God’s Little People Cat Rescue, a cat sanctuary on the beautiful Greek island of Syros, is currently looking for someone to care for their charming and lovely 55 cats. As if hanging out with tons of cats in paradise wasn’t cool enough, the gig also comes with a fully paid for residence and private garden and a salary.
….
Dream job alert: A cat sanctuary on the Greek island of Syros is looking for a caretaker. Comes with 55 cats, a small house, and a little $$.
(Relatedly: What has happened in my life that I am not applying for this job??)
(Enjoyable as the job sounds, even a Greek island and fifty-five felines couldn’t tempt one to leave Whitewater. This small city and a few cats are a match for anywhere, anytime.)
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:56 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 06m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-fifth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
The British scientist James Smithson (1765–1829) left most of his wealth to his nephew Henry James Hungerford. When Hungerford died childless in 1835,[10] the estate passed “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men”, in accordance with Smithson’s will.[11] Congress officially accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation, and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1, 1836.[12] The American diplomat Richard Rush was dispatched to England by President Andrew Jackson to collect the bequest. Rush returned in August 1838 with 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns (about $500,000 at the time, which is equivalent to $11,491,000 in 2017).[13][14]
Once the money was in hand, eight years of Congressional haggling ensued over how to interpret Smithson’s rather vague mandate “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”[12][14] Unfortunately, the money was invested by the US Treasury in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas which soon defaulted. After heated debate, Massachusetts Representative (and ex-President) John Quincy Adams persuaded Congress to restore the lost funds with interest[15] and, despite designs on the money for other purposes, convinced his colleagues to preserve it for an institution of science and learning.[16] Finally, on August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the legislation that established the Smithsonian Institution as a trust instrumentality of the United States, to be administered by a Board of Regents and a Secretary of the Smithsonian.[12][17]
Recommended for reading in full —
Conor Friedersdorf writes Laura Ingraham Doesn’t Love Her Country Anymore (“The Fox News host cites an increase in the numbers of legal and illegal immigrants as the reason for her diminished patriotism”):
Should she stay here rather than immigrate to a country with a whiter population that more closely approximates her preferred demographic profile, one might think her waning patriotism would jeopardize her job at a flag-waving network like Fox. But in Ingraham’s telling, a lot of her audience also feels like changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the country are causing the America that theyloved to cease to exist, so perhaps she can survive by holding onto the growing cohort of former patriots. Ratings are king.
Lest anyone worry that America won’t have enough patriots left, Ingraham is thankfully wrong when she implies that “most of us” feel as she does:
The survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 5 through 12 among 2,002 adults, finds that 38% say legal immigration into the United States should be kept at its present level, while 32% say it should be increased and 24% say it should be decreased. Since 2001, the share of Americans who favor increased legal immigration into the U.S. has risen 22 percentage points (from 10% to 32%), while the share who support a decrease has declined 29 points (from 53% to 24%).
God bless America.
Adam Serwer contends The White Nationalists Are Winning (“Fox News anchors and high-profile politicians are now openly pushing the racism of the alt-right. The fringe movement’s messages have permeated the mainstream Republican Party”):
From the looks of it, the Nazis lost the battle of Charlottesville. After all, Donald Trump’s handling of the aftermath of the rally, in which he said there were “very fine people” on both sides of the protest, drew bipartisan condemnation. The attempted rebranding of white nationalism as the genteel and technologically savvy alt-right failed, the marketing campaign faltering after the murder of the counter-protester Heather Heyer and the attempted murder of several others revealed to the nation the logical conclusion of alt-right beliefs and arguments. The bloody outcome of that day foiled the white nationalists’ attempt to garner sympathy from the mainstream right, and in doing so, make themselves respectable.
But the alt-right and its fellow travelers were never going to be able to assemble a mass movement. Despite the controversy over the rally and its bloody aftermath, the white nationalists’ ideological goals remain a core part of the Trump agenda. As long as that agenda finds a home in one of the two major American political parties, a significant portion of the country will fervently support it. And as an ideological vanguard, the alt-right fulfilled its own purpose in pulling the Republican Party in its direction.
A year after white nationalists in Charlottesville chanted, “You will not replace us!” their message has been taken up and amplified by Fox News personalities. Tucker Carlson tells his audience that “Latin American countries are changing election outcomes here by forcing demographic change on this country.” Laura Ingraham says that “the America that we know and love doesn’t exist anymore” because of “massive demographic changes” as a result of “both illegal and sometimes legal immigration that progressives love.” They echo the white-nationalist claim that America is at risk because the nation is growing more diverse, an argument that treats the mere presence of nonwhite people, citizen or noncitizen, as an existential threat to the country. White nationalists like Cantwell are cheered to hear their beliefs championed on Fox. Cantwell wrote last year that Carlson “is basically telling white America to prepare for war as directly as he can get away with while remaining on Fox News.”
(One can reconcile the views of Friedersdorf and Serwer by their focus: Serwer sees that the nativist right has made gains on places like Fox, while Friedersdorf observes that the American majority yet rejects a race-laden view of citizenship.)
If Republicans retain control of the House in November, Trump will (correctly) claim victory and vindication. He will have beaten the political performances of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in their first midterms. He will have proved the electoral value of racial and ethnic stereotyping. He will have demonstrated the effectiveness of circuslike distraction. He will have shown the political power of bold, constant, uncorrected lies. And he will gain many more enablers and imitators.
Perhaps worst of all, a victorious Trump will complete his takeover of the Republican Party (which is already far along). Even murmured dissent will be silenced. The GOP will be fully committed to a 2020 presidential campaign conducted in the spirit of George C. Wallace — a campaign of racial division, of rural/urban division, of religious division, of party division that metastasizes into mutual contempt.
This would leave many Americans entirely abandoned in U.S. politics: Catholics who are both pro-life and pro-immigrant. Evangelicals who are conservative but think that character matters, that compassion counts, that racial healing is a Christian calling. Traditional Republicans who miss a time — not so long ago — when leaders such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush modeled grace and led the West in defending freedom.
(Gerson is a conservative who writes about the need for GOP defeat; his concern shows how far and how fast the Republican party has become a tool of Trumpism.)
On balance, these sharpening divisions leave Democrats in a strong, but not guaranteed, position to win back the House by maximizing their gains in well-educated suburbs and picking off even a few Republicans outside of the major metropolitan areas. By the count of David Wasserman, the House race analyst for The Cook Political Report, there are 68 House Republican districts whose voting history leans less reliably toward the GOP than Ohio-12. “We won a district where we can nominate a bag of cement … and we won by [about] 1,000 votes,” says the longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy, a Trump critic. “That means … they are playing 50 seats deep in our infield and almost winning. What does that tell you about our midterms?”
But Democrats will be operating with very little margin for error if they must win back the House almost solely by capturing white-collar suburban seats. Their path would be much easier if they could also win a respectable number of the Republican seats they are targeting outside of the major metro areas, including districts in upstate New York, northeastern and southwestern Iowa, downstate Illinois, California’s Central Valley, and Washington State, where Republican Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Jaime Herrera Beutler both showed weakness in Tuesday night’s primary.
….
The consistency of the voting patterns in the major elections since 2016 suggests the divisions around Trump are both hardening and nationalizing. That points toward a 2018 election in which Democrats are likely to solidify their control of the major metropolitan areas, but may struggle to establish widespread beachheads in the Republican strongholds beyond them. (If anything, Democrats have better odds of making gains on the latter battlefields than Republicans do of avoiding losses on the former.) That stark divergence promises intense conflict in Washington, D.C., after November. It also foreshadows a Trump reelection campaign in 2020 that could look like a Battle of the Bulge between what America has been and what it is becoming.
Laura Ingraham: "The America we know and love doesn't exist anymore. Massive demographic changes have been foisted on the American people, and they are changes that none of us ever voted for, and most of us don't like … this is related to both illegal and legal immigration" pic.twitter.com/s5G2qIY4W0
One sees that Laura Ingraham of Fox News laments the demographic changes that have, and will continue, to transform America. Of course she does: she’s a white nationalist, and hopes for a herrenvolk – a sham democracy – favoring her own ilk.
Ingraham bemoans, truly, the transformative power of liberty: the free movement of people, goods, and capital through thousands upon thousands of daily transactions. Through these free & voluntary encounters and exchanges, America has grown more productive and consequently more prosperous.
Those uncomfortable with a more productive society, as Jennifer Rubin observed, are on the wrong side of the divide between Trump vs. an America that works:
On one level, this is hardly surprising since Trump’s message is aimed at Americans who are resentful, feel left behind and are both physically and culturally marginalized. The flip side of this, however, is that Trump either ignores or vilifies urban America, refusing to acknowledge that diversity is part of the formula for their success. And, moreover, the presence of vibrant cities not just on the coasts but also in the heartland suggests Trump’s base would greatly benefit by moving from dead and dying Rust Belt towns to more economically vibrant places. Some of that has already gone on as the population has shifted from the Northeast and upper Midwest to the South and West, but it seems we should not be filling Trump voters with the false hope that coal jobs are coming back, but rather encourage them to be like immigrants — go to where the work is.
Trump fails to understand that immigrants go to places that have work, or at least work better than what they left. Every immigrant who comes is a vote of confidence in America, a bet that there is economic prosperity available at the end of the journey. The same immigrant mentality should be encouraged among native-born Americans.
America does not need to be made great again; she is already a great republic, made so by the ambitious many, both old and new.
Ingraham is right about one thing: the conditions she prefers are gone. Fortunately, they will not be coming back. Trumpism is an extreme-but-futile revanchism, a malevolent attempt to roll back the clock to a lesser time favorable only to Trump’s so-called base. (This base is cocooned and insular, so it overestimates its own strength and underestimates the strength of those in resistance & opposition.)
However long the conflict, the result is assured: every part of Trumpism, and most notably ethnic nativism like Ingraham’s, awaits only the gutter.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with an even chance of a late afternoon shower, and a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 09m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-fourth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 7 PM.
“I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots, and so I ask you to confirm me as your president with your prayers.”[50] He went on to state:
I have not sought this enormous responsibility, but I will not shirk it. Those who nominated and confirmed me as Vice President were my friends and are my friends. They were of both parties, elected by all the people and acting under the Constitution in their name. It is only fitting then that I should pledge to them and to you that I will be the President of all the people.[51]
He also stated:
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule. But there is a higher Power, by whatever name we honor Him, who ordains not only righteousness but love, not only justice, but mercy. … let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate.[52]
Wisconsin, a state where candidates are jumping over each other to highlight the education bonafides of their campaigns, will be a significant test case. In June, Governor Walker told the Wisconsin State Journal that he’s “a pro-education governor … I’m going to continue to be a pro-education governor and build off of that.” He has boasted that the state has frozen tuition at the University of Wisconsin-system campuses for the last six years. And he has a stated goal of getting Wisconsin to have the highest high-school graduation rate in the country by 2023—it currently ranks ninth, down seven spots from 2011. And the Democratic primary field is no different. All the candidates support increased funding for schools, and Kelda Roys, a lawyer running for the state’s highest office, has advocated for guaranteed early-childhood education and free two-year college for all residents.
For his part, Evers has had virtually every school-related job you can imagine: He’s been a teacher, principal, and superintendent over his more than three decades in education. Running for governor was the farthest thing from his mind just a short few years ago, he says. But that changed after he won a third term as the state’s superintendent of public instruction. “It was clear to me that as much as I love my job as state superintendent—I think it’s a very important one—there are things that I just cannot accomplish for the kids of this state in my present role,” he told me. “And I don’t believe that Scott Walker will deliver on any promise he has around education.”
He offered a more blunt assessment of his motivations during his party’s state convention. “I am running for governor because I am goddamn sick and tired of Scott Walker gutting our public schools, insulting our hard-working educators, and destroying higher education in Wisconsin,” he said during his stump speech. According to a recent Marist/NBC survey, Evers is leading Walker by 13 points—and an Emerson College survey has him seven points ahead of the two-term incumbent—and he holds large leads over the rest of the Democratic field.
(It’s worth noting that although education may decide both the Democratic primary and the general election, Walker’s also brought a level of corporate welfare and crony capitalism to Wisconsin unlike anything we’ve before experienced.
In Whitewater, the Community Development Authority has been a tiny nest for these bad ideas. When someone like CDA executive director Dave Carlson gushes that he has more ‘tools’ in Whitewater than he did in his previous job, he truly means there are more government-directed ways to interfere in free markets of capital and labor. That must be impressive to him, or he would not have mentioned it in an interview; no doubt it’s impressive to the local business league that has such influence over Whitewater’s ‘Community’ Development Authority.
In any event, these ‘tools’ are no more impressive than a sorcerer’s spells or a witch doctor’s potions.)
Here’s what’s laid out in complaints from the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (Collins has pleaded not guilty):
Collins sits on the board of Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biopharmaceutical company in which he is also the largest shareholder.
On June 22, 2017, Collins learned that Innate’s main drug had failed clinical trials, a grave outcome for Innate’s financial condition.
Literally seconds after learning this news, Collins contacted his son, Cameron, who at the time owned 2% of Innate.
Over the following four days, Cameron Collins and several other associates of the Collinses proceeded to liquidate their positions in Innate before the public announcement of the drug failure on June 26, after which the stock fell 92%. They saved approximately $750,000 by selling before the announcement.
Innate is not an especially large company. As a result, per the SEC: “The sales by Cameron Collins, his girlfriend, and her parents, including Stephen Zarsky, made up more than 53% of the stock’s trading volume [on June 23] and exceeded Innate’s 15-day average trading volume by more than 1,454%.”
Perhaps it is sometimes possible to trade on insider information and have those trades go unnoticed amid a sea of non-insider trades. But if the nonpublic information you’re trading on is likely to tank the stock price by more than 90%, and your trades are going to make up about 15 times the stock’s typical daily trading volume, and your close associate sits on the company’s board of directors, it is probably not best to assume your trades will get lost in the shuffle.
At least three congressional candidates have already been hit with phishing attacks that strongly resemble Russian sabotage in the 2016 campaign. Among them was Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat in one of the year’s most hotly contested races.
Facebook has shut down dozens of accounts and pages to stop what appeared to be a coordinated disinformation campaign.
Three months ahead of the election, President Donald Trump’s top national security officials are sounding the alarm. Five of them went to the White House podium last week to warn of interference and outline the government’s preparations, even as Trump himself continues to publicly raise doubts about Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election that he won. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, warned that a major Russian effort to undermine the November election is “only one keyboard click away.”
(It’s worth noting that Trump, himself, isn’t sending an alarm about hacking; on the contrary, he shows no worry at all.)
With the primary election just days away, Leah Vukmir came out swinging against charges that she was a latecomer in supporting President Donald Trump.
In unusually blunt terms, Vukmir took issue with a digital ad by her rival Kevin Nicholson and criticized a third-party group that has attacked her with millions of dollars in spending during the heated Republican primary for U.S. Senate.
Vukmir’s counterattack came after last week’s release of a March 2016 video in which she called Trump “offensive to everyone” and held her nose while describing what Republicans thought of the idea of voting for him.
(A race to be Trump’s top backer is a race to the bottom.)
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 11m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-third day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Isaac Arnsdorf reports The Shadow Rulers of the VA (“How Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter and two other Mar-a-Lago cronies are secretly shaping the Trump administration’s veterans policies”):
Last February, shortly after Peter O’Rourke became chief of staff for the Department of Veterans Affairs, he received an email from Bruce Moskowitz with his input on a new mental health initiative for the VA. “Received,” O’Rourke replied. “I will begin a project plan and develop a timeline for action.”
O’Rourke treated the email as an order, but Moskowitz is not his boss. In fact, he is not even a government official. Moskowitz is a Palm Beach doctor who helps wealthy people obtain high-service “concierge” medical care.
More to the point, he is one-third of an informal council that is exerting sweeping influence on the VA from Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. The troika is led by Ike Perlmutter, the reclusive chairman of Marvel Entertainment, who is a longtime acquaintance of President Trump’s. The third member is a lawyer named Marc Sherman. None of them has ever served in the U.S. military or government.
Yet from a thousand miles away, they have leaned on VA officials and steered policies affecting millions of Americans. They have remained hidden except to a few VA insiders, who have come to call them “the Mar-a-Lago Crowd.”
A multimillion-dollar lawsuit has been quietly making its way through the New York State court system over the last three years, pitting a private equity manager named David Storper against his former boss: Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The pair worked side by side for more than a decade, eventually at the firm, WL Ross & Co.—where, Storper later alleged, Ross stole his interests in a private equity fund, transferred them to himself, then tried to cover it up with bogus paperwork. Two weeks ago, just before the start of a trial with $4 million on the line, Ross and Storper agreed to a confidential settlement, whose existence has never been reported and whose terms remain secret.
It is difficult to imagine the possibility that a man like Ross, who Forbes estimates is worth some $700 million, might steal a few million from one of his business partners. Unless you have heard enough stories about Ross. Two former WL Ross colleagues remember the commerce secretary taking handfuls of Sweet’N Low packets from a nearby restaurant, so he didn’t have to go out and buy some for himself. One says workers at his house in the Hamptons used to call the office, claiming Ross had not paid them for their work. Another two people said Ross once pledged $1 million to a charity, then never paid. A commerce official called the tales “petty nonsense,” and added that Ross does not put sweetener in his coffee.
There are bigger allegations. Over several months, in speaking with 21 people who know Ross, Forbes uncovered a pattern: Many of those who worked directly with him claim that Ross wrongly siphoned or outright stole a few million here and a few million there, huge amounts for most but not necessarily for the commerce secretary. At least if you consider them individually. But all told, these allegations—which sparked lawsuits, reimbursements and an SEC fine—come to more than $120 million. If even half of the accusations are legitimate, the current United States secretary of commerce could rank among the biggest grifters in American history.
Robert McCulloch’s 28-year run as St. Louis County’s elected prosecutor came to a stunning end Tuesday when he was upset by a Ferguson councilman who promised to reform the criminal justice system.
Wesley Bell, 43, earned 57 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, according to unofficial results. With no candidate from any other political party in the race, Bell will run unopposed in November.
….
This was the first time McCulloch had faced a challenger since the Ferguson protests that erupted over the killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer in August 2014. Protesters criticized his office for its handling of the grand jury inquiry into the killing of Brown. The grand jury brought no charges against Officer Darren Wilson.
Prices rose at their highest clip since 2012 over the past year, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
The 2.9 percent inflation for the 12-month period ending in June is a sign of a growing economy, but it’s also a painful development for workers, whose tepid wage gains have failed to keep pace with the rising prices.
The cost of food, shelter and gas have all risen significantly in the past year. Gas skyrocketed more than 24 percent, rent for a primary residence jumped 3.6 percent and meals at restaurants and cafeterias rose 2.8 percent.
Prices have risen roughly at the same rate as wages, erasing any gains workers may have hoped to realize via bigger paychecks.
Sen. Rand Paul is a libertarian in the way that Gov. Walker is a free-market man: they prefer the titles, but act in ways contrary to the underlying principles. For Wisconsin, no man behind the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation & Foxconn project could genuinely support free markets in capital, labor, and goods; for Kentucky, no man who advocates détente with Putin’s Russia could genuinely support either peace or liberty.
MOSCOW (Reuters) – U.S. Senator Rand Paul on Monday invited Russian lawmakers to visit Washington after holding talks in Moscow with parliamentarians and pledging to obstruct new sanctions against Russia.
The Republican senator and ally of U.S. President Donald Trump said he had traveled to the Russian capital to encourage diplomacy amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington.
U.S. intelligence agencies say Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to try to tilt the race in Trump’s favor, an assertion Moscow rejects, and the two countries are also at odds over Syria and Ukraine.
There is tension in the American relationship with Putin’s Russia because Putin seized Crimea, foments war in eastern Ukraine, threatens NATO allies in the Baltics and elsewhere, interfered in the last presidential election and looks set to do so in congressional elections this fall, bolsters a dictator in Syria, murders expatriate Russians in other nations, and murders and oppresses his own people at home.
Rand Paul will not bring peace by appeasing a murderous anti-American dictator. It’s a common Russian (and was formerly a Soviet) trick to claim that if one resists Russian ambitions, all the world will crumble. In fact, the world comes closer to crumbling when one does what Russia wants than when the democratic world resists Russian encroachments.
Those of us from old libertarian families have never been much taken with Rand Paul, or his bigoted father. (If anything, we’ve done a poor job of explaining how far we are from the Pauls’ views or Walker’s corporate welfare.)
In any event, there is no one truly libertarian who was, is, or ever will be (as Reuters accurately describes Sen. Paul), an “ally of U.S. President Donald Trump.”
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 13m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 20.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-second day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1782, Gen. George Washington creates the original Purple Heart:
The original Purple Heart, designated as the Badge of Military Merit, was established by George Washington – then the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army – by order from his Newburgh, New York headquarters on August 7, 1782. The Badge of Military Merit was only awarded to three Revolutionary War soldiers by Gen. George Washington himself. General Washington authorized his subordinate officers to issue Badges of Merit as appropriate. From then on, as its legend grew, so did its appearance. Although never abolished, the award of the badge was not proposed again officially until after World War I.[5][6]
No candidate for high office, and no presidential campaign, should even think about accepting Russia’s help “to get information on an opponent.”
This conclusion is not merely a matter of common sense. It is linked with the deepest fears of those who founded our nation. Many people are puzzled by the constitutional provision limiting eligibility for the presidency to “natural born” citizens. But it attests to the founders’ desire to ensure something they prized perhaps above all: loyalty.
In the decisive debates over the impeachment clause, James Madison pointed to the risk that a president “might betray his trust to foreign powers.” Focusing on the electoral process itself, George Mason asked, “Shall the man who has practised corruption & by that means procured his appointment in the first instance, be suffered to escape punishment?”
Last week, President Trump and his lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani argued that collusion isn’t a crime. But on Monday, Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton should be investigated for this supposed non-crime.
“Collusion is very real with Russia,” Trump quoted conservative commentator Dan Bongino as saying on Trump’s favorite Fox News morning show, “but only with Hillary and the Democrats, and we should demand a full investigation.”
“Collusion with Russia was very real. Hillary Clinton and her team 100% colluded with the Russians, and so did Adam Schiff who is on tape trying to collude with what he thought was Russians to obtain compromising material on DJT. We also know that Hillary Clinton paid through….
….a law firm, eventually Kremlin connected sources, to gather info on Donald Trump. Collusion is very real with Russia, but only with Hillary and the Democrats, and we should demand a full investigation.” Dan Bongino on @foxandfriends Looking forward to the new IG Report!
Investigations, it bears emphasizing, are generally launched to find illegal activity. Trump’s call to investigate Clinton’s alleged collusion with Russia — a complex and strained theory having to do with the Steele dossier — would seem to belie his true opinion about whether collusion is, in fact, a crime.
But it’s hardly the first time he’s admitted the obvious: that while the word “collusion” doesn’t appear in the criminal code, it is synonymous with and related to very real crimes. Over and over, mostly through his allegations of Democratic collusion, he’s acknowledged the criminal nature of collusion in ways that would seem to make it much more difficult for his lawyers to press the case that collusion by Donald Trump Jr. or anybody else wasn’t criminal. [Blake lists 5 times that Trump, himself, conceded so-called collusion is illegal.]
Federal election law pairs the these prohibitions on foreign national electoral activity with restrictions on the behavior of the would-be U.S. beneficiaries. U.S. nationals, including campaigns, cannot “substantially assist” a foreign national in any of these activities, and Americans cannot solicit, accept or receive any such illegal foreign-national support. Viewed together, these prohibited activities— assistance, solicitation, acceptance, or receipt—certainly capture the essence of what some might understand by references to “collusion.”
From the standpoint of a competent lawyer, the 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Kremlin emissaries directly implicates these rules. The Russians did not merely offer information, plucked from the sky: In the first place, they had to have procured it. To have done so would normally require the expenditure of funds “in connection with” a federal election: opposition material assembled on a U.S. presidential candidate. Certainly the Russian traveling party spent money to travel to the United States for the meeting. Both the material they proposed to provide and the expenses associated with creating and arranging to deliver it raise the serious question of in-kind contributions to the campaign. Moreover, the hypothetical campaign lawyer would have to be concerned that urging the campaign to invest its own resources in a specific line of attack on Hillary Clinton would constitute illegal “participation” in the campaign’s decision-making on its own spending.
….
But then again, Trump and his senior campaign team may not have asked the lawyers for their opinion. They could well have had their reasons: The most obvious and troubling of the possible explanations is that, anticipating a negative response, they may have chosen to proceed without the advice of counsel to pursue victory with Russian help. Then the lawyers would have been consulted only after the fact, to come up with whatever public defense they could devise. This is the road that may have brought the Trump team to this moment—that is, to Rudy Giuliani and the absurd “collusion is not a crime” theory of the president’s case.
Donald Trump’s connection to Russia and Russian interests dates back more than 35 years. His family and associates also have well-documented ties.
Since it can be challenging to keep track of all the players and moving parts in the ever-growing Russia investigations, lawyer Steven Harper and the producers at BillMoyers.com created this interactive Trump-Russia Timeline. It is a comprehensive, easy-to-navigate tool designed to show what has happened and what still is developing in the story of the president, his inner circle, and a tangled web of Russian oligarchs, hackers, and government officials.
First launched in February 2017, the Trump-Russia Timeline now contains more than 1,000 entries. View it in its entirety below, or select one or more names at a time and explore that particular storyline.
The timeline is updated regularly as new developments emerge.
Here is a screenshot from the interactive timeline – just a portion of a fine resource for Americans who want to know more about Russian influence over Trump:
I’m not a Democrat, and never will be, but then I’ve never been tempted to abandon America for any reason, let alone because there are Democrats here, or because somehow being a Democrat in America might be more objectionable than living under Putin.
These gentlemen are sure that they’d be better off in Russia than as Democrats in America.
They are free to go, and to take others of their ilk with them – Aeroflot offers flights to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from several convenient U.S. locations.
The three of us came into the airport and the flight was delayed by nearly two hours. We could tell that everyone was a little bit unhappy about this and Geoff (the banjo player in the video) suggested that we play a bit of a music session. He played a set of traditional Irish dance tunes on the banjo and I (Daoiri Farrell) backed him on the Bouzouki. Robbie Walsh (Bodhran Player) then joined us and we had the attention of everyone in the room immediately. I then proceeded to sing a song. I picked one that I thought everyone would know, The Galway Girl. It went down really well. By this stage my dad had the Canon out and here is the video footage he took. His name is Desmond Farrell and his hobby is photography. Myself Geoff and Robbie are music pals for years. We were in Cumbria at a music festival called “Maddy Prior’s Steppingstones Folk Festival”. My website is Daoiri.com and Robbie’s is “The Bodhran Buzz” if anyone wants to check out any more of our music. I’ve recorded two solo albums now with Robbie and various things with Geoff also:
Monday in Whitewater will see thunderstorms, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 8:08 PM, for 14h 16m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-first day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1945, after more than three-and-a-half years of war since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and years more of Japanese aggression across Asia, the United States detonates an atomic bomb over Hiroshima:
The discovery of nuclear fission by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938, and its theoretical explanation by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, made the development of an atomic bomb a theoretical possibility.[53] Fears that a German atomic bomb project would develop atomic weapons first, especially among scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist countries, were expressed in the Einstein-Szilard letter. This prompted preliminary research in the United States in late 1939.[54] Progress was slow until the arrival of the British MAUD Committee report in late 1941, which indicated that only 5 to 10 kilograms of isotopically enriched uranium-235 were needed for a bomb instead of tons of natural uranium and a neutron moderator like heavy water.[55]
The 1943 Quebec Agreement merged the nuclear weapons projects of the United Kingdom and Canada, Tube Alloys and the Montreal Laboratory, with the Manhattan Project,[56][57] under the direction of Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[58] Groves appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer to organize and head the project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where bomb design work was carried out.[59] Two types of bombs were eventually developed, both named by Robert Serber. Little Boy was a gun-type fission weapon that used uranium-235, a rare isotope of uranium separated at the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[60] The other, known as a Fat Man device, was a more powerful and efficient, but more complicated, implosion-type nuclear weapon that used plutonium created in nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington.[61]
WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.
Mr. Trump made the comment in a tweet on Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and the role his son Donald Trump Jr. played in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”
But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children.
The first is that Trump appears to have broken some new ground here when it comes to admitting the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer — and even further contradicted the initial statement he helped draft about it. At the time, Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement explaining that he and the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” We have since discovered that the elder Trump actually dictated that statement.
Quickly, though, that explanation fell apart, and we learned that Trump Jr. had actually been promised harmful information about Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. The president himself seemed to shrug it off, saying in July 2017 that, “from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting.” He added: “It’s called opposition research or even research into your opponent.” (Trump also tweeted along these lines.) But at the same time, he still suggested that the meeting was, in large part, about adoption.
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But here’s the thing: This is a tweet about how the Trump Tower meeting was totally fine — nothing illegal to see here. If you’ve got no real concern about legal exposure from the meeting, why distance yourself from it? Trump seems to be arguing against his own point by assuring us that he had nothing to do with this meeting, which — oh, by the way — was totally on the up-and-up. Trump might as well have just confirmed The Post’s report that he is worried about what the meeting portends for his son.
The reason we do not know much of anything regarding Trump’s receipt of foreign monies is because, unlike other modern presidents, Trump has refused to release his tax returns and the GOP House has refused to assume its constitutional power to determine whether the president can accept foreign emoluments. Right now litigation is trying to remedy this likely constitutional violation. However, after the midterms, a Democratic House on a simple up-or-down vote could determine that no, the president cannot accept any foreign emoluments from the Saudis or anyone else.
You see, the emoluments clause requires affirmative permission from Congress; by explicitly denying him that permission, Congress would put Trump squarely in violation of the Constitution. In other words, it would be telling Trump, “Your emoluments or your presidency.” And if Trump refuses to give up his emoluments while remaining president? Impeachment would be a remedy for a willful violation of the Constitution, but Congress might also obtain a court order (if it could survive standing issues and a host of other legal hurdles). Foreign funds, for example, might be impounded by court order at his properties. Like Iran sanctions, U.S. banks could be ordered to stop receipt of any overseas money from Trump properties.
In sum, Trump never thought he’d win the presidency and has had no intention of giving up any income. To the contrary, he’s using the presidency to hawk his properties and, in the case of Mar-a-Lago, ratchet up the price of membership and charge the Secret Service and other officials for their accommodations. Trump’s level of greed and indifference to legal and ethical norms is unsurpassed by any president. A Democratic House, however, might go a long way toward ending the grotesque corruption that characterizes his administration.
Although the press has routinely been blamed for some of the United States’s most controversial conflicts, the historical evidence demonstrates that the power to make wartime decisions rests in the Oval Office and on Capitol Hill—not in the newsroom. Yes, the news media has the power to influence public opinion and to focus attention on particular threats, but elected officials always have considerable leeway—outside of an immediate national-security crisis—to make decisions about how and when to use military force. Besides the fact that the “media” is rarely unified on any issue, the ultimate responsibility for war must be laid squarely on the shoulders of elected officials.
This was the case with the Spanish-American War in 1898, where the press is usually blamed for getting the nation into a conflict. According to the legend, the publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers loved to run sensational headlines and provocative stories, honed in on the Cuban revolt against Spain because the real-life drama attracted readers in an increasingly competitive newspaper market. When an accidental explosion blew up the USS Maine, the Hearst papers blamed Spain and drummed up patriotic sentiment. “Remember the Maine!” read the headline. Soon after, Congress declared war.
The myth vastly oversimplifies the reality. The U.S. fleet was already on its way toward Spanish territorial possessions when the explosion occurred. Joseph Campbell and other historians have effectively punctured most of the pillars of the conventional story. Numerous Republicans leaders had been moved by humanitarian concerns. Vermont Senator Redfield Proctor delivered a speech describing the condition of Cubans who had been detained in camps, “one half have died and one quarter of the living are so diseased that they cannot be saved.” A major diplomatic impasse with Spain set up the conditions for the conflict, and the growing imperial ambitions of numerous advisors who were working with President William McKinley also played a role. As the historian George Herring wrote in his book, From Colony to Superpower, the Republican platform in 1896 had “set forth a full-fledged expansionist agenda” and “the War of 1898 provided an opportunity to implement much of this agenda—and more.”
In Baltimore, sometimes called the heroin capital of the U.S., a group of teenagers have developed an app that can track bad batches of drugs and alert nearby users. This helps drug users know when potentially lethal combinations of heroin and fentanyl are being distributed in their community. The so-called Bad Batch Boys believe that giving the information to the people that need it most has the potential to save countless lives.
(One small, sincere effort may have the power to help at least a few avoid disaster.)
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 18m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirtieth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
An electric traffic light was developed in 1912 by Lester Wire, a policeman in Salt Lake City, Utah, who also used red-green lights.[14] On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.[6]:27–28[15] It had two colours, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for colour changes. The design by James Hoge[16] allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920.[17] Ashville, Ohio claims to be the home of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads from 1932 to 1982 when it was moved to a local museum.[18][19]
Radchenko, Rastorguyev and Dzhema were focusing their report on the activities of Wagner, a private Russian military firm with links to the Kremlin and to the military intelligence agency known as the GRU. Its involvement in the Central African Republic is believed to have begun in January this year, when Russia began shipping arms to CAR along with five active duty military and 170 civilian instructors, many of whom presumably are ex-Russian military, to train two army battalions. It had won an exemption to a United Nations arms embargo in order to contribute small arms and ammunition to the country’s chronically weak military, which needed help to keep very determined rebel groups at bay.
But the Wagner Group is something special. Some have called it Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “private army.” The organization is led by Dmitry Utkin, who was once a member of the Russian special forces and is currently under U.S. sanctions for aiding Russian-backed separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
(According to a CNN report, Utkin was once head of security for Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. Prigozhin was one of 13 Russians indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. He became famous as a restaurateur, and earned the nickname,“Putin’s chef.” Russian business outlet RBC reported a year ago that Utkin’s name appeared in a corporate database as the general director of one of Prigozhin’s companies.)
Even after warnings that tariffs would wreak havoc on the economy, Donald Trump has staked his presidency on a series of trade wars that are now coming home to roost. With economic ruin looming over American farmers — a key constituency — he refuses to change course. Instead, he’s mulling a policy of clientelism, a $12 billion cash handout to the victims of his own bad ideas.
It’s a surprising development for many, especially the conservatives who have long lamented bailouts and subsidies, but it’s hardly out of character. On the contrary, it’s a natural fit for a White House that encourages corruption, exploitation and fraud in exchange for loyalty. As with his cabinet officials, he expects that the allure of taxpayer-funded kickbacks will be enough to keep farmers from holding him accountable for his own corruption and failures. It’s not an accident, it’s a strategy: grease the wheels of government so heavily that they spin in place.
Far from draining the swamp, Trump and his coterie of grifters, fraudsters and co-conspirators have filled it in entirely, dividing the land into personal fiefdoms to exploit.
President Trump’s tariffs threaten to throw his “America First” vision into reverse, prompting manufacturers to ship production and jobs overseas to dodge new trade barriers.
That’s one takeaway from the Institute for Supply Management’s July survey, which tracks sentiment among industry executives. It reveals a rising tide of alarm among manufacturers about the direction of the administration’s trade offensive — even before the White House announced Wednesday that it is considering hiking proposed tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports from 10 percent to 25 percent.
“We’re seeing a lot of comments from the respondents about evaluating whether to manufacture something in the U.S. or make it in Canada or make it in Mexico,” Timothy Fiore, chairman of the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey, said Wednesday, per Bloomberg News. “If the end market is Europe or China … you’re going to want to move it outside the U.S. at this point.”
Chuck Rosenberg: There are enough pieces in the public record already for someone to be charged with a conspiracy to coordinate or receive assistance from a hostile power. pic.twitter.com/i3ggW9CrS2
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 20m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-ninth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1862, the 8th Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in a reconnaissance at Bay Springs, Mississippi.
[Commission member Maine Secretary of State Matthew] Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”
In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.
“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”
After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”
Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who was charged last month with working as an unregistered agent of the Kremlin, socialized in the weeks before the 2016 election with a former Trump campaign aide who anticipated joining the presidential transition team, emails show, putting her in closer contact with President Trump’s orbit than was previously known.
Butina sought out interactions with J.D. Gordon, who served for six months as the Trump campaign’s director of national security before leaving in August 2016 and being offered a role in the nascent Trump transition effort, according to documents and testimony provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee and described to The Washington Post.
The two exchanged several emails in September and October 2016, culminating in an invitation from Gordon to attend a concert by the rock band Styx in Washington. Gordon also invited Butina to attend his birthday party in late October of that year.
(Emphasis added. I’m not much for celebrating my own birthday, but even less for inviting Russian operatives. This fifty-year-old man took a twenty-nine-year-old woman to a Styx concert? YMBFKM.)
On May 7, the National Rifle Association released a curious press release declaring that Oliver North, the key player in the Iran-contra scandal and an NRA board member, was “poised to become” the group’s president. Earlier that day, Peter Brownell, then finishing his first term as NRA president, had announced that he would not seek a second annual term in order to devote more time to his family business, a firearms retail company.
This changing of the guard—and how it happened—was odd. For fifteen years, the NRA leadership had followed a specific pattern: an officer was elected by the board to serve two consecutive annual terms as second vice president, then two as first vice president, and, finally, two as president. But the Brownell-to-North transition broke this orderly process. North at the time was serving in neither vice president position. And his ascension was a surprise—even to North. The day of the move, North told NRATV, “I didn’t expect this to be happening…This was very sudden.” (North also remarked, “A coup is being worked against the president of the United States and every conservative organization on the planet.”)
…
What wasn’t publicly known at the time was that on April 25—two weeks before this seemingly hasty NRA leadership makeover—FBI agents in tactical gear raided the apartment of Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian who three months later would be charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly serving as a secret agent for the Russian government in the United States. For years, Butina and her mentor, Alexander Torshin, a Russian official tied to Vladimir Putin, had hooked up with the NRA and other conservative groups, allegedly as part of what the Justice Department called a covert influence operation. Butina, who ran a gun rights group in Russia, and Torshin, who has been accused of money laundering (a charge he denies), had attended NRA events and other right-wing get-togethers, and during the 2016 campaign used their NRA contacts to try to arrange a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump. (It didn’t happen.) During this operation, according to prosecutors, Butina relied upon the assistance of conservative consultant Paul Erickson, her romantic partner and an active NRA member.
At some point, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, you’ve likely met Dale Hansen, the 70-year-old Texas sportscaster who goes “Unplugged” at moments of national distress, sitting the nation on his grandfatherly knee and trying to make sense of calamity after calamity.
“It was another shooting in America,” he said almost casually after the 2016 ambush that killed five police officers in downtown Dallas. “This is what I have become.”
“I’m not taking a side tonight, although I know you think I am,” he said discussing the “March for Our Lives” rally this spring after a massacre at a South Florida high school. “I’m just hoping the kids from Parkland don’t lose the passion they have now.”
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority represents a specific part of the Trump tax bill as beneficial to this city. (Seepress release 1, press release 2.)
For today, looking at the bill generally, it’s bad for America: it’s a sham reform instead of a beneficial restructuring, and it makes this country’s outlook worse.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 leaves many promises of tax reform unfulfilled. In this paper, we examine the plan’s prospects to boost future growth, and discuss fundamental reforms that would boost the stock of capital and generate sustained, long-term growth. After making the case that the current tax code is unsustainable and that reform will be revisited, we recommend a series of strategies for future Congresses, including limiting windfall tax breaks on already-committed capital, providing targeted tax cuts on wages to boost labor supply, reducing the most harmful tax distortions, and administering the tax code more effectively.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) leaves many promises of tax reform unfulfilled. The bill’s cost sets revenues far-below projected spending levels, and puts deficits and debt on an unsustainable trajectory. Many provisions are temporary and expire, require clarification in regulation, or may not survive court challenges from our trading partners—creating uncertainty for individuals and businesses and punting hard choices to future policymakers. While the bill provides temporary economic stimulus, it delivers only a meager boost to long-term economic growth, and even less for Americans’ future living standards. And it fails to achieve other goals of tax reform by making the tax system more complicated and more difficult to administer, and creating new opportunities for avoidance or noncompliance. These shortcomings, coupled with voters’ expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation, seem likely to drive efforts to repeal and replace it.
Fortunately, the tax system is fixable. In the 1980s, an ill-conceived deficit-burgeoning tax cut in 1981 was quickly revised in subsequent years, culminating in comprehensive reform in 1986. America would benefit if history repeated itself—and soon. When the time comes to revisit tax reform, policymakers will have the opportunity to install a tax code that is pro-growth, simpler, sustainable, and more equitable.
When Congress takes up another tax bill, a lasting and beneficial reform will include several ingredients. As a starting point, the most important function of the tax system is to raise revenue to pay for the spending Congress has authorized and that Americans expect. Hence, one objective of reform is to set federal tax revenues on a sustainable path. Given commitments to popular social programs and shifting demographics, and today’s strong economic situation, stabilizing the debt over the next 30 years would require revenues close to 21 percent of GDP (Auerbach, Gale, and Krupkin 2018).
(Emphasis added.)
The full paper is embedded at the bottom of this post. This isn’t a libertarian analysis, of course: setting revenues on a sustainable path would be easier if one set expenditures on a downward path. And yet, for it all, this is a reasonable and possible path (although not, to my mind, ideal).
By contrast, the Trump plan is junk economics. (Lightning would more probably strike the same place a hundred times than Trump would make his way through a white paper on tax policy even once.)
A consideration of particulars awaits, yet this much is now obvious to any reasonable person: a tax policy that hobbles America will never boost Whitewater.