Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776,  Washington is victorious at the Battle of Trenton, defeating and capturing nearly one hundred Hessian mercenaries.

Recommended for reading in full —

Monsy Alvarado, Ashley Balcerzak, Stacey Barchenger, Jon Campbell, Rafael Carranza, Maria Clark, Alan Gomez, Daniel Gonzalez, Trevor Hughes, Rick Jervis, Dan Keemahill, Rebecca Plevin, Jeremy Schwartz, Sarah Taddeo, Lauren Villagran, Dennis Wagner, Elizabeth Weise, and Alissa Zhu report Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US (‘A USA TODAY Network investigation revealed sex assaults, routine use of physical force, poor medical care and deaths at facilities overseen by ICE’):

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Combined with an analysis by a government watchdog, the USA TODAY Network analyzed inspection reports since 2015 and identified 15,821 violations of detention standards. Yet more than 90% of those facilities received passing grades by government inspectors. Network reporters interviewed 35 former and current detainees, some conducted using video chats from inside an ICE detention center. They reviewed hundreds of documents from lawsuits, financial records and government contracts, and toured seven ICE facilities from Colorado to Texas to Florida. Such tours are extremely rare.

At least two detention centers passed inspections despite using a chemical restraint – Freeze +P – that is forbidden for use under ICE rules because it contains tear gas that produces “severe pain,” according to its manufacturer. Other centers received passing marks even after inspectors chronicled widespread use of physical force or solitary confinement. Richwood was one of the centers that passed inspections.

Vicente Raul Orozco Serguera, one of the Richwood detainees who protested after Hernandez-Diaz died, told outsiders that the death and violent confrontation with guards punctuated a terrifying stay at Richwood that began with detention center officials forcing him to sign a document listing who would recover his body if he died in custody.

“The United States has appointed itself the country of liberty, the land of opportunity, the defender of human rights and the refuge for people oppressed by their governments. All that ends once you’re detained,” Orozco Serguera wrote in a letter from Richwood that was delivered to a lawyer in hopes of finding someone to help him. “We want our freedom to fight our cases freely and leave this hell, for Louisiana is a ‘Cemetery of living men.’ ”

(In this, one does well to remember that Adam Serwer is right about Trumpism: cruelty is the point, that ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’ Repeated rights abuses of others bring Trumpism’s lumpen band – a bund, one might also say – closer together. These abuses have a secondary purpose, undoubtedly – to convince America’s majority that resistance and opposition are futile. Trump and his officials are, in this, short-sighted: they will meet a lawful reckoning individually, and political ruin collectively. A Third Reconstruction awaits, advancing – over a century – America’s liberal democratic tradition while rendering its adversaries ineffectual.)

‘Ring of Fire’ solar eclipse darkens the skies across Asia:

Good morning.

Christmas Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 22s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776,  George Washington and the Continental Army cross the Delaware River at night to attack Hessian forces serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey, the next day.

Recommended for reading in full —

Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, and Carol D. Leonnig report Former White House officials say they feared Putin influenced the president’s views on Ukraine and 2016 campaign:

Almost from the moment he took office, President Trump seized on a theory that troubled his senior aides: Ukraine, he told them on many occasions, had tried to stop him from winning the White House.

After meeting privately in July 2017 with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Trump grew more insistent that Ukraine worked to defeat him, according to multiple former officials familiar with his assertions.

The president’s intense resistance to the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia systematically interfered in the 2016 campaign — and the blame he cast instead on a rival country — led many of his advisers to think that Putin himself helped spur the idea of Ukraine’s culpability, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions.

One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because “Putin told me.”

Two other former officials said the senior White House official described Trump’s comment to them.

Anna Nemtsova writes Russia’s Twin Nostalgias (‘Vladimir Putin has a fondness for the Soviet era. So do many Russians—but often not for the same reasons’):

Here in Sochi, it is apparent that Putin’s memories of the Soviet era differ markedly from those of ordinary city dwellers. Putin has positive recollections of his time as a KGB officer, when the might of the state was awe-inspiring, its rulers held on par with the most powerful around the world. Sochi’s people, though, remember a time when their gardens and public spaces were open and accessible, not simply in the physical sense, but in the financial one.

A few years ago, the authorities here closed one of Sochi’s earliest spa hotels, Ordzhonikidze. It now stands abandoned, and when I visited, I could see its ceiling paintings rotting in the moist air, the building’s columns falling apart. Parts of statues had fallen off and wild ivy sprawled across the floor. The resort’s former gardener pointed out some trees in the resort’s park that she said were unique to Russia, and noted how paths that used to cut through neatly trimmed beds of flowers were now cracking. As I took it in, a female security guard wearing a camouflage uniform ordered me to leave, saying the building was “under the control of the presidential administration.”

I later spoke with a local artist, Oleg Korchagin, who fondly recalled an era I could barely remember, what he described as the “urban harmony” of the Sochi of his youth. “I miss the Sochi where I could walk freely, the Sochi of beautiful architecture,” he told me. “Unfortunately now, local people move along fences surrounding secret, specialized, resorts.

“My nostalgia,” he continued, “is different from the nostalgia of our authorities.”

How Used Hilton Hotel Soaps Get Recycled:

Good morning.

Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 02m 04s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 3.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1968, Apollo 8 becomes the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth orbit, reach the Moon, orbit it, and return.

Recommended for reading in full —

Philip Bump reports Trump notwithstanding, incomes in blue America continue to grow faster than in red areas:

New data from the Census Bureau, though, suggest that, even under Trump, it’s bluer areas of the country that are seeing bigger gains.

There are several reasons for this, including the increasing centralization of technology jobs in certain regions, as the Brookings Institution reported this month. Part of it, too, is that areas that once relied on manufacturing haven’t evolved their economies enough to prevent younger workers from migrating elsewhere, as Well Fargo Securities economist Mark Vitner told the Associated Press. The AP was reporting on the new census data, which found “household income grew the most in tech and entertainment centers like Austin, Texas; Nashville, Tennessee; and large chunks of the West Coast.”

If we break out that data by congressional district and overlay 2016 voting preference, clear patterns emerge. Incomes in districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or more narrowly preferred Trump tend to range across a number of median incomes. Districts that were more heavily supportive of Trump are clustered in lower income ranges. (These figures are not adjusted for inflation.)

….

The extent to which Trump can shape the economy was always more limited than he suggested. He has enacted some policies, such as tariffs, that have had an effect opposite to the one he promised. (Thanks in part to those tariffs, employment growth in the Midwest is trailing other areas of the country.)

The implicit promise of Trump’s campaign, though, was that red America would thrive at blue America’s expense. Under Trump, blue America is doing just fine.

Gerry Shih reports ‘Everyone is getting locked up’: As workers grow disgruntled, China strikes at labor activists:

In meetings of senior officials in January, Xi stressed the need for a “high degree of vigilance” against political and economic challenges, while a key ally, Wang Huning, told cadres of the need to “defuse major risks” that could undermine the party’s rule.

[They built a Chinese boomtown. It left them dying of lung disease with nowhere to turn.]

In the past year, authorities have severely punished students from elite universities for trying to organize electronics workers. They have also sentenced several nonprofit workers and bloggers for advocating for sick construction workers. China’s government has not commented on the labor crackdown, and police in Guangzhou declined to answer questions about Chen.

Ground zero both for activists and the government response has been southern Guangdong province, which has been rocked by strikes, factory relocations and closures as China’s exports dip.

How Much Do Traffic Jams Cost The U.S. Economy?:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 01m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, Gen. Washington resigns as commander-in-chief, marking the end of his military service during the Revolution.

Recommended for reading in full —

Rory Linnae reports Wisconsin once had a ‘model’ voting rights program for people with disabilities. Officials have let it decline:

Despite the clamor to turn out Wisconsin voters in 2020, some voters might be stopped at the doors of their polling places.

Auditors have flagged hundreds of violations at Wisconsin polls that make it harder or impossible for voters with disabilities to vote in person. A Journal Sentinel review of audits found officials are missing required action plans to fix most of these issues from the last two years.

Though Wisconsin once had a robust program for monitoring accessibility problems at polls — one that was lauded as a best practice by a presidential commission in 2014 — state officials have let it wane. Since the recognition, officials have missed audits, been slow to follow up on accessibility violations and provided fewer supplies to help polling places become more accessible.

“This dramatic decrease in the audit program is troubling as these audits provide critical information on the accessibility of polling places around the state,” said Denise Jess, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Margaret Sullivan writes The two big flaws of the media’s impeachment coverage — and what went right:

Their test was to cover the impeachment proceedings without getting mired in the usual traps: false equivalence; distraction by presidential stunt; rampant speculation; the use of squishy language; and what I called Barr-Letter Syndrome, a reference to the way the mainstream press allowed Attorney General William P. Barr last spring to mischaracterize the findings of the Mueller report.

….

Equating the unequal: In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference.

“Too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop,” wrote Jon Allsop in Columbia Journalism Review. “We’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of ‘both sides’ is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly.”

Other critics, including the Atlantic’s James Fallows, NYU’s Jay Rosen and Dan Froomkin of Press Watch, among others, pointed particularly at the New York Times.

The “pizazz” and “polarization” problems: The first hearings, featuring State Department officials William B. Taylor Jr. and George Kent, failed to provide adequate thrills for some, despite their helpfulness in establishing that Trump had strong-armed Ukraine for political favors.

Some news organizations seemed to join with President Trump in dubbing them dull — a “#snoozefest” as his son Eric saw it.

Author Jennifer Weiner warned in a Times opinion piece: “If we keep insisting that impeachment has to entertain us, we’re going to channel-surf our way right out of our democracy.”

Who Pre-Ordered Tesla’s Cybertruck?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 15.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1944, Anthony McAuliffe, acting commander of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division troops defending Bastogne, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge, refuses a German surrender demand.

Recommended for reading in full —

R. Jeffrey Smith reports Trump Administration  Officials Worried Ukraine Aid Halt Violated Spending Law:

When President Donald Trump ordered a halt to aid to Ukraine last summer, defense officials and diplomats worried first that it would undermine U.S. national security. Ukraine is, as some of them later testified before Congress, on the front lines of Russian aggression, and only robust American support would fend off aggressive Moscow meddling in the West. This worry eventually helped galvanize congressional support for one of the two impeachment articles approved by the House of Representatives on Dec. 18.

But there was also a separate, less-noticed facet of the internal administration uproar set off by Trump’s July 12 order stopping the flow of $391 million in weapons and security assistance to Ukraine. Some senior administration officials worried that by defying a law ordering that the funds be spent within a defined period, Trump was asking the officials involved to take an action that was not merely unwise but flatly illegal.

The administration so far has declined to release copies of its internal communications about this vital issue – the legality of what Trump had ordered. On Friday, in 146 pages of new documents provided to the Center for Public Integrity under a court order, the Justice Department blacked out – for the second time – many of the substantive passages reflecting what key officials at the Pentagon and the Office of Management and Budget said to one another.

But considerable evidence is still available that those at key institutions responsible for distributing the Ukraine aid worried the halt potentially violated a 45-year-old law written to keep presidents from ignoring the will of Congress, according to public statements and congressional testimony

That law, known as the Impoundment Control Act, says that once Congress appropriates funds – like the Ukraine assistance – and the president signs the relevant spending bill, the executive branch must spend those funds. A president cannot simply ignore Congress’s direction, no matter how inconvenient or unappealing that instruction might be. If funds are withheld or shifted elsewhere, this cannot be done in secret, and Congress must approve.

(Emphasis added.)

See also updates to the Center for Public Integrity’s reporting at the DIGGING INTO THE #UKRAINEDOCS live blog.

Dan Friedman reports Trump Touts Support from Putin Over Impeachment (‘Trump’s tweet follows a report that Putin planted the idea of Ukrainian inference with Trump’):

You can’t make it up. President Donald Trump on Friday night touted a statement from Russian President Vladimir Putin criticizing Trump’s impeachment. Trump did this amid continuing revelations that Putin helped sell him on the discredited theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Get In the Christmas Spirit With These Stories:

Good morning.

The first day of winter in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 23.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Catherine Rampell writes Two years later, every promise made about the GOP tax cuts has been broken:

In the fiscal year that recently ended, the deficit once again widened, to nearly $1 trillion. That is 26 percent higher than the deficit in fiscal 2018 and an astounding 48 percent higher relative to 2017, the last full year before the tax cuts were in place.

Yes, the deficit went up partly because spending did. But it has also increased because tax revenue isn’t coming in nearly as strongly as you’d expect during an economic expansion. In fact, thanks to Trump’s tax overhaul, corporate tax revenue is down more than a fifth since fiscal 2017. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that the legislation overall will end up adding nearly $2 trillion in red ink over a decade.

As you may recall, the tax law’s boosters promised it would pay for itself by supercharging the economy. Just two weeks before signing the bill, Trump foresaw “6 percent growth.” If true, that would have been quite an achievement — roughly triple what independent forecasters predicted for the upcoming decade.

Lisa Kaplan writes The Biggest Social Media Operation You’ve Never Heard of Is Run Out of Cyprus by Russians:

Here’s what I do know: Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia. It is run by Russian nationals and based in and managed from Cyprus, with U.S. operations housed in a shared work space in New York. It funds itself with ad revenues from YouTube and Google worth tens of millions of dollars. And in 2018, it purchased a small suite of Facebook advertisements targeting U.S. citizens on political issues—and it made those purchases in rubles.

….

If you’ve never heard of TheSoul, you’re not alone. The company has built its online empire in relative obscurity. Public coverage of the company in English has been sporadic. In September 2019, Time magazine raved over the company’s traffic and described the “bizarre” content posted by 5-Minute Crafts. Vox likewise posted an article in November 2018 characterizing the channel’s content as “cringey” and “peculiar.” Forbes has noted the lightning-fast rise of TheSoul Publishing and its remarkable traffic, contrasting the apparently anodyne videos with dire-sounding concerns over Russian election interference: “So just what are those Trump loving, Hillary hating Russians promoting ad nauseam on Facebook to fool Americans into voting the way Vladimir Putin wants?” the Forbes article asks, before showing a lengthy video compilation of TheSoul’s crafting suggestions.

….

But here’s the thing: TheSoul Publishing also posts history videos with a strong political tinge. Many of these videos are overtly pro-Russian. One video posted on Feb. 17, 2019, on the channel Smart Banana, which typically posts listicles and history videos, claims that Ukraine is part of Russia.

“Best Illusion of the Year” by the Neural Correlate Society:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 35.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Luthern and Gina Barton report A powerful Milwaukee real estate developer accused of sexual assault was questioned at a shelter instead of the police station:

A woman who told police a real estate developer drugged and raped her took five years to come forward largely because she feared for her safety and was afraid he would retaliate against her, according to a police report obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The woman told police Kalan Haywood Sr. “is a man of importance in Milwaukee and is known to associate with high-level political officials including senators and the mayor,” according to the report.

Haywood, 45, denied the allegations, telling a Milwaukee police detective any sexual activity he had with the woman was consensual and he did not remember the November 2014 encounter she described, according to a video obtained by the Journal Sentinel.

“Me drugging a lady to have sex with her? Totally insane,” Haywood told the Journal Sentinel in a lengthy interview. “Totally, totally, totally, totally, totally insane.”

When a detective questioned Haywood, he did so at the Sojourner Family Peace Center, without the knowledge of the center’s executive director.

In the video of Haywood’s interview with police, the detective appeared to assuage Haywood’s fears that he’d be recognized by telling him the domestic violence shelter was a place where suspects are never questioned.

Haywood has not been arrested or charged in the case. The investigation remains open. The Journal Sentinel is using his name because he is a high-profile developer, sits on numerous civic boards, has received city funding for real estate projects and has been publicly identified by the Milwaukee Police Association as a suspect in a sexual assault case.

Nathalie Baptiste writes Trump’s Food Stamp Cuts Will Be Devastating to Trump Country:

Earlier this month, the US Department of Agriculture finalized new restrictions on eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, which provided food assistance to 40 million people in 2018. Millions of low-income families, seniors, veterans, and people with disabilities access this vital benefit. Under the new rule, which goes into effect in April 2020, work requirements for the 700,000 SNAP users who are labeled as “able-bodied” adults without any dependents (ABAWD) will be tightened, potentially leaving them without access to the program and pushed deeper into poverty.

But an unintended consequence of this measure is the damage that it will do to rural communities and the grocery stores they rely on.

….

“SNAP users help grocery stores’ bottom line,” says David Procter, director of Kansas State University’s Rural Grocery Initiative. According to a report from Civil Eats, a news organization that reports on America’s food system, SNAP cuts will mean that places as different as Detroit and rural Alaska could suffer. In Detroit, two different grocers told researchers that SNAP makes up 80 percent of their business. In rural Alaska, according to Eater, a food news site, for some village grocers, SNAP benefits make up 40 percent of their profits. Oregon Food Bank CEO Susannah Morgan estimated that the state stands to lose $18 million in revenue at grocery stores and agricultural production.

  The Best Tech Of The Decade:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 46.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Betsy Swan reports Trump Administration Battles New Sanctions on Russia:

The bill, called the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act of 2019” (DASKA) would level new sanctions against Russian oligarchs, against its banking sector, and against its sovereign debt (which the powerful California Public Employees Retirement System has hundreds of millions of dollars invested). It would also open the door to sanctioning Russia’s ship-building industry in response to the Kremlin’s capture of Ukrainian sailors and ships as they sailed through the Kerch Strait late last year. And it would sanction some crude oil development projects in Russia, as well as energy projects outside the country backed by Russian state-owned entities.

Julia Davis writes Russia’s State TV Calls Trump Their ‘Agent’:

They’ve also added a cynical new a narrative filled with half-joking ironies as they look at the American president’s bleak prospects when he does leave office.

Appearing on Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Mikhail Gusman, first deputy director general of ITAR-TASS, Russia’s oldest and largest news agency, predicted: “Sooner or later, the Democrats will come back into power. The next term or the term after that, it doesn’t matter… I have an even more unpleasant forecast for Trump. After the White House, he will face a very unhappy period.”

The host, Vladimir Soloviev, smugly asked: “Should we get another apartment in Rostov ready?” Soloviev’s allusion was to the situation of Viktor Yanukovych, former president of Ukraine, who was forced to flee to Russia in 2014 and settled in the city of Rostov-on-Don.

Such parallels between Yanukovych and Trump are being drawn not only because of their common association with Paul Manafort, adviser to the first, campaign chairman for the second, but also because Russian experts and politicians consider both of them to be openly pro-Kremlin.

Isaac Stanley-Becker reports Russian disinformation network is said to have helped spread smear of U.S. ambassador to Ukraine:

The story that appeared on the Hill website on March 20 was startling.

Marie Yovanovitch, the American ambassador to Ukraine, had given a “list of people whom we should not prosecute” to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, according to a write-up of an interview Lutsenko gave to the conservative columnist John Solomon.

Five days later, an image of that purported list appeared in a post on the website Medium and on some other self-publishing platforms in locations as disparate as Germany, South Africa and San Francisco. In less than a week, the Medium essay had been translated into Spanish and German and posted to other websites.

Now, a social media analysis firm, Graphika, has traced those posts to a Russian disinformation campaign — in the first evidence that a network of accounts involved in spreading disinformation before the 2016 presidential election also participated in circulating the false claims about Yovanovitch that earlier this year led to her recall from the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

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