a long way from complete, there are sobering statistics about conditions on the island. Less than 11 percent of people have electricity. Just 42 percent have working phones. Barely half have access to drinking water. And until this week, anyone visiting FEMA’s page for the Maria recovery effort could have found that information. But then, as The Washington Post first noticed, they’re gone now. FEMA still has some information there, including road status, but the bleakest numbers are gone.
FEMA’s answer is that the numbers are all available on an official Puerto Rican page, which is true. “Our mission is to support the governor and his response priorities through the unified command structure to help Puerto Ricans recover and return to routines. Information on the stats you are specifically looking for are readily available,” a spokesman told the Post. That’s all fair enough, but it doesn’t explain why FEMA was posting those numbers, or why it stopped now.
The deletion of the statistics both fits with the Trump administration’s pattern of treating Maria largely as a matter of so-called optics, the concern with how things look rather than how they are, and with its past tendency to remove public posting of data that cuts against its message in other realms. As a federal project, Maria poses a particularly difficult task: The scale of the destruction on Puerto Rico is bad, even for a major hurricane, and the territory’s remoteness makes it harder to move resources to than other American land. Brock Long, the head of FEMA, has described it as the biggest logistical challenge in American disaster history, and experts broadly agree. As both professional disaster managers and journalists like me have pointed out, while any delay is frustrating to those enduring it, the difficulties are real….
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Wednesday that relations with America had “become hostage to the internal political situation in the U.S.,” but that his country had many friends in the United States who can help improve relations between the two nations when the political tensions in America settle down.
“Certain forces use the Russian-American ties to solve internal political problems in the U.S.,” Mr. Putin said at a high-profile energy development forum in Moscow. “We are patiently waiting until this process in the internal political life in America will end.”
Ties between Moscow and Washington have ebbed and flowed since President Trump took office, despite Russian lawmakers’ Champagne toast after election night in hopes that Mr. Trump would make significant moves in Russia’s favor….
(Those who are Putin’s friends in America are either fellow travelers or, worse, fifth columnists actively supporting his regime. Putin, himself, is responsible for the legitimate grievances against him: annexing part of Ukraine, fomenting an ongong war in eastern Ukraine thereafter, interfering in the American democratic process, ceaseless hacking against the United States military and domestic companies & citizens, and human rights violations at home, including the frequent jailing, torture, and murder of dissidents in Russia & elsewhere in Europe. He is a liar, dictator, and murderer.)
….Details of the communications were turned over by the Trump Organization in August to the White House, defense lawyers and government investigators and described to The Washington Post.
Though there is no evidence that these Russia-related entreaties resulted in further action, the email communications about them show that Trump’s inner circle continued receiving requests from Russians deep into the presidential campaign.
After WikiLeaks began to publish emails from the Democratic National Committee that were widely believed to have been hacked at the direction of Moscow, Trump said on several occasions that he had no financial ties to Russia. In July 2016, he tweeted, “For the record, I have ZERO investments in Russia.”
But the new disclosures add to an emerging picture in which Trump’s business and campaign were repeatedly contacted by Russians with interests in business and politics. Trump’s son, his son-in-law, his campaign chairman, low-level foreign policy advisers and, now, Cohen, one of his closest business confidants, all fielded such inquiries in the weeks before or after Trump accepted the nomination.
The documents also underscore the Trump company’s long-standing interest in doing business in Moscow….
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – Anchorage resident Tim Newton awoke to the sound of something running across his deck in the area of Flattop, last Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. So naturally, he went to check it out.
Family of lynx on deck of Anchorage resident (photo Courtesy of Tim Newton Photography)
“I crept over to the window and opened the curtains a crack, and could see it looked like a cat,” he told Channel 2. But to his surprise it was no regular house cat.
“I started to think nothing more of it,” he said. “But then I noticed it had really big feet and little tiny hairs on its ears. So I knew then it was probably a lynx kitten – not a full grown cat.”
The very next thing Newton did was grab his camera.
“Normally when you see a lynx, you have just enough time to get your camera out, and then they’re gone,” says Newton. “So I was thrilled I could get a couple pictures of them playing on the deck. And I thought that might be the end of it.”
But that was not the end of it….
“Then I saw the grass… rustling,” he says. “It’s like in Jurassic Park! We got the velociraptors going through the bushes – well that’s what I saw. And lo and behold, one by one, all these baby lynx came to mama and shuffled out onto the deck, right in front of me, where I was standing behind the screen.”
In total, the family was made up of eight lynx – seven kittens and one mother….
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of sixty-eight, and a probability of afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 6:26 PM, for 11h 27m 10s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1927, The Jazz Singer has its premiere in New York City. On this day in 1917, Robert La Follette supports free speech in wartime: “Senator Robert La Follette gave what may have been the most famous speech of his Senate career when he responded to charges of treason with a three hour defense of free speech in wartime. La Follette had voted against a declaration of war as well as several initiatives seen as essential to the war effort by those that supported U.S. involvement in the first World War. His resistance was met with a petition to the Committee on Privileges and Elections that called for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. The charges were investigated, but La Follette was cleared of any wrong doing by the committee on January 16, 1919.”
“Finally doing my big feature on the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a March 9, 2016, email to Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, a hacker who is the system administrator of the neo-Nazi hub the Daily Stormer, and who would later ask his followers to disrupt the funeral of Charlottesville victim Heather Heyer. “Fancy braindumping some thoughts for me.”
“It’s time for me to do my big definitive guide to the alt right,” Yiannopoulos wrote four hours later to Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug helped create the “neoreactionary” movement, which holds that Enlightenment democracy has failed and that a return to feudalism and authoritarian rule is in order. “Which is my whorish way of asking if you have anything you’d like to make sure I include.”
“Alt r feature, figured you’d have some thoughts,” Yiannopoulos wrote the same day to Devin Saucier, who helps edit the online white nationalist magazine American Renaissance under the pseudonym Henry Wolff, and who wrote a story in June 2017 called “Why I Am (Among Other Things) a White Nationalist.”
The three responded at length: Weev about the Daily Stormer and a podcast called The Daily Shoah, Yarvin in characteristically sweeping world-historical assertions (“It’s no secret that North America contains many distinct cultural/ethnic communities. This is not optimal, but with a competent king it’s not a huge problem either”), and Saucier with a list of thinkers, politicians, journalists, films (Dune, Mad Max, The Dark Knight), and musical genres (folk metal, martial industrial, ’80s synthpop) important to the movement. Yiannopoulos forwarded it all, along with the Wikipedia entries for “Alternative Right” and the esoteric far-right Italian philosopher Julius Evola — a major influence on 20th-century Italian fascists and Richard Spencer alike — to Allum Bokhari, his deputy and frequent ghostwriter, whom he had met during GamerGate. “Include a bit of everything,” he instructed Bokhari.
“Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
“I think you’ll like what I’m cooking up,” Yiannopoulos wrote to Saucier, the American Renaissance editor.
“I look forward to it,” Saucier replied. “Bannon, as you probably know, is sympathetic to much of it.”
Five days later Bokhari returned a 3,000-word draft, a taxonomy of the movement titled “ALT-RIGHT BEHEMOTH.” It included a little bit of everything: the brains and their influences (Yarvin and Evola, etc.), the “natural conservatives” (people who think different ethnic groups should stay separate for scientific reasons), the “Meme team” (4chan and 8chan), and the actual hatemongers. Of the last group, Bokhari wrote: “There’s just not very many of them, no-one really likes them, and they’re unlikely to achieve anything significant in the alt-right.”
In the spring of 2012, Donald Trump’s two eldest children, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., found themselves in a precarious legal position. For two years, prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office had been building a criminal case against them for misleading prospective buyers of units in the Trump SoHo, a hotel and condo development that was failing to sell. Despite the best efforts of the siblings’ defense team, the case had not gone away. An indictment seemed like a real possibility. The evidence included e-mails from the Trumps making clear that they were aware they were using inflated figures about how well the condos were selling to lure buyers.
In one e-mail, according to four people who have seen it, the Trumps discussed how to coördinate false information they had given to prospective buyers. In another, according to a person who read the e-mails, they worried that a reporter might be on to them. In yet another, Donald, Jr., spoke reassuringly to a broker who was concerned about the false statements, saying that nobody would ever find out, because only people on the e-mail chain or in the Trump Organization knew about the deception, according to a person who saw the e-mail. There was “no doubt” that the Trump children “approved, knew of, agreed to, and intentionally inflated the numbers to make more sales,” one person who saw the e-mails told us. “They knew it was wrong.”
In 2010, when the Major Economic Crimes Bureau of the D.A.’s office opened an investigation of the siblings, the Trump Organization had hired several top New York criminal-defense lawyers to represent Donald, Jr., and Ivanka. These attorneys had met with prosecutors in the bureau several times. They conceded that their clients had made exaggerated claims, but argued that the overstatements didn’t amount to criminal misconduct. Still, the case dragged on. In a meeting with the defense team, Donald Trump, Sr., expressed frustration that the investigation had not been closed. Soon after, his longtime personal lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, entered the case.
Kasowitz, who by then had been the elder Donald Trump’s attorney for a decade, is primarily a civil litigator, with little experience in criminal matters. But, in 2012, Kasowitz donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the reëlection campaign of the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, Jr., making Kasowitz one of Vance’s largest donors. Kasowitz decided to bypass the lower-level prosecutors and went directly to Vance to ask that the investigation be dropped….
(Although not ending with an indictment, evidence gathered in this matter might be used in a subsequent prosecution to show a pattern of dishonesty.)
Russian hackers obtained classified information about National Security Agency cybersecurity programs after breaching a personal computer used by an agency contractor in 2015, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The contractor, who wasn’t identified, took the classified material home, where Russian hackers stole it by exploiting vulnerabilities in Kaspersky Lab Inc. software that he had on his computer, according to the person, who asked not to be identified….
White House officials believe that chief of staff John Kelly’s personal cellphone was compromised, potentially as long ago as December, according to three U.S. government officials.
The discovery raises concerns that hackers or foreign governments may have had access to data on Kelly’s phone while he was secretary of Homeland Security and after he joined the West Wing.
Tech support staff discovered the suspected breach after Kelly turned his phone in to White House tech support this summer complaining that it wasn’t working or updating software properly.
Kelly told the staffers the phone hadn’t been working properly for months, according to the officials.
White House aides prepared a one-page September memo summarizing the incident, which was circulated throughout the administration….
(You may have heard that a local official’s address would be a wonderfulopportunity, and that one should be fortunate for it. No, and no again: wonder is to be found elsewhere, in other places, among them the created, natural order.) more >>
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:27 PM, for 11h 30m 02s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirtieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and her Fire Department to hold a business meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1931, Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon complete the first non-stop trans-Pacific flight, flying from Japan to Washington state. On this day in 1846, Wisconsin’s first state constitutional convention meets: “[t]The Convention sat until December 16,1846. The Convention was attended by 103 Democrats and 18 Whigs. The proposed constitution failed when voters refused to accept several controversial issues: an anti-banking article, a homestead exemption (which gave $1000 exemption to any debtor), providing women with property rights, and black suffrage. The following convention, the Second Constitutional Convention of Wisconsin in 1847-48, produced and passed a constitution that Wisconsin still very much follows today. [Source: The Convention of 1846 edited Milo M. Quaife].”
WASHINGTON — The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee delivered a stark warning on Wednesday to political candidates: Expect Russian operatives to remain active and determined to again try to sow chaos in elections next month and next year.
At a rare news conference, Senators Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the committee’s chairman, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia and its vice chairman, broadly endorsed the conclusions of American spy agencies that said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a campaign of hacking and propaganda to disrupt the 2016 presidential election.
“The Russian intelligence service is determined — clever — and I recommend that every campaign and every election official take this very seriously,” Mr. Burr said.
“You can’t walk away from this and believe that Russia’s not currently active,” he added….
….The conference [proceedings of a closed conference held at the Pell Center on the campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, in June of 2017, drawing together 36 researchers, technologists, scholars, journalists, and policy experts from North America, Europe, and Australia] produced several specific recommendations:
Improve transparency and raise public awareness of the threat. Specifically, the Pell Center authors call for the appointment of an independent bipartisan commission to establish a widely-accepted understanding of Russia’s actions, means, and objectives in the 2016 U.S. election. Specifically, the study highlights the need for a public accounting of irregular social media activity in battleground states prior to the 2016 election as well as on-going social media efforts to sow division in the United States. Ludes and Jacobson also call on the news media to review, and if necessary revise, their standards and practices so that they don’t become unwitting vehicles for foreign propaganda. Social media platforms, themselves, must be regulated and held to federal standards of transparency when it comes to political advertising. Finally, the study recommends public and private investment in the investigations and reporting needed to educate the American public about a threat that has not waned.
Prepare the executive branch for a new cold war. Organizations from the White House to the intelligence community need to be reviewed for their efficacy in meeting the propaganda challenge to the West, according to Ludes and Jacobson. The White House must communicate to Congress the need for any new authorizations to meet this threat. It must also request sufficient appropriations for these activities and prosecute these programs vigorously. The authors called on the Trump administration, as well, to provide the diplomatic leadership required for an international response to the common challenge posed by Russian intervention in the democratic processes of the West.
Congress must lead. Ludes and Jacobson argue that in the absence of clear executive branch willingness or readiness to lead on this issue, the U.S. Congress must take the initiative. It can do so by eliminating “dark-money” in American politics; requiring more transparency by corporations operating in the United States; embracing bipartisanship in the defense of American democracy; and reforming the laws governing the activities of foreign agents operating in the United States—to begin by considering legislative changes that would require state-sponsored media outlets, such as RT and Sputnik, to publicly reveal their sources of funding.
Invest in the American people. Finally, the authors of the Pell Center conference report urged the public to once again consider education a national priority and the cornerstone for an effective defense of democracy. Russia, they argue, “exploited America’s media illiteracy, our civic illiteracy, and our historical illiteracy.” The Pell Center study calls for increased funding for programs to increase the public’s resistance to influence by foreign powers.
“Shatter the House of Mirrors” is available for download here.
On January 6, after intelligence agencies briefedDonald Trump on cyberattacks against the United States during the election, he pledged to “appoint a team to give [him] a plan within 90 days of taking office.” Ten months later, Trump not only lacks that cybersecurity plan, he doesn’t even have the team.
The president has still not nominated anyone for arguably the most important cybersecurity job in the government, Homeland Security undersecretary running the department’s National Protection and Programs Directorate, which oversees private and public networks in the United States. Trump has also failed to nominate a new chief for the entire department since former DHS Secretary John Kelly left to become White House chief of staff. Kelly’s former job is among nine out of 14 top DHS posts that currently are filled by acting officials or remain vacant.
Trump‘srefusal to accept the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that Russia used cyberattacks to help him win the presidential election has of coursegained wide notice. But critics say his head-in the-sand stance has more quietly hamstrung his entire his entire administration, impeding government-wide efforts to prepare for expected meddling by Russian hackers and others in the 2018 midterm elections….
Russia has opened a new battlefront with NATO, according to Western military officials, by exploiting a point of vulnerability for almost all allied soldiers: their personal smartphones.
Troops, officers and government officials of North Atlantic Treaty Organization member countries said Russia has carried out a campaign to compromise soldiers’ smartphones. The aim, they say, is to gain operational information, gauge troop strength and intimidate soldiers….
I wrote yesterday about two proposed amendments to Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission ordinances (Items O-1 and O-2 on the 10.3.17 Council agenda). SeeAmendments Concerning the Landmarks Commission. Last night, Council unanimously passed O-1, and amendment O-2 died for lack of a second vote to move consideration of it.
A few quick points about all this – and what it likely says about more serious matters.
1. Contentious, Not Dangerous. The most important point about the proceedings last night is that they may have been the consequence of disputes and contentions over a challenge to the Landmarks Commission’s authority, but there was nothing of danger in any of this. These were not matters of public safety, where lives and property might be immediately and grievously threatened.
That’s why it made sense to let the matter unspool on its own, ending yesterday’s post on the subject with ‘We’ll see.’ Nothing was at risk by waiting and watching without further comment. Indeed, one sometimes observes the course of an event for months before writing on it.
2. A Preference Against Change. All considered – all meaning events both near and far – I wouldn’t have proposed any changes to these existing ordinances. There are ordinances and policies in Whitewater I’d like to see changed; the existing Landmarks provisions of our municipal code would not have been among them.
3. A Protest. This may not have been my cause, so to speak, but it’s encouraging to see a pre-meeting protest before City Hall. Old Whitewater (a state of mind, rather than a person or chronological age) has for years expected a heads-down-eyes-averted approach to town notables’ ideas and actions. There’s never been a reason for that in an American town, that don’t-you-know-who-I-am expectation of self-declared leading figures. (No one should yield to imposed expectations like that.)
Residents in Whitewater can protest without the sky falling. Actually, they just did, last night.
4. Sharp Residents, All Around Us. Whitewater’s filled with sharp people. All communities are — society wouldn’t be able to function without large majorities of capable people performing myriad challenging tasks each day. Critiques are seldom if ever about intelligence (it’s not in question); critiques are typically over perspective, over ways of learning to see things.
5. Item O-1. Item O-1 was the more interesting, although the less contentious, of the two proposed amendments. Consider Section 1 of the amendment:
SECTION 1. Whitewater Municipal Code Chapter 17.12, Designation of Landmarks,
Landmark Sites and Historic Districts is hereby amended as follows:
Sub-Section 17.12.040 (e) is created to read:
Before the Landmarks Commission explores a city owned property as a
potential landmark, the Commission shall notify the City Manager with a
notice of intent….
There one finds a simple error of drafting, that might easily have been avoided, and if avoided, would have produced a far better amendment.
“Before the Landmarks Commission explores….” The obvious point is that explores is so nebulous and susceptible of multiple meanings that it’s too vague to be in a properly worded ordinance. Indeed, explores is nowhere present in Whitewater’s Municipal Code, not once in usage, let alone as a definition.
One knows what it means to explore (Roald Amundsen reaching the South Pole comes to mind), but that definition of exploration is inapplicable here. Does explore mean first to think about the matter, to raise the subject, first to debate it as a commission, first to vote on it, etc.? One sees the point: explores cannot mean never consider – because if one does not consider at all, how is one to contemplate what might be a desirable proposal for the commission?
An ordinance isn’t merely for the moment, but for years yet to come, when those now part of a present question or controversy have long passed from the political scene. The ordinance has to be clear for them, too. Explores doesn’t offer the clear definition that an ordinance needs to be enduringly useful.
Note what this means: a clear definition is in everyone’s interest, to prevent future uncertainty and disputes that would arise from it.
6. An Easy Fix. Instead of explores, one would set the trigger of notifying Council to a specific, concrete event: before the commission votes on any proposal, after a single meeting’s discussion but before any other action, etc. There are many possibilities that would make the ordinance clearer, and so more useful to avoid disputes now and in the future (when new members have to look at these provisions with fresh eyes).
7. Why Someone Writes This Way. Someone writes this way (using explores) to come to a consensus between parties in the present – to find language that satisfies them. That’s the important work of conflict resolution, to be sure. It’s not an easy task – it is an admirable one. One could easily list city officials who would be skilled at conflict resolution. That contention isn’t meant as a backhanded compliment – it’s acknowledge meant to a vital skill.
It’s just that – as with so many divisions of labor – it’s not the only skill that matters. Someone else on council or in the local government, not part of a conflict-resolution outreach, should have been able to see that the ordinance needed improvement, to make it an even better expression of the parties’ and city’s interests.
Perhaps there was a concern that, having reached a solution, it was risky to offer further suggestions that might upset that immediate solution. That’s too cautious – having gone so far, one could have gone a bit farther (and done even better) by showing what good drafting can do.
8. Canaries, Coal Mines. So why a picture of a canary in a coal mine? Because after this present dispute fades, there will still be a need in this community for public and private institutions to develop a stronger grasp of risk and opportunities under the law. City, school district, university – this community doesn’t have a professional class that inculcates in its members an correct understanding of what’s possible and what’s not.
Like the ACLU (of which I am a member), this libertarian has no interest in representing government’s interests. (Government is the one client the ACLU never represents.) There are many people in the city who can care for government’s interests ably, if only they’d broaden their perspective, beyond the immediate and transitory.
There are many reasons for this lacking: a smaller number of transactions in a small town, a small professional class (of any profession), a distance from a plaintiff’s bar that would otherwise be noticing events even more closely (than a few ADA deficiencies) on which to litigate, etc.
Draft amendment O-1 is a like a sentinel species, a canary in a coal mine. Its condition – its quality of drafting, in this case – tells something worrying about what may lie ahead, if one looks farther, and deeper, into the workings of the community’s principal public institutions.
As one would always prefer sound workings over unsound ones, there’s reason for concern.
Whitewater High School has the advantage of a new principal and assistant principal. I’ve written before that I’ve no particular advice for Messrs. Lovenberg and O’Shaughnessy. See For Your Consideration, Dr. Jonas Salk. (Indeed, in that post I offered only a question, but – to be sure – one that implied how very much their efforts are needed and welcome here.)
