According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the cougar (puma concolor) is one of three wild cats native to the state, along with the bobcat and Canada lynx. It is the largest wildcat north of Mexico, with males ranging from 116-160 pounds and females from 75-110 pounds.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 23m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-eighth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on 1 August and on 3 August, at 2315 (EDT) she became the first watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole.[16] The ability to navigate at extreme latitudes and without surfacing was enabled by the technology of the North American Aviation N6A-1 Inertial Navigation System, a naval modification of the N6A used in the Navaho cruise missile; it had been installed on Nautilus and Skate after initial sea trials on USS Compass Island in 1957.[17] From the North Pole, she continued on and after 96 hours and 1,590 nautical miles (2,940 km; 1,830 mi) under the ice, surfaced northeast of Greenland, having completed the first successful submerged voyage around the North Pole. The technical details of this mission were planned by scientists from the Naval Electronics Laboratory including Dr. Waldo Lyon who accompanied Nautilus as chief scientist and ice pilot.
Navigation beneath the arctic ice sheet was difficult. Above 85°N both magnetic compasses and normal gyrocompasses become inaccurate. A special gyrocompass built by Sperry Rand was installed shortly before the journey. There was a risk that the submarine would become disoriented beneath the ice and that the crew would have to play “longitude roulette”. Commander Anderson had considered using torpedoes to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface.[18]
The most difficult part of the journey was in the Bering Strait. The ice extended as much as 60 feet (18 m) below sea level. During the initial attempt to go through the Bering Strait, there was insufficient room between the ice and the sea bottom. During the second, successful attempt to pass through the Bering passage, the submarine passed through a known channel close to Alaska (this was not the first choice, as the submarine wanted to avoid detection).
Recommended for reading in full —
The Committee to Investigate Russia shares the trailer for the upcoming documentary ACTIVE MEASURES, about Russian covert actions against the United States:
ACTIVE MEASURES chronicles the most successful espionage operation in Russian history, the American presidential election of 2016. Filmmaker Jack Bryan exposes a 30-year history of covert political warfare devised by Vladimir Putin to disrupt, and ultimately control world events. In the process, the filmmakers follow a trail of money, real estate, mob connections, and on the record confessions to expose an insidious plot that leads directly back to The White House. With democracy hanging in the balance, ACTIVE MEASURES is essential viewing. Unraveling the true depth and scope of “the Russia story” as we have come to know it, this film a jarring reminder that some conspiracies hide in plain sight.
(The film will be in theaters on Friday, August 31st.)
Here’s the video. Sarah Sanders is asked multiple times if she believes the media is the enemy of the people. She refuses each time to respond. (via Yahoo) pic.twitter.com/q9jvKSzl3u
First, this is the behavior Trump incites and amplifies with his attacks on the free press. When he says the media is the “enemy of the people” or the worst people or the most dishonest people, his followers take it as license to treat members of the media as something less than human. Trump has defined the press as part of “the other,” and his cult responds with the kind of venom used to keep a foreign body at bay.
The Trump administration blocked a CNN correspondent from attending an open media event. That’s an assault on press freedom.(Erik Wemple, Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)
Second, let’s not be surprised when 35 percent or so of voters consistently tell pollsters that the president is the victim of a witch hunt or that they agree with every policy position and action he takes. Trump fans’ politics is not the politics of rationality, considered judgment or empirical observation. Blind hatred and unthinking boorishness are not moderated by new facts or observable phenomena. We should stop marveling as his “success” in holding his base as if this were a reflection of his political skill, let alone the efficacy of his policies. Rather, the unbreakable and unblinking devotion of his unhinged base is confirmation that he now must rely on support from people oblivious to reality.
Third, we should stop infantilizing Trump supporters, treating them as hapless victims of forces beyond their control. We’ve done them wrong. They come from “real America.” Bunk. Whatever one’s economic hardships, any threatening, unhinged conduct and crude insults shouldn’t be excused. Trump cultists claim to be injured by the disrespect of “elites”; the only ones showing disrespect in Tampa were those in the mob. (And anyway, what ever happened to personal responsibility for one’s life choices?)
(Our forefathers opposed Tories, Know Knothings, Confederates, Copperheads, Klan, and Bund – we in our time are called to face Trumpism. The proper focus is Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders and this focus necessarily extends to officials supportive of Trumpism Down to the Local Level, but Rubin correctly sees that Trump begets Trumpism, and Trumpism begets a threat to the democratic order.)
Republican governance has shown how much the party actually cares about the deficit: not one bit.
The party’s hypocrisy on the budget is not new.After Bill Clinton dramatically shrank both deficits and government spending as a share of the economy, George W. Bush took office and proceeded to dramatically increase both.
Yet the thoroughness of the Republicans’ insincerity is still remarkable.Through their actions, they have proven that they cared about the deficit primarily for its usefulness as a political cudgel, an easy way to curtail Democratic policy goals.
So it is hardly surprising that Democrats, driven by young progressives, would respond by moving toward an agenda that no longer treats those concerns as genuine. True, even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has not entirely given up the pretense of caring about deficits. In a recent “The Daily Show” appearance, she was asked how she would pay for her agenda, and she responded by proposing a series of tax increases and a significant reduction in military spending.
….
One can perhaps imagine a Republican Party that could defend conventional notions of fiscal responsibility with some semblance of integrity, a conservative movement that governed according to its professed principles; even some deficit doves might find such a party useful as a pragmatic counterweight to progressive ambitions.
But although Republicans will surely attack the new class of Democratic Socialists and their policies as debt-increasing budget busters — that is, after all, what Republicans do — their own actions will ensure that those criticisms have no real authority. Their opposition to the socialist agenda will be hollow, because they helped make that agenda possible.
(It’s worth noting that although I do not – indeed cannot – support Ocasio-Cortez’s economic agenda, I don’t dislike her, so to speak. Her economics are, to me, misguided, but then Trumpism is far worse than misguided, on matters far beyond economics. A libertarian could sit with Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez and discuss economic policy, although a deal would likely be impossible. By contrast, there’s no reason even to sit with Trump and his ilk.
In the spring, Whitewater saw two Community Development Authority press releases touting a specific part of the Trump tax bill. (Seepress release 1, press release 2.)
(3) to remark on the CDA’s admission that – even after a generation of CDA public spending – the particular tax provision was for “lower income communities like ours” (seeA Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA).
They find that TCJA will stimulate the economy in the near term, but the long-term impact on gross domestic product (GDP) will be small. The impact will be smaller on gross national product (GNP) than on GDP because the law will generate net capital inflows from abroad that have to be repaid in the future.
The new law will reduce federal revenues by significant amounts, even after allowing for the impact on economic growth. It will make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal. If it is not financed with concurrent spending cuts or other tax increases, TCJA will raise federal debt and impose burdens on future generations. If it is financed with spending cuts or other tax increases, TCJA will, under the most plausible scenarios, end up making most households worse off than if it had not been enacted.
One has much more to write about the general and particular aspects of the Trump tax bill (including so-called opportunity zones).
There’s a more general consideration even than this, of course: Trumpism is wholly and particularly dangerous to our democratic tradition. It is, at its core, a rejection of the centuries of political and economic development on this continent, and thousands of years of political, economic, moral, and philosophical learning on which our tradition rests.
Even if, however, one were too ignorant to grasp this, it should be enough to know that federal officials Trump, Mnuchin, and Sensenbrenner have nothing good to offer Whitewater. Scampering off to thank Sensenbrenner, both as the act and as an account of it, shows how out of touch these development men are with the very town they seek to develop.
Indeed, the full application of Trumpism to this city would rend both its social and economic fabric.
Finally, as I made clear in an email to two city officials, no official in this city is owed a particular reply on this issue. That’s been my practice on smaller issues for these last eleven years, and it would be my practice on Trumpism even for the next eleven hundred, if it should take so long. The proper focus of one’s attention should be Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders and this focus necessarily extends to officials supportive of Trumpism Down to the Local Level.
There’s no discussion to be had, no deal to be made, and no possible understanding to be reached. Trumpism, as was true with a few similarly malevolent movements from our past, deserves only a diligent opposition until its end.
Thursday in Whitewater will see an occasional thunderstorm, with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 25m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-seventh day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.
The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776 at the Pennsylvania State House, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the 13 former colonies which had declared themselves the “United States of America,” and they endorsed the Declaration of Independence which the Congress had approved on July 4, 1776. The Declaration proclaimed that the former Thirteen Colonies then at war with Great Britain were now a sovereign, independent nation and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. The signers’ names are grouped by state, with the exception of President of the Continental Congress John Hancock; the states are arranged geographically from north to south.
“Twenty-one months after the 2016 election, and only three months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said Wednesday at a hearing of Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is vice chairman. “They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today.”
Experts say the lack of forceful administration leadership on the issue — with President Trump at times questioning the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about Russia’s disinformation and hacking campaign — renders less effective the efforts of agencies to mount a coordinated government action.
“If you can’t talk about Russia around the president, I don’t see how you get out in front of this, given that they’re the ones doing most of the foreign influence,” said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and disinformation expert for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
(Trump would rather win dishonestly with Russia than lose honestly with America.)
In the face of active measures by our adversaries to widen our nation’s social gulfs, one might imagine a more responsible leader trying to bring us together, to ease our anxieties about each other and to stand against endless cycles of recrimination.
Instead, Trump is working in tandem with these outside trolls to aggravate resentment, stoke backlash and incite his opponents.
On the very day that Facebook revealed the new influence operation and announced it had deleted 32 pages and accounts connected to it, Trump went to Florida for a rally where he rehearsed some of his favorite incendiary themes.
Last winter, the Greater Whitewater Committee, a local 501(c)(6) business league, invited Matt Moroney (a longtime Walker operative) to speak to residents on Foxconn’s many supposed benefits. The Daily Union‘s longtime stenographer correspondent dutifully and uncritically reported on Moroney’s remarks. See A Sham News Story on Foxconn.
Over the years, key leaders of this business league have served on the Community Development Authority, where they’ve touted state public subsidies to chosen businesses via WEDC and other corporate welfare schemes.
(Indeed, they market these taxpayer-funded subsidies as though they were manna from God. Quick theological reminder: The governor is not God, WEDC is not the heavenly host, and corporate welfare is not manna. SeeFoxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions.)
Still, as a suggestion, why not make the next business league meeting something really special, and go all-out, in a costume affair?
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-sixth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this date the armed steamboat the Warrior reached the British Band on the Mississippi where they hoped to cross the river and escape the American troops. After being guided by a Sioux Indian, the ship which held an artillery piece, dropped anchor, making the Sauk escape virtually impossible. Black Hawk attempted to surrender to the Warrior, waving a white cloth, but the crew either did not understand or did not accept the message. The ship and its men opened fire, killing a number of unprepared Indians. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 140-141]
Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R
(The scientific case against the existence of a ‘master race’ is overwhelming, but even as anecdotal evidence this video is a powerful refutation of the ludicrous claim of white superiority.)
“The Republican college-educated woman is done,” Bannon replied. “They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
I spend a decent amount of time looking at polls and data, and Bannon’s comments struck me as accurate. On Monday, I looked at how women broadly were lining up in opposition to Trump and the Republican Party at unusual levels; the idea that white, college-educated women might be out of play rings largely true.
(Bannon uses the condescending Trumpist term ‘triggered’ for how these women feel about Trump. They’re not triggered, they’re repulsed and infuriated, as any reasonable person would be by Trump’s bigoted, autocratic self-dealing.)
Rudy Giuliani can’t seem to get the law right. The president’s lawyer suggested Monday on CNN and Fox News that Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime even if he colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign by encouraging them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani put it. “You start analyzing the crime – the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”
That’s just wrong. Although there is no formal charge known as “collusion,” federal criminal law covers anyone who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” a felony. The elements of the crime need to be broken down to see how they might potentially apply to Trump’s actions during the campaign. And to be sure, not all the facts that would bring Trump under the federal statute have been proved.
But the law definitely doesn’t require Trump to have hacked himself or to have paid the Russians to do the hacking, as Giuliani argued. And the First Amendment wouldn’t protect Trump if the facts showed that he counseled the Russians to commit a federal hacking crime.
It’s true there is no crime called “collusion.” It’s also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened. Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called “collusion” is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit “homicide” not “shooting.”
Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy. A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States. Both charges are potentially relevant here — and Mueller has already deployed both.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States includes an agreement to impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful functions of the federal government. This could include, for example, an agreement with the Russians to interfere with the Federal Election Commission’s administration of federal election laws. Indeed, this type of conspiracy was the lead charge in February’s indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies for interfering with the election largely through social media. That indictment charges the defendants “intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of the FEC, the State Department and the Justice Department by making illegal campaign contributions, obtaining visas under false pretenses and failing to register as foreign agents.
