Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 27m 23s of daytime.  The moon is nearly full with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1835, The Sun, a New York Newspaper, publishes what we now know as the Great Moon Hoax:

The “Great Moon Hoax” refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time.

….

The articles described fantastic animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids (“Vespertilio-homo”) who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

The author of the narrative was ostensibly Dr. Andrew Grant, the travelling companion and amanuensis of Sir John Herschel, but Grant was fictitious.

Eventually, the authors announced that the observations had been terminated by the destruction of the telescope, by means of the Sun causing the lens to act as a “burning glass,” setting fire to the observatory.[2]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Natasha Bertrand contends New York Prosecutors May Pose a Bigger Threat to Trump Than Mueller (“The offer of immunity to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer is reminiscent of moves law enforcement used as they were taking down the Mafia”):

The man who knows “where all the financial bodies are buried” in President Donald Trump’s namesake organization may now lead prosecutors in the Southern District of New York directly to them.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer who also serves as the treasurer of the Trump Foundation, has been granted immunity by prosecutors in their ongoing investigation of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. The significance of his flip, paired with Cohen’s recent plea deal, cannot be overstated: It took slightly more than a year for two of the president’s longest-serving employees, considered by many to be the last who would ever turn on him, to cooperate with federal investigators—and, in Cohen’s case, directly implicate Trump in a crime. But the news also marked a turning point in the legal assault on Trumpworld: SDNY prosecutors may now pose a more immediate threat to the president than Special Counsel Robert Mueller does.

….

“This is a classic move in investigations of a criminal organization,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that convicted the Gambino family boss John Gotti. “They’re moving up the ladder. Peripheral characters are given immunity, witnesses testify, but they’re ultimately keeping their eye on the prize.”

Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig write Cohen, Pecker, Weisselberg: The Men With Trump’s Secrets Work for the Feds Now (“Prosecutors immunized the president’s accountant and tabloid confidant. His former fixer implicated him in court. This is far from over”):

We now know from the charging document (called an Information) to which Cohen pleaded guilty, that several other people, identified but not named, were involved in that scheme. The Information identifies a “Chairman of a Media Company,” and Executive-1 and Executive-2 of what is clearly the Trump Organization, as participating in this scheme. Based on reporting and the facts in the Information, it’s clear that the media chairman is David Pecker of American Media, Inc. (the National Enquirer), a longtime ally of Trump, and that Executive-1 is Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization.

And we now know, based on further reporting, that both of those men received some kind of immunity deal in exchange for their cooperation. Usually, immunity entails giving essentially a pass on prosecution to someone who has some criminal exposure but is less culpable than people about whom they can testify.

James Fallows offers The Greatest Disappointment of the Trump Presidency (“The institutional fabric of the United States has proven more tenacious and resilient in responding than many feared. The Republican Congress has not”):

Still: The struggle for the country’s values and future continues, as a struggle, rather than as a settled and tragic result. The complex institutional fabric of the country has proven more tenacious and resilient than many people might have guessed or feared. A generation from now, the verdict on our era could be: irrecoverable tragedy. But that verdict is not yet determined.

Is there a surprise, a disappointment, and a settled tragedy so far? There is. It is the same one I described last year, in the first summer of the Trump age:

The major weakness these six months have revealed in our governing system is almost too obvious to mention, but I’ll name it anyway. It is the refusal, so far, by any significant Republican figure in Congress to apply to Donald Trump the standards its members know the country depends on for long-term survival of its government. A system of checks and balances relies on each of its component branches resisting overreach by the others. The judiciary has done its part; Paul Ryan’s House and Mitch McConnell’s Senate have not. We’re seeing the difference that can make.

Eliot Cohen speculates How This Will End (“Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers”):

But to really get the feel for the Trump administration’s end, we must turn to the finest political psychologist of them all, William Shakespeare. The text is in the final act of what superstitious actors only refer to as the “Scottish play.” One of the nobles who has turned on their murderous usurper king describes Macbeth’s predicament:

Those he commands move only in command,

Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

And so it will be for Trump. To be clear, these are very different people. Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.

But in the moment of losing power, the two will be alike. A tyrant is unloved, and although the laws and institutions of the United States have proven a brake on Trump, his spirit remains tyrannical—that is, utterly self-absorbed and self-concerned, indifferent to the suffering of others, knowing no moral restraint. He expects fealty and gives none. Such people can exert power for a long time, by playing on the fear and cupidity, the gullibility and the hatreds of those around them. Ideological fervor can substitute for personal affection and attachment for a time, and so too can blind terror and sheer stupidity, but in the end, these fall away as well.

JPL, GO!:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 30m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupts:

Mount Vesuvius, a stratovolcano in modern-day Italy, erupted in 79 AD in one of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.[1] The event is the namesake for the Vesuvian type of volcanic eruptions.

Mount Vesuvius violently spewed forth a deadly cloud of super-heated tephra and gases to a height of 33 km (21 mi), ejecting molten rock, pulverized pumice and hot ash at a massive rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings.[2] Several Roman settlements were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits, the best known being Pompeii and Herculaneum.[1][2]

The total inhabitants of both cities were 16,000–20,000; the remains of over 1,500 people have been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, but the overall death toll is still unclear.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Andrew Cohen offers A Reader’s Guide to Our Constitutional Crisis:

It’s not easy to write in real time about the legal and political fate of a president who rages in tweets, “NO COLLUSION — RIGGED WITCH HUNT!” at one o’clock in the morning. In part this is because of the gulf that exists between the reality that animates the mind of Donald Trump and the reality in which the rest of us live. In part it’s because so much of what happened this week, in and out of courts in Washington, New York, and Virginia, is unprecedented in the nation’s history. In some ways we’ve already gone past the point at which the Watergate story ended.

The conviction of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on tax fraud and bank fraud charges in Virginia tells us that jurors aren’t going to buy into the administration’s “witch hunt” theme when there is compelling evidence of criminal conduct. A juror emerged on Wednesday to say that a lone holdout prevented prosecutors from sweeping all 18 of the charges against Manafort, a defendant the president later called “brave.” That’s bad news for Trump and bad news for Manafort, too, who now faces a second federal trial, in Washington, before a less sympathetic judge and perhaps less sympathetic jurors, too.

The guilty pleas entered by former Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, for their part, tell us that federal prosecutors believe the president himself may have committed crimes. More bad news for the president. As Benjamin Wittes pointed out, “the significance of the Cohen plea is not merely that Cohen alleges that Trump had him arrange to pay hush money to a porn star and a model in a specific effort to influence the election with illegal corporate contributions. It’s that the Justice Department believes this allegation to be true and is willing to proceed criminally against Cohen on that basis.” And don’t forget it was federal prosecutors in New York, and not special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in Washington, who handled the Cohen deal.

Conservative Michael Gerson describes A cancer on the presidency:

Every time we gain a peek into the inner workings of Trump world, we see a leader with the ethics of an Atlantic City casino owner who surrounds himself with people chosen for their willingness to lie and cheat at his bidding. A world in which Paul Manafort is “a very good person.” A world in which payoffs and election tampering are all in a day’s work.

Left to his investigation, Mueller will expose this world to the light. And the choice for Congress is likely to be clear: Impeach, or tolerate massive corruption.

Jeffrey Goldberg describes Donald Trump’s Mafia Mind-Set:

I have not seen [Gambino family underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull”] Gravano in a very long time—he has spent most of the past two decades in prison, after having failed to hide his drug-distribution business from his federal monitors—but my thoughts turned to him yesterday, when I read President Donald Trump’s tweet on the subject of loyalty and respect. The president, who is obviously perturbed by the felony conviction of his former campaign chair Paul Manafort and the plea deal taken by his former attorney Michael Cohen, wrote the following: “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’”—a cutting reference to the Justice Department, which he oversees as the leader of the executive branch—“took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ – make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”

What we see in this astonishing tweet is an implicit endorsement by the president of the United States of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, which has been honored, especially over the past 30 years or so, more in theory than in practice.

….

In these statements, Trump displays contempt for the rule of law, and honors criminals who refuse to cooperate with law enforcement. He’s doing nothing less than elevating gangster ideology to the status of high principle. He’s also evincing a gauzy and archaic understanding of the nature of gangsterism. I heard, in his statements, echoes of many conversations I had while trying to understand the culture of organized crime.

Rich Kremer reports DNR Wastewater Permit Backlog Persists More Than Year After Critical Audit:

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is still behind on reviewing a backlog of wastewater discharge permits more than a year after an audit found the agency wasn’t following its own policies aimed at preventing water pollution, the agency reports.

A report requested by state Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, shows the DNR fell short of its goals for reviewing municipal, industrial and concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) wastewater permits between July 2017 and July of this year. The DNR did not respond to a request for comment on the data.

DNR policy suggests an acceptable permit backlog of no more than 10 percent for municipal and industrial sources and 15 percent for CAFOs. The latest data show backlogs of 13.6 percent for municipal and industrial permittees and 21.8 percent for CAFOs.

A Curious Polar Bear Gets Up-Close To Photographer:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:10 AM and sunset 7:43 PM, for 13h 32m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at noon, and the CDA board at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1861, Confederate spy Rose O’Neal Greenhow is arrested:

Allan Pinkerton was made head of the recently formed Secret Service and one of his first orders was to watch Greenhow, because of her wide circle of contacts on both sides of the sectional split.[17] Due to the activities of visitors, he arrested Greenhow and placed her under house arrest at her 16th Street residence on August 23, 1861, along with one of her couriers, Lily Mackall.[18] His agents traced other leaked information to Greenhow’s home. While searching her house, Pinkerton and his men found extensive intelligence materials left from evidence she tried to burn, including scraps of coded messages, copies of what amounted to eight reports to Jordan over a month’s time, and maps of Washington fortifications and notes on military movements.[4][19]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Adam Serwer writes Trump’s Troubles Are Just Getting Started (“The conviction of his former campaign chair and the guilty plea of his former personal attorney will not be the end of the president’s legal difficulties”):

“We haven’t been in this territory very often,” John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University and a former associate counsel in the Iran-Contra affair, told me. “I think the naming of Richard Nixon as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Watergate investigation is the parallel, or the previous analogous event.”

The turbulent pace of the news cycle in the Trump era has habituated political observers to dramatic developments. But even by recent standards, Tuesday’s events represent a dramatic escalation of legal peril for the president and his allies. Trump’s former campaign chair, his former deputy campaign chair, his former national-security adviser, and his former attorney have all been implicated in federal crimes. That fact is already remarkable, even before considering that the Cohen plea deal suggests that list is likely to grow, and that the president has few options to shield himself that would not fatally undermine democratic governance and the rule of law.

William Saletan contends Donald Trump Is Losing His War on Truth:

Trump’s whole presidency has been a tower of lies: that Mexico would pay for a border wall, that man-made climate change is a hoax, that workers would get the money from corporate tax cuts, that trade wars are easy to win, that North Korea is dismantling its nuclear program. At a rally on Tuesday night, the president lied to West Virginians, telling them that the coal industry was coming back. Trump’s followers love these fantasies. But eventually, truth does to his lies what the ocean does to sandcastles.

Trump’s political success has infuriated and alarmed people who detest him. They can’t believe that so many Americans voted for, and continue to support, such an egregious fraud. His critics worried that his base would ignore most of his fabrications, and they were right. No one is going to punish Trump for falsely claiming, as he did at the West Virginia rally, that Hillary Clinton “said there’s no such thing as manufacturing jobs anymore.”

But Trump’s bigger lies can be falsified, and the falsification hurts. When crop prices plummet, interest rates rise, health insurance premiums go up, coal jobs don’t come back, and shareholders take the tax cuts, Trump voters feel it. The mounting evidence that Trump approved and covered up pre-election payoffs to his accusers is just the beginning of his exposure. Voters who don’t care what he’s done with Russia or with Stormy Daniels will care about what he’s doing to America.

(Saletan here refers to voters, generally; he wisely doesn’t suggest that the most obdurate of Trump’s followers will ever relent.  No matter: a strong majority exists without those followers.)

 Aaron C. Davis reports Trump called this White House defender ‘wonderful.’ He was fired from his previous job for alleged sexual harassment:

A conservative commentator who was lauded by President Trump this week as “wonderful” and who has argued that past sexual indiscretions should have no bearing on Trump’s presidency was fired from Arizona State University four years ago for making sexually explicit comments and gestures toward women, according to documents and a university official.

An internal investigation by the university concluded that Paris Dennard, a surrogate during the campaign and now a member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships, told a recent college graduate who worked for him that he wanted to have sex with her. He “pretended to unzip his pants in her presence, tried to get her to sit on his lap, and made masturbatory gestures,” according to a university report obtained by The Washington Post.

According to the 2014 report, Dennard did not dispute those claims but said he committed the acts jokingly. The investigation began after the woman and a second female employee told superiors Dennard’s actions went too far and had made them uncomfortable.

Peter Beinart tackles Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt:

The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”

Cohen’s admission makes it harder for Republicans to claim that Trump didn’t violate the law. But it doesn’t really matter. For many Republicans, Trump remains uncorrupt—indeed, anticorrupt—because what they fear most isn’t the corruption of American law; it’s the corruption of America’s traditional identity.

Visit the Garage Converting Classic Cars to Electric Vehicles:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:45 PM, for 13h 35m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 86.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s University Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this day in 1861, future Gov. Lucius Fairchild departs for the front:

The Daily Milwaukee Press reported on this day that Company K of the 1st Wisconsin Infantry presented their Captain, Lucius Fairchild, with a ceremonial sword and sash at Camp Scott in Milwaukee. Fairchild was to leave that same afternoon for Washington, D.C., and begin his new appointment as lieutenant colonel of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Matthew DeFour reports Scott Walker’s flights in years after presidential run cost state taxpayers $818,00:

The flights included eight trips of less than 40 miles, including from Appleton to Green Bay, though that was part of a busy day on Sept. 7, 2016, in which Walker attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Neenah before promoting his sales tax holiday proposal in Green Bay and Menomonee Falls. The four flights he took that day each covered less than 75 miles and cost a total of $1,667.51.

In nine cases, he flew out of Madison round trip, covering distances of less than 75 miles, with each trip costing on average $819. The destinations included Burlington, West Bend and Oshkosh.

(It would take a vast number of daily brown bags, and a vast number of daily ham sandwiches, to make up this amount. Even Methuselah, one reads, didn’t live so long.)

Mikhaila R. Fogel, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic, and Benjamin Wittes consider What Michael Cohen’s Plea and Paul Manafort’s Conviction Mean for Trump and the Mueller Investigation:

How big a deal is the Cohen plea agreement?

Very big.

The president’s former lawyer has not only confessed to criminal campaign finance violations, but he has also said under oath that he was doing so at the direction of the president himself. It’s hard to say yet what precisely this means. But it is not a small thing. Setting aside the question of whether Cohen will cooperate with Mueller, it remains to be seen whether prosecutors will pursue additional criminal charges against individuals mentioned but not charged in the criminal information.

Cohen’s plea agreement does not contemplate any specific cooperation. However, as Lawfare’s David Kris noted, the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure allow the court to reduce a sentence within one year of sentencing when the government agrees that the defendant has “provided substantial assistance in investigating or prosecuting another person.” That means the question of cooperation, on campaign finance questions or other matters, could remain open possibly even after Cohen’s sentencing. It seems preponderantly likely that Cohen is cooperating—or at least that he will cooperate.

This means that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York have a witness on their hands who was very close to Trump and knows a great deal about a lot of things—some of which he pleaded guilty to Tuesday.

Philip Bump ponders How the campaign finance charges against Michael Cohen implicate Trump:

To the layperson, this likely sounds as a slightly more noxious example of business as usual in politics. It’s not. Cohen made that very clear when he stood up to accept guilt for his actions, in two phrases.

The payment to McDougal was made “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” he said, adding that it was made “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” The Daniels payment was similarly made “in coordination with and at the direction of the same candidate” and for the same reason.

Those points are important. As we noted when the Daniels payment was first reported, making a payment of $130,000 to bury a story is of dubious legality in the abstract. How and if it violates the law depends on the relationship of the person making the payment to the campaign and whether such payments were in the standard course of practice of his business.

Noah Bookbinder, Barry Berke, and Norman L. Eisen explain What the Manafort Verdict Means (“It’s Robert Mueller’s biggest victory yet, in one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history”):

With Tuesday’s convictions in the criminal trial of President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has struck another blow in his investigation: five guilty pleas, 32 indicted individuals, 187 charges revealing startling evidence of Russia’s 2016 attack on our democracy, and now the conviction of one of the top operators in the Trump campaign orbit. Mr. Manafort’s conviction on eight separate counts means he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

The conviction conclusively and publicly demonstrates what many of us have said since the start of the investigation: This is no “witch hunt.” It instead is one of the most successful special counsel investigations in history. Coming alongside the guilty plea by Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, implicating the president in campaign finance violations, it was a very bad day for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Manafort’s conviction cannot be diminished by arguing, as Mr. Trump and his coterie are fond of doing, that the misconduct was unrelated to the Trump campaign or Russian “collusion.” On the contrary, the trial evidence included Mr. Manafort’s close ties to pro-Russia forces and his desperate financial straits as he “volunteered” his time for the next president. The trial revealed how willing Mr. Manafort was to corruptly leverage his position of influence over Mr. Trump during the campaign for his own personal benefit. He offered briefings to a pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch and dangled a position in the Trump administration in front of a banker who provided him a loan for which he would not otherwise have qualified.

About those white stripes on chicken…

Have you ever noticed the mysterious white stripes on chicken? pic.twitter.com/c23GeoU0g1

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) August 19, 2018

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 38m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 79.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s  Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6 PM, and Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1959, Hawaii becomes a state.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Aaron Blake writes Trump blurts out another Lester Holt moment:

It really was the Russia investigation all along.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal posted late Wednesday, President Trump once again gave away the ballgame when it comes to his efforts to affect the probe and tear down its leaders (both current and former). He confessed that his true motivation for revoking former CIA director John Brennan’s security clearance was the “rigged witch hunt” that Brennan once “led.”

“I call it the rigged witch hunt; [it] is a sham,” Trump told the Journal’s Peter Nicholas and Michael C. Bender. “And these people led it!”

He added: “So I think it’s something that had to be done.”

You could be forgiven for having flashbacks to Trump’s interview with NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt in the aftermath of his firing last year of James B. Comey as FBI director. Then, as now, the White House offered a series of motivations for the crackdown on a person who was a liability in the Russia probe. Then, as now, it seemed clear what the actual motivation was. And then, as now, Trump appeared to go out and just admit the actual motivation.

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg report Microsoft says it has found a Russian operation targeting U.S. political institutions:

A group affiliated with the Russian government created phony versions of six websites — including some related to public policy and to the U.S. Senate — with the apparent goal of hacking into the computers of people who were tricked into visiting, according to Microsoft, which said Monday night that it discovered and disabled the fake sites.

The effort by the notorious APT28 hacking group, which has been publicly linked to a Russian intelligence agency and actively interfered in the 2016 presidential election, underscores the aggressive role that Russian operatives are playing ahead of the midterm elections in the United States. U.S. officials have repeatedly warned that the November vote is a major focus for interference efforts. Microsoft said the sites were created over the past several months and that the company was able to catch them early, as they were being set up. It did not go into more specifics.

Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, which is responsible for the company’s response to email phishing schemes, took the lead role in finding and disabling the sites, and the company is launching an effort to provide expanded cybersecurity protection for campaigns and election agencies that use Microsoft products.

Julie Hirschfeld Davis reports Trump Says Hispanic-American Border Patrol Agent ‘Speaks Perfect English’:

WASHINGTON — It was supposed to be a White House salute to the heroism of immigration agents who put their lives on the line to protect Americans. But on Monday, President Trump appeared to have something else on his mind: the ethnicity of one of the men he was honoring.

“Speaks perfect English,” Mr. Trump blurted out as he encouraged Adrian Anzaldua, a Hispanic-American Border Patrol agent and dog handler from Texas, to join him onstage in the East Room. Mr. Anzaldua recently arrested a smuggler in Laredo who had tried to bring 78 people into the United States illegally inside a truck trailer.

(Trump’s a bigoted authoritarian grifter, but as his remarks again demonstrate, he’s also a notably vulgar and obvious one.)

Nick Miroff reports Border arrest data suggests Trump’s push to split migrant families had little deterrent effect:

The number of migrant families taken into custody along the U.S. border with Mexico remained nearly unchanged from June to July, according to government data released Wednesday [8.8], an indication the Trump administration’s controversial move to separate thousands of parents and children did little to deter others from attempting the journey.

U.S. border agents arrested 9,258 family members along America’s southwest border last month, down slightly from 9,434 in June and 9,485 in May.

The administration cited a springtime surge of parents crossing illegally with children as justification for its “zero tolerance” prosecution initiative, which led to the separation of approximately 2,500 families between May 5 and June 20, when public outcry forced President Trump to end the practice.

Since then, some of the policy’s defenders have argued the separations would have had a stronger deterrent effect if allowed more time. They insist its true impact would not be apparent until word of the crackdown had spread to rural Central America, prompting parents to reconsider travel plans.

But the July arrest totals released Wednesday suggest the separations made little difference. While families continued to arrive at roughly the same rate, the number of unaccompanied minors taken into custody dropped from 5,093 in June to 3,938 in July, even though that group wasn’t a target of the “zero tolerance” crackdown.

The Secret to Ant Efficiency Is [Occasional] Idleness:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 40m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 6 PM, and Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On the night of August 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other communist forces invade Czechoslovakia to crush Alexander Dubcek’s Prague Spring liberalization reforms.

On this day in 1794, American soldiers defeat a tribal confederation at the Battle of Fallen Timbers:

On this date American troops under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne defeated a confederation of Indian forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees. Wayne’s soldiers, who included future Western explorer William Clark and future President William Henry Harrison, won the battle in less than an hour with the loss of some 30 men killed. (The number of Indian casualties is uncertain.)

The battle had several far-reaching consequences for the United States and what would later become the state of Wisconsin. The crushing defeat of the British-allied Indians convinced the British to finally evacuate their posts in the American west (an accession explicitly given in the Jay Treaty signed some three months later), eliminating forever the English presence in the early American northwest and clearing the way for American expansion. The battle also resulted in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which the defeated Indians ceded to Wayne the right of Americans to settle in the Ohio Valley (although the northwestern area of that country was given to the Indians). Wayne’s victory opened the gates of widespread settlement of the Old Northwest, Wisconsin included. [Source: American History Illustrated, Feb. 1969]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Eric Lindquist reports Foxconn Technology Group lease for Haymarket Landing upsets some who envisioned riverside restaurant there:

From the time developers first talked six years ago about building a massive project at the confluence of the Eau Claire and Chippewa rivers that would be the centerpiece of Eau Claire’s downtown revitalization efforts, a key component was a restaurant offering spectacular river views.

The restaurant, which was to include a patio with outside dining, was proposed for the retail space on the ground floor of what became Haymarket Landing, a six-story multiuse building that began housing UW-Eau Claire students in August 2016 in apartments on the upper five floors.

But two years later, with the Pablo Center at the Confluence — the community performing arts center that is half of the Confluence Project — about to open next month, the space once designated for the long-awaited riverside restaurant on developer drawings is now committed to the controversial Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn Technology Group for a planned innovation center.  And some people aren’t happy about the change.

“There has been a lot of overwhelmingly negative feedback about it,” City Council acting President Andrew Werthmann said. “I think that’s because we as a community were investing in a certain vision for downtown and that space, and this is not in keeping with that vision.”

(Given the choice, residents of Eau Claire would rather have a restaurant than a Foxconn ‘innovation center.’  Good for them – they’re showing more sense than policymakers in Whitewater did a decade ago when they repurposed a grant for flood victims and unemployed autoworkers into a third-tier university building innovation center in Whitewater.  They’re also showing more economic sense than the Greater Whitewater Committee did when it invited a state operative, Matt Moroney, as a guest speaker to flack Foxconn in Whitewater.)

Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani claims ‘Truth isn’t truth’:

E.J. Dionne Jr. contends America is slouching toward autocracy:

The list of ominous signs goes on and on: Trump invoking Stalin’s phrase “enemies of the people” to describe a free press; the firing, one after another, of public servants who moved to expose potential wrongdoing, starting with then-FBI Director James B. Comey; Trump’s effusive praise of foreign despots; his extravagantly abusive (and often racially charged) language against opponents; and his refusal to abide by traditional practices about disclosing his own potential conflicts of interest and those of his family. Add to this the authoritarian’s habit of institutionalizing lying as a routine aspect of governing, compressed into the astonishing credo Rudolph W. Giuliani blurted out on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday: “Truth isn’t truth.”

This is not business as usual. Yet our politics proceeds as if it is. Slowly, Trump has accustomed us to behavior that, at any other recent time and with just about any other politician, would in all probability have been career-ending.

 William K. Rashbaum, Ben Protess, and Maggie Haberman report Michael Cohen, Trump’s Ex-Lawyer, Investigated for Bank Fraud Over $20 Million:

Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter.

Investigators are also examining whether Mr. Cohen violated campaign finance or other laws by helping to arrange financial deals to secure the silence of women who said they had affairs with Mr. Trump. The inquiry has entered the final stage and prosecutors are considering filing charges by the end of August, two of the people said.

Any criminal charges against Mr. Cohen would deal a significant blow to the president. Mr. Cohen, 52, worked for the president’s company, the Trump Organization, for more than a decade. He was one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal and visible aides and called himself the president’s personal lawyer after Mr. Trump took office.

NASA offers its own version of Moonlight (Clair de Lune):

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 43m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1812, the USS Constitution defeats HMS Guerriere:

A frigate was sighted on 19 August and subsequently determined to be HMS Guerriere (38) with the words “Not The Little Belt” painted on her foretopsail.[93][Note 3] Guerriere opened fire upon entering range of Constitution, doing little damage. After a few exchanges of cannon fire between the ships, Captain Hull maneuvered Constitution into an advantageous position within 25 yards (23 m) of Guerriere. He then ordered a full double-loaded broadside of grape and round shot which took out Guerriere’s mizzenmast.[94][95] Guerriere’s maneuverability decreased with her mizzenmast dragging in the water, and she collided with Constitution, entangling her bowsprit in Constitution’s mizzen rigging. This left only Guerriere’s bow guns capable of effective fire. Hull’s cabin caught fire from the shots, but it was quickly extinguished. With the ships locked together, both captains ordered boarding parties into action, but the sea was heavy and neither party was able to board the opposing ship.[96]

At one point, the two ships rotated together counter-clockwise, with Constitution continuing to fire broadsides. When the two ships pulled apart, the force of the bowsprit’s extraction sent shock waves through Guerriere’s rigging. Her foremast collapsed, and that brought the mainmast down shortly afterward.[97] Guerriere was now a dismasted, unmanageable hulk with close to a third of her crew wounded or killed, while Constitution remained largely intact. The British surrendered.[98]

Hull had surprised the British with his heavier broadsides and his ship’s sailing ability. Adding to their astonishment, many of the British shots had rebounded harmlessly off Constitution’s hull. An American sailor reportedly exclaimed “Huzzah! her sides are made of iron!” and Constitution acquired the nickname “Old Ironsides”.[99]

The battle left Guerriere so badly damaged that she was not worth towing to port, and Hull ordered her to be burned the next morning, after transferring the British prisoners onto Constitution.[100] Constitution arrived back in Boston on 30 August, where Hull and his crew found that news of their victory had spread fast, and they were hailed as heroes.[101]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report McGahn, White House Counsel, Has Cooperated Extensively in Mueller Inquiry:

The White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, has cooperated extensively in the special counsel investigation, sharing detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President Trump obstructed justice, including some that investigators would not have learned of otherwise, according to a dozen current and former White House officials and others briefed on the matter.

In at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours over the past nine months, Mr. McGahn described the president’s fury toward the Russia investigation and the ways in which he urged Mr. McGahn to respond to it. He provided the investigators examining whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice a clear view of the president’s most intimate moments with his lawyer.

Among them were Mr. Trump’s comments and actions during the firing of the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and Mr. Trump’s obsession with putting a loyalist in charge of the inquiry, including his repeated urging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to claim oversight of it. Mr. McGahn was also centrally involved in Mr. Trump’s attempts to fire the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, which investigators might not have discovered without him.

Carol D. Leonnig, Devlin Barrett, Ellen Nakashima, and Josh Dawsey report GOP fundraiser Broidy under investigation for alleged effort to sell government influence, people familiar with probe:

The Justice Department is investigating whether longtime Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy sought to sell his influence with the Trump administration by offering to deliver U.S. government actions for foreign officials in exchange for tens of millions of dollars, according to three people familiar with the probe.

As part of the investigation, prosecutors are scrutinizing a plan that Broidy allegedly developed to try to persuade the Trump government to extradite a Chinese dissident back to his home country, a move sought by Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to two of the people.

They also are investigating claims that Broidy sought $75 million from a Malaysian business official if the Justice Department ended its investigation of a development fund run by the Malaysian government. The Malaysian probe has examined the role of the former prime minister in the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the fund.

(Emphasis added. It should – but apparently does not universally – go without saying that no worthy man or woman would participate in a plan, as alleged here, to send a dissident back to a dictatorship.)

Susan Ferriss reports In horrifying detail, women accuse U.S. customs officers of invasive body searches:

The women who’ve brought these lawsuits, including two minor girls, say CBP officers subjected them to indignities — such as strip searches while menstruating and prohibited genital probing — despite finding no contraband. Four women further allege they were handcuffed and transported to hospitals where, against their will, one underwent a pelvic exam and X-rays. In one of the cases, the woman’s lawsuit asserts she was intravenously drugged at the hospital, according to lawsuits.

Such invasive medical procedures require a detainee’s consent or a warrant. In two cases, the plaintiffs say they were billed.

A lawsuit filed in San Diego federal court on behalf of a Hispanic 16-year-old identified as C.R. alleges CBP strip-searched her last September as she and her adult sisters returned from a family visit to Mexico through the San Ysidro pedestrian port. The sisters were flagged after a false drug-sniffing dog alert, the lawsuit asserts. Female officers took C.R. aside and allegedly told the tearful girl to disrobe, hand over a sanitary pad, and squat and cough “while officers probed and shined a flashlight at her vaginal and anal areas,” the lawsuit says.

Justice Department attorneys representing officers have filed to dismiss C.R.’s suit, arguing that it was not filed properly.

Sixteen-year-old C.R.’s lawsuit details an alleged strip-search by CBP last September at the San Diego-Mexico border. Since September, two other Hispanic minors also reported to rights activists that they were detained and forced to strip upon entry. (Center for Public Integrity/Washington Post Illustration)

From May, Alexia Fernández Campbell explains Undocumented immigrants pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year:

One of the biggest misconceptions about undocumented immigrants is that they don’t pay any taxes. In his first address to Congress, President Trump set the tone for his coming immigration agenda when he said immigration costs US taxpayers “billions of dollars a year.”

A 2017 Gallup poll that asked survey respondents “whether immigrants to the United States are making the [tax] situation in the country better or worse” found that 41 percent said “worse,” while only 23 percent said “better” (33 percent said they had “no effect”).

The reality is far different. Immigrants who are authorized to work in the United States pay the same taxes as US citizens. And, contrary to the persistent myth, undocumented immigrants do in fact pay taxes too. Millions of undocumented immigrants file tax returns each year, and they are paying taxes for benefits they can’t even use.

The best estimates come from research by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy, a Washington, DC, think tank, which suggests that about half of undocumented workers in the United States file income tax returns. The most recent IRS data, from 2015, shows that the agency received 4.4 million income tax returns from workers who don’t have Social Security numbers, which includes a large number of undocumented immigrants. That year, they paid $23.6 billion in income taxes.

Those undocumented workers paid taxes for benefits they can’t even use, like Social Security and Medicare. They also aren’t eligible for benefits like the earned income tax credit.

(See also The biggest beneficiaries of the government safety net: working-class whites.)

In France, This Chapel Rises From a Volcano:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 46m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad opens near Petersburg, Virginia:

The 2nd, 6th, 7th, 37th, and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments took part in the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, also known as the Battle of Globe Tavern, near Petersburg, Virginia. This was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign. By destroying the railway while under heavy attack, Union troops forced Confederates to carry their provision 30 miles by wagon around Union lines to supply the city.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Conservatives Rick Esenberg and Collin Roth write To ‘Save’ Jobs, Wisconsin Republicans Set a Dangerous Precedent:

This should serve as a moment for reevaluation. Republicans talk all the time about how government doesn’t create jobs. They like to say that government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers. But a desire to appear to be “pro-business” (as distinct from “pro-market”) and curry favor with working-class voters has led Republicans in many states to embrace a role for government that they once bemoaned. Instead of simply focusing on creating the proper conditions for economic growth through low taxes and a minimal regulatory burden, they have found it politically profitable to target companies and industries with incentives and handouts. Job totals are now tallied like points on a scoreboard.

Virtuous though its intent may be, this is central planning by another name. The result is market distortion, an inefficient use of resources, and a narrative of economic development built on myths and hubris. It serves neither business nor workers. Politicians have convinced themselves that without tax incentives, new jobs would never be created and lost ones would never be replaced. This is, quite simply, false. It fails to see what occurs in the economy every day when consumer choice and markets determine whether businesses succeed or fail.

(Esenberg & Roth are writing in National Review Online, so they carefully couch their criticism with qualifiers like ‘[v]irtuous though its intent may be.’  They know these policies are junk, but they have to say so carefully, to soften the blow for any pro-Trump readers who may still visit NRO.)

Dan Kaufman writes Why Education May Be the Issue That Breaks Republicans’ Decade-Long Grip on Wisconsin:

When a new academic year begins in Wisconsin a few weeks from now, the only school in Darien, a small community near the Illinois border, will remain empty. In January, local school officials proposed raising property taxes to bring in three and a half million dollars. Voters rejected the idea—it would have been the second property-tax increase in three years—forcing the district to make drastic cuts to its budget. Darien Elementary School was one of those cuts. Its teachers were laid off, and its students will be sent to other schools in the area. Similar school closings have, in recent years, occurred in a number of other rural Wisconsin towns.

It has been nearly a decade since Governor Scott Walker—who grew up near Darien—and his fellow-Republicans began implementing their vision of conservative austerity and privatization in Wisconsin. The result has been a state more attractive to corporations, with a smaller middle class and deteriorating public infrastructure and institutions—from roads to the University of Wisconsin system to public schools. During this period, Republicans have maintained nearly unbroken control of the state’s government, and Walker has become a conservative hero. This year, as he seeks reëlection to a third term, he has expressed pride about his record and has been typically implacable on most issues—except, notably, education. After the state cut more than a billion dollars in spending on schools and universities between 2011—the year Walker took office—and 2017, Walker signed a budget last year that included an increase of some six hundred and forty million dollars in K-12 spending. “I’m being aggressive on this,” Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal, in June. “We’re proclaiming proudly that I’m the pro-education governor and I want to continue to be the pro-education governor.”

This is the context for Tony Evers’s victory in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary on Tuesday. Evers, Wisconsin’s state superintendent of schools since 2009, beat out seven opponents to claim the nomination. And at sixty-six years old, with little charisma and middling name recognition, he might beat Walker in November. Until last month, no poll had ever shown Walker trailing a declared Democratic opponent by more than a few points. Then NBC/Marist released a poll showing Evers ahead of Walker by thirteen points. Another poll, by Emerson College, had Evers ahead by seven.

Jennifer Rubin contends Hanging on to Trump’s rabid base won’t be enough:

After the Helsinki debacle, 11 days of the Paul Manafort trial, contradictory statements on the infamous June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, numerous obnoxious and racist tweets, never-ending verbal duels with accusers (including past employees) and, for good measure, a senseless trade war, we shouldn’t be surprised that President Trump’s approval rating is slipping somewhat. Gallup has it down to 39 percent; Quinnipiac has it at 41 percent.

The Quinnipiac poll numbers highlight how poorly Americans think of him:

Only 31 percent of American voters like President Donald Trump as a person, while 59 percent dislike him, according to a Quinnipiac University National Poll released [Tuesday]. … By a smaller 54 – 43 percent margin, American voters dislike President Trump’s policies.

Voters disapprove 54 – 41 percent of the job Trump is doing as president, including 48 percent who disapprove strongly. Another 30 percent approve strongly.  The Trump Administration is not doing enough to help middle class Americans, voters say 58 – 38 percent.

Americans don’t need to hear a tape of Trump saying the n-word to know he “does not treat people of color with the same amount of respect he affords white people”  — by a margin of 54 percent  to 39 percent. Moreover, “American voters say 54 – 37 percent that ‘President Trump has emboldened people who hold racist beliefs to express those beliefs publicly.’ ”

Sarah Jones describes Trump’s New Strategy to Demonize Immigrants:

A draft rule, which has not been released to the public, reportedly stated, “Non-citizens who receive public benefits are not self-sufficient and are relying on the U.S. government and state and local entities for resources instead of their families, sponsors or private organizations. An alien’s receipt of public benefits comes at taxpayer expense and availability of public benefits may provide an incentive for aliens to immigrate to the United States.”

These restrictions may now be close to fruition. On Tuesday, NBC News reported that Trump’s immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, is preparing a rule that would penalize documented immigrants for using certain public benefits: Use of food stamps, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or even Obamacare could cost a documented immigrant a green card or prevent them from gaining citizenship.

….

The rule is premised on the notion that non-citizens burden citizen taxpayers by taking welfare benefits or other public funds. But the evidence doesn’t support this. Not only is it extremely difficult to immigrate legally to the United States, it’s even more difficult to access benefits after doing so. A fair examination of the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: Trump’s policy isn’t intended to shore up the welfare state for citizens, but to undermine it by reducing immigration.

(Indeed, see The biggest beneficiaries of the government safety net: working-class whites.)

It’s a cougar v. dog faceoff: