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Monthly Archives: January 2018

Small-Town News and “The Value of Accuracy”

Over at The Atlantic, David Beard writes about The Libraries Bringing Small-Town News Back to Life. The story’s not, to my mind, a recommendation that Whitewater’s library should publish a news site – Whitewater has digital and print publications in town and nearby. The story’s interesting for how important accuracy is to news publishing:

When a teenager began firing on students in Marilyn Johnson’s old high school east of Cleveland, Johnson searched everywhere to find out what was happening. She first saw the news on CNN, but she found out more on the town library’s Facebook page. The site was “the best, most detailed place to get breaking information,” she says.

Johnson had published an acclaimed book on the digital and community future of libraries just two years earlier—This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All—but she hadn’t predicted that the sharp decline in original local news could propel librarians into action. Since that 2012 shooting, more local newspapers have folded or shrunk, and a few libraries have ventured in to fill the vacuum.

It makes sense that librarians would get it right. Librarians understand the value of accuracy. They are familiar with databases. Americans by and large trust librarians, actually much more than they trust journalists. And in a nation where traditional local news outlets are cutting back, their advertising coffers drained by Google and Facebook, their ownership increasingly by hedge funds or other out-of-town enterprises, where else can a citizen go? In some communities, the questions are basic: Who will sift through and list the best events so residents could decide whether to participate? Who would understand what makes an area distinctive and would get its history right?

Whitewater has more one place to turn for community events, including the Banner under a new publisher. (The site is significantly cleaner in formatting, and so easier to read and faster to load, over the last two weeks. It looks sharp.)

Whitewater’s publishing problems have been when politicians, themselves, report the news (or intimidate weak reporters), including by way of dodgy data, skewed studies, etc. The error of local politics – a grave one, truly – has been its striving manipulation of information and thereby of local culture.

Jeff Bezos both runs Amazon and personally owns the Washington Post. That’s not a political conflict, however, because he’s not a politician, not an officeholder. In any event, I’ve long felt that more private voices are better than fewer.  See New Whitewater’s Inevitability (“But I don’t believe — and will never believe — that the present or (certainly) the future revolves around one website, one blog, one city official, one politician, or one group. Of course not — our city is 14,622, not a few or even a few hundred….That doesn’t bother me — I like it, and hope for more and still more. Each and every thoughtful person in this city will benefit from an expanding marketplace of ideas.”

Perhaps some towns will see libraries produce more news, but that’s hardly necessary, especially in Whitewater. What is necessary, everywhere, is a commitment both to sound reporting and to independent commentary (different matters, surely) on political, economic, or other policy topics.

That’s why Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life seems so relevant, and so worth beginning today.

Daily Bread for 1.31.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinWednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 16s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}four 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 1958, the United States enters the Space Age with the launch of Explorer 1 (after the launches in 1957 of two Soviet satellites). On this day in 1862, the 16th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “It would go on to fight in the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta, and then participate in Sherman’s March to the Sea. About half of its members would die in the South.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Mira Rapp-Hooper describes The Cataclysm That Would Follow a ‘Bloody Nose’ Strike in North Korea (“H.R. McMaster’s broken rationale for confronting Kim Jong Un”):

Now that Kim has acquired nuclear weapons, a first strike by America against his regime should be a total non-starter. Yet the Trump administration has reportedly considered a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea’s military facilities to coerce Pyongyang, in hopes of punishing the regime with attacks on discrete defense facilities or platforms while blunting its military response. But it makes little sense for American war planners to assume a “limited” strike like this would stay limited. A U.S. operation may not achieve its objectives, and even if it does, it would still leave the decision of whether or not to retaliate up to Kim. The North Korean leader would make that decision based on his own beliefs about the strike once it took place, not based on American wishes for his response. If he did decide to hit back, the result could be the most calamitous U.S. conflict since World War II.

As a result, American alliances would likely suffer irreparable damage. Competitors like Russia and China would capitalize on the blunder to advance their own interests, and U.S. foreign policy would be consumed by the task of reconstruction for years. Jeffrey failed to acknowledge this horrific toll.

In addition to the ruinous human, financial, and political costs of U.S. military action against the North, it’s hard to see how Kim Jong Un could take the South and live to rule it. With America’s heavy troop presence and longstanding security guarantees with countries across the region, his expansive objectives would undermine his most central one—survival. He simply cannot take the South while holding the North.

➤ Nyshka Chandran reports The man who almost became ambassador to South Korea just warned about US plans for North Korea:

Reports first emerged last June that Cha, currently a Georgetown University professor and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was set to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea — a post that’s been vacant since Trump took office.

But over the weekend, the White House notified Cha that he was no longer being considered, the Financial Times reported this week. Trump’s team stopped returning Cha’s calls in December after the strategist made his concerns known about attacking the North, the FT continued, noting that Cha was reportedly asked whether he could help manage the evacuation of American citizens from South Korea.

➤ Stephen Stromberg describes Trump’s night of intense gaslighting:

“We have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government,” President Trump said Tuesday night in his first State of the Union address. Was this sarcasm?

This is the president who has fueled a hysterical smear campaign against the FBI for personal gain. He wants to and may soon release a memo with cherry-picked information alleging misconduct in the Justice Department in order to discredit a federal investigation into his associates. He singles out individual FBI officials for accusation and abuse on Twitter. He on a practically daily basis insists that the Russia investigation is based on a hoax, despite the intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that Russia attempted to sway the 2016 election. He insists he respects the professionals in the law enforcement and intelligence communities, until their professionalism clashes with his wishes.

This is the president who alleged, without evidence, that he really won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in California. He empaneled a commission designed to find “evidence” of widespread voter fraud — which only benefits Democrats, of course. To the chagrin of state officials across the country, the message was that Americans cannot trust their voting system.

➤ Greg Sargent writes Trump’s speech exposed Trumpism’s biggest and ugliest lies:

The first required Trump to make a deeply misleading case that the economy is doing far better now than when he took office. Trump hailed the jobs created on his watch, the companies that credited his tax plan with new jobs, the soaring stock market. But as Michael Grunwald shows, Trump cherry-picked good company announcements while conveniently forgetting about the ones that went bad (Carrier, anyone?); misrepresented who actually benefits from his tax cuts; and unleashed a whole string of distortions rooted in a refusal to acknowledge the actual state of the economy he inherited.

Even Trump’s efforts to tout his economic record as a boon to minorities, to show that the race mongers are falsely depicting his presidency as polarizing, accomplished the opposite goal. Trump boasted that the unemployment rate among African Americans is at a record low, but taking credit for this required airbrushing away its huge drop under Obama, thus furthering his racially-divisive narrative that his predecessor was a full-blown disaster for them. Similarly, when Trump talked about the American flag as a unifying symbol, he immediately undercut it by reminding us of his polarizing attacks on African American football players who protest racism.

On the second goal: Trump didn’t back off his immigration agenda, or the toxic ideas and rhetoric undergirding it, in the slightest. He merely tried to repackage those things as conciliatory. Trump called for a deal protecting the “dreamers” that would, he said, give concessions to both sides. But he reiterated his demand for large cuts to legal immigration, even as he rehashed his ugliest demagoguery about undocumented immigrants by blaming fictional open borders for crime and dissembling reprehensibly about the diversity visa lottery program and “chain migration.”

Climb to the Top of Sri Lanka’s Fortress in the Sky:

In order to explore one of Sri Lanka’s most unique and ancient sites you will have to climb up—way up. Perched atop a rock plateau, 660 feet in the air, are the ruins of the 5th century fortress of King Kasyapa, known as Sigiriya. The large rock it sits on was formed from hardened volcanic lava dating back to prehistoric times, while the fortress is entirely surrounded by what are believed to be the world’s oldest landscape gardens. Today, Sigiriya is distinguished as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains the most visited attraction in Sri Lanka.

The Planning of the Planning Commission’s Subcommittee

The Scene from Whitewater, Wisconsin

Whitewater’s Planning Commission Subcommittee on Housing recently met on 1.17.18. They had single-family homes and rental properties on their minds.  (The discussion is embedded below, and the city’s file is online.)

One could have had this same housing discussion ten or fifteen years ago, and yet, and yet – here we are, ten or fifteen years later. A wider perspective might help.

In the photograph above of two dogs, one is small and the other is large.

A question for Whitewater’s planners:

Is the small dog too small, or the large dog too large?

In any normal understanding of dogs, the answer would be no, of course not: the chihuahua is the right size for a chihuahua, and the Great Dane is the right size for a Great Dane.

For Old Whitewater (a traditional frame of mind), with the small dog representing existing single-family housing, and the large dog representing rental housing, the answer is yes, on both counts: the small dog of single-family housing is too small,  and the large dog of rental housing is too big.

So something has to be done about it – marketing for single-family buyers, moratoriums against renters, money for single-family homebuilders, blandishments for single-family homeowners, warnings against renters, etc… (Truly, in their telling, it’s more like SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT IT!!!)

Dog Sizes. There’s nothing wrong with the natural size of either dog in the photo above. Stuffing the little one with treats won’t make it a healthy, big dog. Starving the big one won’t make it a healthy, small dog. That one overshadows the other does not make either unnaturally sized.

The Area Nearby as a Constraint. One could reasonably contend that some dog breeds have particular, natural sizes, but by contrast there’s no natural (inevitable) size for the number of single-family homes or rental properties. That’s right only generally, until one considers that there are constraints against some outcomes.

In a place with no campus, like nearby Fort Atkinson, there is less need for rental housing. The housing demand there understandably meets a proportionately greater single-family need. Whitewater has a greater need for rental properties because she has a campus, of course.

Nevertheless, couldn’t Whitewater simply expand the number of single-family homes?

True enough, different proportions are possible in a city, but yet there are still comparative and competitive environmental pressures that set those sizes. These pressures come from cities nearby. When college-town Whitewater tries to entice single-family homes into her college-town market, she’s competing against nearby cities that excel as single-family markets.

The whole area’s demand – not just Whitewater’s – sets a limit on how individual towns develop. Doing everything planners can imagine won’t make the chihuahua into a giant or the Great Dane into a toy breed.

Rather than develop Whitewater’s comparative advantage as a college town, Old Whitewater wants to be a single-family bedroom community, too: these small-town officials want to be both a college town and a non-college town at the same time.

Markets don’t work that way.

Markets, Deceptively Defined.  Single-family home advocates complain that properties are bought and sold as rentals too quickly, without a chance to reach the market for single-family buyers.

No, and no again: when private buyers and sellers purchase properties, that is a market transaction. It’s just a semantic trick to say that the only market transactions are ones that appear on an MLS somewhere, thereafter sitting for months, until a seller wastes his or her time long enough to satisfy these planners, and then has their permission find a rental buyer.

Clever’s Not Enough. One can readily concede that the principal officials & speakers at the 1.17.18 meeting – Munz-Pritchard, Meyer, Zaballos, Crone, and Knight – are all clever people. Here, one is straightforward – intelligence isn’t in question.

For it all, it doesn’t matter – no amount of clever will be enough to overturn the area market’s allocation of resources. Some towns will be proportionately single-family areas, others college-town rental markets. Each has a specialization, and comparative advantage of its own.

There’s not enough word-play in the world (sly misuse of the word market, rhyming variations on another speaker’s words) to carry the day against the regional demand of thousands of buyers and sellers.

A Minority of a Minority.  A majority of Whitewater’s residents are college students, and of the remaining minority, there are different communities by age, race, ethnicity, and outlook. (To my mind, there’s great beauty and opportunity in this diversity.) When these planners tell the ‘community’ what ‘Whitewater’ wants, they’re speaking as a minority of a minority, however erroneously they may hold the conviction of speaking for all, or even for many.

They and I have this in common, if little else: not one of us is of Whitewater’s largest demographic.

They’ll not comfortably admit as much; I just did. Then again, this is one author’s website of independent commentary – there’s no claim to represent one faction or another, let alone any exaggeration of the importance one’s own cohort.

Daily Bread for 1.30.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinTuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 55m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four 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 1948, a Hindu nationalist assassinates Mohandas Gandhi. On this day in 1866, 9th Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 9th Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, including the Battle of Prairie Grove. It lost 191 enlisted men during service; 77 were killed and 114 died from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Eliot Cohen contends Americans Are Rising to This Historic Moment (“The commitment of ordinary citizens to democratic ideals is being tested each day—and its enduring strength is containing the damage of Trump’s presidency”):

A writer usually itches to rewrite any article that is more than a week old: I confess to no such temptation with my first article for The Atlantic, published a year ago. I stand by every word. I think now as I did then that Trump will not grow into his job, “because the problem is one of temperament and character;” I continue to think that to be associated with him “will be for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction;” and most importantly, “There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”

That last is the key point, and the one I find myself returning to, a year later. Trump himself is not an interesting human being. In Shakespearean terms, he is no Richard III, but rather the dumb, vicious, lecherous, and unsuccessful Cloten of Cymbeline. Nor is there anything particularly intriguing about the brown-nosing and spinelessness of his enablers among politicians and scribblers. They have no excuses, and when the end comes—and it will, be it in seven years, or three, or sooner than that—they will not have much in the way of reputations left to defend. Nor should they.

No, at the end of a year in which American global credibility and reputation has taken a hit from which it cannot fully recover, in which neo-Nazis have been assured by the leader of the Free World that there are some fine people among them, and in which the ethnic divisions of the United States have been exacerbated by a president who seemed to enjoy baiting hapless American citizens who hail from Puerto Rico and who agitated for the political prosecution of his defeated opponent in the last election, the vital signs of American democracy are surprisingly good.

(Cohen – who sees Trump’s harm quite clearly, yet is optimistic. Perhaps, but one can suggest reasonably that we’ll see far worse before Trump meets his political ruin.)

➤ Jay Rosen writes of Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer (“A conflict in the journalist’s code was created by a president wholly unfit for the job”):

If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that. 

This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal. 

What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a little.

➤ Franlin Foer describes The Plot Against America (“Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington”):

For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.

Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.

➤ Bret Stephens ponders The G.O.P.’s Bonfire of the Sanities:

Alas, [Sen. Ron] Johnson’s suspicions are only of a piece with other paranoid G.O.P. effusions. That includes the supposed loss of five months’ worth of texts between Page and Strzok, which on Tuesday President Trump called “one of the biggest stories in a long time” — until the bureau said they were recovering the texts on Thursday.

Or the contrived furor over former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of Trump team officials, who, it turned out, were trying to set up a dubious back channel to Russia without notifying the outgoing Obama administration.

Or the outlandish and swiftly refuted claim that the British government had spied on the Trump campaign.

Or the appalling falsehood, aggressively insinuated by Fox’s Sean Hannity, that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was the victim of a political assassination in the summer of 2016.

Or, for that matter, the very idea that the F.B.I. is dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency. Recall this is the same bureau that, wittingly or not, probably did more than any other arm of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled F.B.I. field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election.

➤ It’s a Super Blue Blood Moon tomorrow (that’s astronomy with a marketing twist):

On Jan. 31, 2018, the a supermoon and lunar eclipse (blood moon) will occur. It also happens to be the second full moon of the month, known as the blue moon. The show starts just before dawn in the western United States. — When, Where and How to See it: https://www.space.com/39208-super-blu…

A Second Empire Bed & Breakfast

The Scene from Whitewater, Wisconsin

Near the middle of college-town Whitewater, there’s a large Second Empire bed & breakfast that the owners are looking to sell. Whitewater’s Planning Commission, on 1.8.18 in the video clip above, had numerous questions for the prospective buyers. The request afterward met with rejection as a change in zoning & conditional use at  Whitewater’s Planning Commission and later at the Whitewater Common Council. The full video of the 1.8.18 meeting is available online. (I’ve no connection to either the buyers or sellers; it’s here a question of sound policy.)

Let’s assume there are a thousand possible regulatory objections to the buyers’ plan.

For it all, there’s still this truth about a bed & breakfast in Whitewater, as the sellers wrote in a letter about the proposed sale:

We have owned the Hamilton House property at 328 W. Main Street for the last 17 years and have maintained it by running it as a bed and breakfast. We are now in the process of trying to sell the property. It has been on the market as a bed and breakfast business for several years. Due to the change in economic climate with the decline in popularity of bed and breakfasts and the advent of internet competition such as Airbnb and third party booking sites, It is difficult to sell the property as a bed and breakfast. In addition, the plans for building a hotel in close proximity may make it less feasible as a bed and breakfast business. We have had the business for sale for some time now and have had no serious offers. We have significantly reduced the asking price over the years. Because of the location and the configuration of the building with multiple bedrooms and bathrooms, it is not likely to sell as a high end residence.

We have an offer to purchase the property and its contents for high end student housing; this offer is contingent on rezoning the property to allow occupancy of up to 18 people. We have carefully reviewed and discussed the new use with the prospective buyer. The buyer is purchasing the contents, and its decorations as well as the real-estate. This gives us confidence that the purchaser intends to maintain the property in its current condition. We believe the structure of the offer and the plans, as described to us, would allow the property to be well maintained and cared for at the current standards. Since it is a well-loved landmark on the main street of the community, we believe it would be beneficial to enable such a business to be run in the property, which would sustain the property as an attractive asset to the community.

Perhaps this house will sell tomorrow, of course. There may be – somewhere,  someone – who’s eager to keep the property going in its present style, as a bed & breakfast, in spite of changing economics (and, to be blunt, in spite of the wholesale movement of later, twentieth-century American architecture as far away from Second Empire as possible).

Possible, yes, but unlikely, and that’s Whitewater’s problem: there’s demand in this small city, but it’s not the demand planners, regulators, town officials, etc., find acceptable. And so, in this small city, a house for sale will remain unsold even longer.

Film: Tuesday, January 30th, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Battle of the Sexes

This Tuesday, January 30th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Battle of the Sexes @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.

Simon Beaufoy directs the two-hour, one-minute film. Battle of the Sexes is a historical comedy-drama: “The true story of the 1973 tennis match between women’s world champion Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and ex-men’s champ Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), in the wake of the sexual revolution and the rise of the women’s movement. A biography/comedy/drama of an event watched by over 100 million people worldwide.”

The movie carries a rating of PG-13 from the MPAA.

One can find more information about Battle of the Sexes at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Daily Bread for 1.29.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinMonday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:04 PM, for 9h 53m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1845, Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven. On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites fight in South Carolina in defense of the Union: “The 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fought a skirmish at the Combahee River on the coast of South Carolina, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fought another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, South Carolina.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Ina Fried, Kim Hart, and David McCabe report Federal takeover of 5G wireless network raises significant concerns:

A Trump administration proposal to nationalize a portion of the nation’s wireless network in order to combat threats from China in 5G raises many technical, logistical and political concerns, including a fierce debate over the proper role of government in business.

The bottom line: The proposal calls for aggressive government involvement in the private wireless market, representing a significant shift in U.S. industrial policy that would hugely disrupt the business plans of America’s largest telecom and technology companies.

As first reported by Axios, a proposal circulated by Trump’s National Security Council proposes building a national 5G network in a chunk of airwaves, known as mid-band spectrum.

While the security of the wireless network and competition with China are both real threats, experts doubt the feasibility of this approach and question whether it would actually lead to a faster, more secure path to 5G connectivity.

(It’s just as likely that China’s being used as bogeyman to justify a Trump Administration proposal to nationalize an incipient next-generation communications network.)

➤ Murray Waas reports Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses:

President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, recently fired FBI Director James Comey disclosed that he spoke contemporaneously with other senior bureau officials about potentially improper efforts by the president to curtail the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s efforts constituted obstruction of justice.

Not long after Comey’s Senate testimony, Trump hired John Dowd, a veteran criminal defense attorney, to represent him in matters related to Mueller’s investigation. Dowd warned Trump that the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion, according to people familiar with the matter.

In discussions with at least two senior White House officials, Trump repeated what Dowd had told him to emphasize why he and his supporters had to “fight back harder,” in the words of one of these officials.

In a brief conversation Friday afternoon, Dowd denied the accounts of administration officials contained in this story as “flat-out wrong,” but he also refused to discuss what details were incorrect. “My advice to the president is confidential,” he told Foreign Policy.

“You don’t know me,” Dowd added. “You don’t how I lawyer, and you don’t know what I communicated to the president and what I did not.”

➤ Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko report  Russians Brave Icy Temperatures to Protest Putin and Election:

MOSCOW — Protesters across Russia braved icy temperatures on Sunday to demonstrate against the lack of choice in the March election that is virtually certain to see President Vladimir V. Putin chosen for a fourth term.

“What we are being offered right now are not elections, and we must not participate in them,” Yevgeny Roizman, the mayor of the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg and a rare elected official from an opposition party, told a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in protest.

The protests in scores of cities — from Vladivostok in the east to Kaliningrad in the west — were called by Aleksei A. Navalny, the charismatic, anticorruption opposition leader, after he was barred from running for the presidency because of legal problems that he said had been manufactured to prevent his candidacy.

“You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a recorded message urging protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the rallies were banned, to turn out. “Every additional year of Putin staying in power is one more year of decay.”

Attacking the government as thieves, he said: “How many more years will you keep getting a lower salary than you are due? For how many more years will your business receive less revenue than it is due?”

Mr. Navalny was detained before he reached the several thousand demonstrators gathered in Pushkin Square in central Moscow and other main avenues closer to the Kremlin. Video footage showed police officers, who over all were far more restrained than during previous demonstrations, tackling him and dragging him onto a bus.

➤ Gillian B. Wright contends Trump Misunderstands Jay-Z, and the Black Community:

Capitalism has worked out really well for Jay-Z. So well in fact, that he recently dedicated an entire song to promoting capitalism as a tool of black empowerment. But even with promises of lowered taxes, and financial incentives for the wealthy—things that a wealthy capitalist should in theory love— Sean “Jay-Z” Carter still doesn’t think that President Trump is doing that much good for the black community.

In an interview with the CNN* host Van Jones on Saturday, Jones brought up reports that Trump referred to a number of countries, including many in Africa, as “shithole countries” and then asked if it was okay  for Trump to “say terrible things but put money in our pockets.” Carter unequivocally said no, adding “it’s not about money at the end of the day. Money doesn’t equate to happiness. It doesn’t. That’s missing the whole point.”

Trump took umbrage at the remarks, tweeting, “Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!” As I’ve written before, Trump touting the black unemployment rate ignores some crucial context about the economy: First, the black unemployment rate has been dropping for the past eight years. Trump has only been president for one of them. Second, even at 6.8 percent, the black unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high as that of whites.

Trump’s response to Carter confirms precisely what the rapper was trying to say in the first place—that the president fundamentally misunderstands the aims of the black capitalism and the needs of the black community. Jay-Z, and many before him, have espoused capitalism and economic empowerment as a means to an end: racial equality. Being rich is a secondary benefit to the power, stability, and peace of mind that money can provide in a country that has forced blacks into poverty and segregation.

Pow Surf 101 shows the beauty of nature and the beauty of snowboarding through nature:

Daily Bread for 1.28.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinSunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. (“Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.”) On this day in 1959, Lombardi becomes Packers coach: “He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. ”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Hope Kirwan reports Western Wisconsin Led Nation In Farm Bankruptcies In 2017:

New federal court data shows the Western District of Wisconsin had the highest number of farm bankruptcies in the country last year.

The Western District had 28 Chapter 12 bankruptcy cases filed in 2017, a chapter specifically for family farmers or fishermen. The district includes 44 counties and covers more than half of the geographic area of the state.

The Eastern District of Wisconsin had 17 cases and the Minnesota District had 19 cases. There are 94 federal court districts in the United States.

“The increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is certainly an anomaly when you compare it to the other types of bankruptcies,” said Christopher Seelen, an Eau Claire attorney who represents creditors in bankruptcy court. “People seem to have jobs, and the economy seems to be going well for most folks. Unfortunately for some of these farmers who are suffering through these low grain prices, the economy is not going as well for them.”

(All those Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation grants & loans, eight years of bold declarations of being ‘open for business,’ and yet rural Wisconsin remains a struggling afterthought.)

➤ The editorial board of his district newspaper, the Fresno Bee, blasts how Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s stooge, attacks FBI:

Instead of taking Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election seriously and leading an impartial and bipartisan inquiry, Nunes has colluded with the White House. Last March, Nunes said he’d seen secret intelligence reports backing Trump’s claims that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” his offices, but it turned out the documents came from the administration.

The blowback forced Nunes to step away from the Russia investigation. But he never fully recused himself and after the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee in December cleared him of disclosing classified information, he raised his profile again.

Now, he’s being celebrated in Trumpworld with the four-page memo that accuses the FBI of political bias and misdeeds. Drafted by Nunes staffers, it apparently summarizes classified material and alleges abuse of the surveillance process by the FBI and Justice Department to target the Trump campaign. Conservative media and some Republicans in Congress are calling for it to be released publicly and using it to call for Mueller’s investigation to be shut down.

There are reasons to be very skeptical of this memo. The FBI hasn’t been sent a copy or given a chance to respond. Democrats who have seen it, including Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, say it’s full of inaccuracies and innuendo. And the social media campaign #ReleaseTheMemo may be promoted by Russian-linked bots, just as during the 2016 campaign.

(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)

➤ Dana Milbank contends Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does:

New evidence suggests that the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way — men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not — except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.

In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).

No doubt some of those Republicans now condoning Trump’s behavior will give the standard rebuttal: What about the Clintons? Well, Quinnipiac didn’t poll nationally during the Clinton presidency, but Gallup, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999, asked a similar question. The number of Republicans back then saying Clinton did not provide good moral leadership, 91 percent, was similar to the 96 percent of Democrats who say Trump does not provide moral leadership today. The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.

The triumph of partisanship over morality starts at the top. Franklin Graham excused Trump’s alleged sexual encounter, and Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that Trump gets a “mulligan” — a do-over — for his behavior.

Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017 — a time in which Trump said there were “very fine people” among a march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. (This month, as Trump was whipping up loathing of the “fake news” media, a young man was arrested for threatening to gun down CNN journalists.)

➤ Jordan Bhatt reports Donald Trump tells Theresa May he won’t visit the UK unless she bans protests:

Donald Trump is refusing to visit the UK unless Theresa May can ensure that he is not met with protests.

Bloomberg revealed that Trump complained in a phone call to May about the “negative coverage” he has received in the British press.

May told the US president that that was how the UK media operated and she could do little to change it.

Trump went on to say that he would not visit the UK unless there were guarantees that he would not be met with protests.

[British] Advisers who had been listening to the phone call are reported to have been “astonished” at the demands.

(In effect, Trump insists that he will not visit Britain unless the British prime minister turns her country into a dictatorship on his behalf.)

The Naked Mole Rat Is One of the Weirdest Creatures Out There:

Naked mole rats feel no pain. They’re exceptionally long-lived. They frequently enter reversible comas, and a single queen mole rat rules over her colony with totalitarian authority. They can also survive without oxygen for extended periods of time—a feat that almost no other animal can accomplish. In this episode of “Animalism,” Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, explains why the naked mole rat is one of the strangest animals in the kingdom..

more >>

Daily Bread for 1.27.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinSaturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1943, an all-American force of fifty-five bombers strikes the German port city of Wilhelmshaven. 9th Wisconsin Light Artillery Battery musters in: ” It spent most of the war in the far West guarding forts and trains in Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas. In 1864 it returned east to Missouri and Arkansas and saw limited combat. In three years it lost only six men, all to disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Jeffrey Toobin contends The Answer to Whether Trump Obstructed Justice Now Seems Clear:

It is this question of corrupt intent that makes the Times’srecent blockbuster scoop so important. According to the article, the President tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, last June, but he stopped when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to resign if Trump insisted on the dismissal. Trump apparently offered three justifications to fire Mueller—that Mueller had left one of Trump’s golf clubs in a dispute about dues; that Mueller’s former law firm had represented Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law; and that Trump had interviewed Mueller as a possible interim replacement for Comey as F.B.I. director. McGahn’s threat to resign shows that he saw these purported reasons as pretexts. The golf-dues matter was obviously trivial; the law firm’s representation of Kushner, which did not involve Mueller at all, could only have biased the special counsel in favor of the President’s family; and Trump’s willingness to interview Mueller for the F.B.I. position showed how much the President trusted Mueller, not that he believed the former F.B.I. director harbored any animosity toward him.

McGahn recognized the key fact—that Trump wanted to fire Mueller for the wrong reasons. Trump wanted to fire Mueller because his investigation was threatening to him. This, of course, also illuminates the reasons behind Trump’s firing of Comey, which took place just a month before the President’s confrontation with McGahn regarding Mueller. Trump and his advisers have offered various tortured rationalizations for the firing of Comey—initially, for example, on the ground that Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself came clean in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. In both, Trump acknowledged that he fired Comey to stall or stop the Russia investigation—that is, the investigation of Trump himself and his campaign.

This was an improper purpose, and McGahn clearly saw that the same improper purpose underlay Trump’s determination to fire Mueller. So McGahn issued the ultimatum that prompted the President to back down.

Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public. But even on the available evidence, Trump’s position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation—of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump’s own White House counsel rebelled at the President’s rationale for his actions.

(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)

➤ Consider Trump’s many past assurances on Mueller’s job:

Before it came out that President Trump sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last June, Trump and his aides repeatedly said he wasn’t giving “any thought” to dismissing him.

(They lie when they speak.)

➤ Russell Brandom reports Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.

The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”

Reached by The Verge, Vigilant declined to confirm any contract with ICE. “As policy, Vigilant Solutions is not at liberty to share any contractual details,” the company said in a statement. “This is a standard agreement between our company, our partners, and our clients.”

While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

➤ Kim Willsher reports Paris zoo shut after 50 baboons escape:

The Paris Zoological Park has been evacuated and closed after dozens of baboons escaped their enclosure.

As zookeepers raced to round up the animals, armed police surrounded the popular attraction and sealed off nearby roads.

About 50 baboons were reported to have got out and congregated around the Grand Rocher, the fake rock centrepiece of the zoo, on Friday morning. Most had been rounded up and sent back to their shelters a few hours later, but four remained on the loose.

Officials at the zoo said the animals had not come in contact with the public as they had remained in areas inaccessible to visitors.

Members of the public had been evacuated as a precaution because baboons could be unpredictable “especially when stressed”. “They’re stronger than us,” they added.

The emergency services were called, and keepers, vets and a team carrying tranquilliser darts were on the scene in minutes and surrounded the animals.

(Stronger than people? Yes they are.)

➤ From the Aviemore Sled Dog Rally 2018:


Musher Richard Morgan with his husky during a training session at Feshiebridge ahead of the The Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain’s 35th Aviemore Sled Dog Rally being held this upcoming weekend on forest trails around Loch Morlich, in the shadow of the Cairngorm mountains.

Daily Bread for 1.26.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinFriday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 5:00 PM, for 9h 46m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On the other side of the world, Australians are celebrating Australia Day: “Celebrated annually on 26 January, it marks the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales and the raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur Phillip. In present-day Australia, celebrations reflect the diverse society and landscape of the nation and are marked by community and family events, reflections on Australian history, official community awards and citizenship ceremonies welcoming new members of the Australian community.” On this day in 1925, fire destroys the Whitewater Hospital.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes assess Trump’s Effort to Fire Mueller: Reactions to the New York Times Report:

First, the Times’s reporting demonstrates just how out of control the president had become in June, less than a month after firing James Comey as FBI director. A few of his tweets from that time offer a stark reminder that the special counsel’s investigation—and Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller—weighed heavily even in his public statements.

Second, Trump’s apparent willingness to fire the special counsel in a fit of rage—even after experiencing the blowback that followed his dismissal of Comey—drives home the fact that his hints about firing other senior members of federal law enforcement are far from idle. Indeed, the Times broke this story only days after Axios reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had pressured FBI Director Christopher Wray to dismiss Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. As with McGahn, Wray reportedly threatened resignation and the attorney general ultimately backed off. So when Trump hints about firing Sessions or Rosenstein, it should be clear that they may be in real danger. On the other hand, as Jack Goldsmith argued on an upcoming special edition of the Lawfare Podcast, the fact that Trump could not get his own White House counsel to execute his will on this point shows that the president really is constrained in his apparent desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Particularly in combination with the Axios story about Wray, the incident paints a picture of a president who desperately wants to corrupt the justice system but just can’t get it done: malevolence tempered by incompetence, one might call it.

Third, in contrast to the many valid reasons to criticize McGahn’s White House tenure, this episode illustrates—at least in this instance—the White House counsel’s deft performance of his duties under difficult circumstances, perhaps even skillful management of a particularly ornery client. McGahn has not always behaved so admirably; he reportedly was willing to carry out Trump’s earlier instruction to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from this investigation. But in this instance, he allegedly managed to ride out a presidential temper tantrum, both offering the president reasonable advice and declining to carry out a presidential order clearly not made in good faith.

Fourth, the story also shows rather vividly how successful Ty Cobb has been in calming the president in the months since and persuading him to take a less adversarial posture—at least publicly—toward Mueller and the Russia investigation generally. Consider the difference between Trump in June, who actually gave an order to fire Mueller, and today’s Trump, who has turned over material the special counsel wants and allowed interviews with White House witnesses and has said he is even willing to be interviewed himself. Cobb seems to have convinced Trump that the path to making the Russia investigation go away lies in cooperation. If Cobb is correct that the Mueller investigation will end well for a cooperative Trump, this is all a laudable example of excellent client management. Cobb’s strategy, however, seems to rely on convincing Trump that the investigation is going to conclude in the near future if he just plays along. If Cobb is wrong on this point, and the investigation isn’t, in fact, close to wrapping up, then he may have simply deferred the June explosion to the date when Trump realizes that the end is not in sight. Thursday night’s story shows that this explosion, whenever it happens, can be pretty big.

➤ Huib Modderkolk reports Dutch agencies provide crucial intel about Russia’s interference in US-elections:

It’s the summer of 2014. A hacker from the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has penetrated the computer network of a university building next to the Red Square in Moscow, oblivious to the implications. One year later, from the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, he and his colleagues witness Russian hackers launching an attack on the Democratic Party in the United States. The AIVD hackers had not infiltrated just any building; they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything.

That’s how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won’t be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.

The Dutch access provides crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party, according to six American and Dutch sources who are familiar with the material, but wish to remain anonymous. It’s also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the election race between the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

➤ Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report Russians got tens of thousands of Americans to RSVP for their phony political events on Facebook:

Russian operatives used Facebook to publicize 129 phony event announcements during the 2016 presidential campaign, drawing the attention of nearly 340,000 users — many of whom said they were planning to attend — according to a company document released by the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday.

It’s not possible to know how often people gathered in response to the sham announcements, but the numbers highlight how Russian operatives were successful in prompting Americans to express a willingness to act. In some cases, Russians allegedly working in an office building in St. Petersburg motivated at least some people to mobilize behind various causes, a striking accomplishment for a foreign influence campaign.

“Not only did they influence how people viewed Russian policy, they got people to take physical action. That’s unprecedented,” said Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent who studies Russian disinformation for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “They just did it persistently, and they did it well.”

➤ Watch Sean Hannity switch gears from denying Trump tried to fire Mueller to acknowledging the truth of that attempt:

(Note Hannity slurs his speech during these segments.)

This Robot Can Walk and Swim — Inside You:

Daily Bread for 1.25.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinThursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 44m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM. Whitewater’s Fire Department meets at 6:30 PM, in closed session not to reconvene.

On this day in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ends in an Allied victory as German forces are pushed back to lines held before their offensive began. On this day in 1932, dancing on Sunday in Janesville remains prohibited as that city’s council deadlocks 3-3 on permitting that entertainment.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Steve Verburg reports Preventing ‘brown water events’ in Wisconsin not a done deal:

The Natural Resources Board approved long-awaited new rules Wednesday aimed at keeping dairy manure out of drinking water in 15 eastern Wisconsin counties.

But board members acknowledged that elected officials haven’t supplied the money needed to put the rules into action.

The board heard testimony about “brown water events” — manure- and pathogen-tainted water flowing from faucets — that have been going on for more than a decade in Kewaunee and Door counties where farms spread dairy waste on shallow topsoil.

Department of Natural Resources staff members said new limits on spreading over vulnerable aquifers would take five years to work into pollution permits of all factory farms and the department hasn’t discussed moving more quickly, said Mary Anne Lowndes, DNR runoff management section chief.

There have been reductions in financial assistance needed to ensure smaller farms follow the rules, and decreased staffing levels at the DNR and at the county level where implementation and monitoring of compliance would take place.

➤ Pema Levy and Dan Friedman report Jeff Sessions Appears to Be Meddling in the Russia and Clinton Probes He Vowed to Avoid:

Yet Sessions appears to have backtracked on his pledges, and Democrats say he is violating his recusal. This criticism comes as, last week, Sessions became the first Cabinet member to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

Questions about Sessions’ recusal came early on, when he played a role in the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, whose ouster Trump acknowledged was directly related to the bureau’s investigation of his campaign’s contacts with Russia. But more recently, Sessions appears to have directed prosecutors to look into matters connected to Clinton’s campaign.

Sessions’ recusal infuriated Trump, and multiple White House staffers, including the president’s chief lawyer, Don McGahn, tried to talk him out of giving up oversight of the Russia investigation. Trump publicly rebuked Sessions’ decision in an interview with the New York Times. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump said. Democrats say Sessions is now bowing to political pressure from the White House and Trump, who has tweeted attacks on his own Justice Department and called on Sessions to go after Clinton, and they accuse Sessions of participating in an all-out effort to politicize his agency. This week, Axios reported that Sessions had pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire his deputy, Andrew McCabe, who had also been Comey’s No. 2. Trump, and his Republican allies have relentlessly targeted McCabe, whose wife was a Democratic candidate for state Senate in Virginia, to advance a narrative of anti-Trump bias within the FBI.

➤ Jonathan Chait contends Republicans Are Using the Russian Playbook on the FBI:

Republican senator Ron Johnson highlights a text of Strzok expressing reluctance to join Robert Mueller’s team, because “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” Johnson told a conservative talk-show host that this “jaw-dropping” comment amounted to a confession that Strzok knew that Trump was innocent and joined Mueller’s investigation to smear him. But maybe Strzok simply had an open mind and thought Mueller’s probe stood a strong chance of clearing Trump. Another Strzok “scandal” grew out of a text he sent expressing the opinion that Clinton would not be charged in the email investigation. The text “suggests they knew and, in turn, believed Loretta Lynch knew, that no charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton, even before the FBI had interviewed her over her unauthorized private email server,” reports Breitbart.

They knew! The fix was in! Or maybe they simply knew that the evidence of the private email server did not amount to a plausible federal case against Clinton.

Note that a Strzok text expressing his view that Trump would not be charged over Russia became evidence of a nefarious plot against Trump, and another Strzok text expressing a view that Clinton would not be charged over the emails became evidence of a nefarious plot to help Clinton. If Strzok had expressed a belief that Clinton or Trump were guilty, those messages would become scandals, too. This is the way the game works. When you begin with a suspicious of nefarious intent, a captured expression of candid thought can be turned into devastating evidence.

➤ Denise Clifton writes Sean Hannity Is Now a Favorite Weapon of Russian Trolls Attacking America:

Hannity did not respond to a request for comment about his rising popularity among the network of Russian-linked accounts.

“Because Russian accounts promote a certain political position is not evidence of coordination” between the trolls and Trump partisans advocating for the release of the memo, Schafer notes. The key takeaway with #releasethememo, he says, “is that Kremlin-oriented trolls have used that hashtag to promote divisiveness, distrust, and to negatively influence our public discourse.”

Former FBI special agent Clint Watts pointed out Tuesday that attacks on the FBI have been increasing as the Russian investigation continues to accelerate. After reports Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and James Comey had been interviewed by Mueller’s team, Watts tweeted: “Interviews are getting closer to the top & suddenly attacks by @GOP on FBI have increased.”

The 600 Kremlin-linked live Twitter accounts that Hamilton 68 monitors are separate from the 2,752 accounts Twitter revealed last fall that were operated before the 2016 presidential election by the Russian Internet Research Agency. Last Friday, Twitter updated that number to 3,814 IRA-linked accounts—plus more than 50,000 automated bot accounts linked to the Russian government. Twitter says it is sending emails to 677,000 users to notify them that they interacted with the Russian accounts.

(The Hamilton 68 dashboard is available online, as a service of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is currently funded by a group of American private individuals and small family foundations from across the political spectrum and housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States)

➤ What about That Time a Guy Parachuted Onto Devils Tower and No One Could Figure Out How to Get Him Down?:

Daily Bread for 1.24.18

Good morning.

The Scene from Whitewater, WisconsinWednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-two.  Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 42m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1935, the first canned beer goes on sale: “Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer were the first beers sold to the public in cans. Canned beer was an immediate success. The public loved it, giving it a 91 percent approval rating. Compared to glass, the cans were lightweight, cheap, and easy to stack and ship. Unlike bottles, you didn’t have to pay a deposit and then return the cans for a refund. By summer Krueger was buying 180,000 cans a day from American Can, and other breweries decided to follow.” (Draft or bottled seems – to me – preferable to canned, but the practicality of cans is understandable.)

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Jesse Garza reports Aurora Sinai suspends employees after homeless patient is left on sidewalk in Milwaukee:

An undisclosed number of employees at Aurora Sinai Medical Center in downtown Milwaukee were suspended Tuesday after reports that a mentally ill homeless patient was discharged and left on a cold, wet sidewalk outside the hospital.

A photo and video of a shoeless man – clad in pants and what appears to be a hospital gown and sitting on a sidewalk outside the hospital –began circulating on social media and television stations after the incident allegedly occurred Monday.

Eva Welch, director of Street Angels Milwaukee Outreach, said the person who took the video told her the man was rolled across the street from the hospital in a wheelchair and left on the sidewalk outside the facility, 945 N. 12th St.

Welch said the man is mentally ill and was brought to a shelter two weeks before by West Allis police after being treated at a different hospital for frostbite to his right foot.

➤ Emily Guskin reports Most Americans don’t trust President Trump with the ‘nuclear button’:

About half of Americans are concerned that President Trump might launch a nuclear attack without justification, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

This worry comes as Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continue to provoke each other on Twitter and follows a previous Post-ABC poll that found a large majority of Americans are concerned about the United States going to war with North Korea.

Overall, 38 percent of Americans trust Trump to handle the authority to order nuclear attacks on other countries, while 60 percent do not. Among those who distrust Trump, almost 9 in 10 are very or somewhat concerned the president might launch an attack.

Combining those results, the poll finds 52 percent of the public overall is concerned the president might launch a nuclear attack without reason, including one-third who say they are “very” concerned, according to the poll.

➤ Ellen Nakashima, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett report Trump asked the acting FBI director how he voted during Oval Office meeting:

Shortly after President Trump fired his FBI director in May, he summoned to the Oval Office the bureau’s acting director for a get-to-know-you meeting.

The two men exchanged pleasantries, but before long, Trump, according to several current and former U.S. officials, asked Andrew McCabe a pointed question: Whom did he vote for in the 2016 election?

McCabe said he didn’t vote, according to the officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive matter.

Trump, the officials said, also vented his anger at McCabe over the several hundred thousand dollars in donations that his wife, a Democrat, received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate bid from a political action committee controlled by a close friend of Hillary Clinton.

(There’s almost no political, ethical, or cultural norm Trump won’t violate.)

➤ Conor Friedersdorf explains  Trump and Russia Both Seek to Exacerbate the Same Political Divisions (“A country is in a precarious place when its foreign adversaries and its president are both trying to increase its political polarization along the same lines.”):

But if the share of today’s whites who regard black NFL players as uppity ingrates significantly shrinks; if fear of Muslim immigrants wanes; if native-born Americans bear less animosity toward undocumented Mexican immigrants, regardless of their views on border security or illegal immigration; then all of those wins for American unity would be blows to the political prospects of Trump, Pence, the GOP in the 2018 midterms, and the foreign adversaries who want to weaken the United States.

Thus, they divide Americans as a means to an end, and the GOP as a whole is implicated. The deal with the devil that Republicans made by embracing a charlatan birther, sticking with him through a bigoted campaign, and propelling him to a victory that thrilled the likes of Richard Spencer has a clause that does ongoing harm to our country: One of America’s two political parties now benefits politically, in the short term, from the polarization of the country along racial and ethnic lines, just as surely as the Republican Party of 1968 and 1972 benefited from that era’s tumult and division.

Not all or even most Trump supporters are racists or authoritarians, but the 2018 midterms will go better for the GOP if turnout among racists and authoritarians is strong, and it will go poorly for the party if anti-authoritarians turn out in record numbers. That is the unenviable incentive structure that Trumpism creates.

➤ This New Google App Finds Your Fine Art Doppelgänger