Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:28 PM, for 11h 31m 25s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 2017, the New York Times publishes its investigation into allegations against Harvey Weinstein.  See Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.  (Kantor & Twohey now have a book, She Said, about their reporting on Weinstein’s serial violence.)

Recommended for reading in full:

Adam Taylor writes Foreign allies who gambled on Trump face big losses:

The Trump administration has had a rough few weeks, but spare a thought for the president’s closest foreign allies. From Britain to Australia, Japan to Saudi Arabia, foreign leaders who decided to gamble on America’s unpredictable leader are probably wondering whether they made a losing bet.

In the United States, the ongoing scandal about President Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sparked a swell of momentum for impeachment. Democrats argue that the phone call, in which Trump said Zelensky should open a criminal investigation against the son of one of his rivals, amounted to an abuse of office.

But there was more than one world leader on that phone call. Some critics in Ukraine have condemned Zelensky’s attempts to placate Trump during the conversation. “Now we’re a part of American elections, and I don’t like it,” Oleksiy Honcharenko, a member of former president Petro Poroshenko’s party, told The Washington Post. “Ukraine has problems enough without this.”

(Emphasis in original. Foreign leaders who gambled on Trump were never worthy allies of the United States.  If they were worthy allies, then they would not have been so solicitous to a bigoted autocrat who was a threat to the liberal democratic order that defines the American republic.  We can do better.)

In Fighting Russian Disinformation, Brookings scholar Alina Polyakova on why the United States needs to go on the offense:

Russia’s attempt to swing the 2016 U.S. election campaign for Donald Trump was just one of dozens of such operations Moscow has waged in the West in recent years. Assessing the specific impact of each act of political interference is exceedingly difficult. But analysts increasingly point to a general trend that serves Russia’s interest: The operations are eroding Western voters’ overall trust in democracy.

This week on And Now the Hard Part, we trace the roots of Moscow’s political interference and talk about how countries can fight back.

“You have to send the message to those that try to undermine our democracies that there will be consequences for their actions,” says Alina Polyakova, the director of the Global Project on Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution and our guest this week.

The Last Video Store:

When [Miguel] Gomez moved to a small town outside Philadelphia, he lamented its lack of a video store. So he opened one himself. Roy Power’s short documentary Memory Video is a portrait of Gomez and his homespun operation—one of the last rental stores of its kind.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:30 PM, for 11h 34m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 37.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1957, the Soviets launch Sputnik 1 into orbit.

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley reports Nearly 40,000 Wisconsinites would lose benefits under proposed Trump administration food stamp rule:

The change would boost costs for Wisconsin taxpayers by millions of dollars a year because the state would have to upgrade the computer systems that administer the FoodShare program, retrain workers and more thoroughly scrutinize the assets of people who apply for benefits.

The computer upgrade would cost $2.3 million, according to the state Department of Health Services. Operational costs would rise by $17.7 million a year. State and local taxpayers would have to pick up about half of both sets of costs, with the federal government paying for the rest.

“The bottom line is you’d have more cost on bureaucracy and administration and fewer benefits going to Wisconsinites,” Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said.

Kaul and 23 other attorneys general sent a letter last week urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to implement the new rule for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which is widely known as the food stamp program. In Wisconsin, it is called FoodShare.

(This federal mandate asks too much, and takes from those who have too little.)

Jeff Stein, Tom Hamburger, and Josh Dawsey report IRS whistleblower said to report Treasury political appointee might have tried to interfere in audit of Trump or Pence:

An Internal Revenue Service ­official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president’s or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document.

Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it in a federal court filing. They are also discussing whether to make it public.

The details of the IRS complaint follow news of a separate, explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August by a member of the intelligence community. That complaint revealed Trump’s request of Ukranian leaders to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival. It has spurred an impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.

Have you ever seen an atom?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:32 PM, for 11h 37m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and the Fire Department board of directors meets at 6:30 PM. 

On this day in 1862, 17th Wisconsin Infantry fights at Corinth, Mississippi: “also known as the Irish Brigade, [they] led a bayonet charge with the Gaelic battle cry ‘Faugh a ballagh!’ or ‘Clear the Way.’ ”

Recommended for reading in full:

Patrick Marley reports Top Republican signals he won’t cover legal bills in Twitter case, says he was doing his job when he blocked liberal group:

A top GOP lawmaker is signaling he won’t help reimburse taxpayers for $200,000 in legal bills he and other Republicans racked up when a court found they had illegally blocked a liberal group on Twitter.

State officials in August agreed to pay for One Wisconsin Now’s legal bills after a federal judge determined Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Rep. John Nygren violated the group’s First Amendment rights by preventing it from accessing and responding to their Twitter posts.

Vos and Nygren didn’t respond to questions about the settlement at the time and Nygren on Wednesday gave no sign he planned to pay the settlement.

“I’m not even answering that,” he said when asked if he would pay some of the settlement.

Last year, then-Rep. Dale Kooyenga paid the state $30,000 to cover a settlement in a lawsuit brought after he took a protest sign from a public area of the Capitol. Kooyenga, a Republican from Brookfield, won a seat in the state Senate in November.

Greg Sargent writes Here’s the next fake scandal Trump thinks will save him:

President Trump and Republicans are excitedly drawing attention to a breaking story in the New York Times that reports that the whistleblower gave advance notice to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) about the subject of his complaint, before filing it to the intelligence community’s inspector general.

….

But there’s nothing in the story that says anything about Schiff having any substantive input into the whistleblower’s complaint. It says Schiff’s aide reported to him some of what the whistleblower said, and that the aide told the whistleblower to get a lawyer and go to the inspector general.

In so doing, the aide advised the whistleblower on how to follow the law. That’s not “rigging” the process. It’s the opposite.

Indeed, the Times piece itself describes the significance of this news by claiming it shows “how determined” the whistleblower was to make his discovery known. This, by itself, does not raise doubts about his motives or truthfulness, or about the complaint itself, in any way. All it does is underscore how serious the whistleblower thought his discovery was, and how urgent he thought it was to get it to Congress.

Futuristic Copenhagen Architecture Builds on Water:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:33 PM, for 11h 40m 01s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1958, 4,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals at Janesville’s two GM plants walked off the job as part of a national strike

Recommended for reading in full:

Heather Long reports Trump is heading into reelection with a deep manufacturing recession:

U.S. manufacturing fell deeper into a contraction last month, erasing hope of a quick turnaround for the industry and handing a blow to President Trump’s promises that he would revive blue-collar jobs and companies.

September marked the worst month for U.S. manufacturing in more than a decade — since June 2009 — according to the closely watched Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index. Companies blamed Trump’s escalating trade war for many of their woes, putting pressure on the White House to show progress soon. Manufacturing remains a prominent industry in many swing states.

“Global trade remains the most significant issue, as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019. Overall, sentiment this month remains cautious regarding near-term growth,” said Timothy R. Fiore, chair of ISM.

….

Manufacturing fell into a technical recession in the first half of the year, and the latest ISM data indicates the situation appears to be getting worse.

Concerns are rising that the contraction in manufacturing could spill over into the rest of the U.S. economy. Stocks sold off quickly on the news that nearly every manufacturing sector reported trouble, with the Dow Jones industrial average ending the day with a 344-point loss.

“There is no end in sight to this slowdown, the recession risk is real,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, in an email to clients.

(Emphasis added.)

Patrick Marley reports Trump ag secretary Sonny Perdue says dairy farms will survive, but may have to get bigger.  (Alternative headline — Trump Administration to Family Farmers: DROP DEAD. H/t New York Daily News.)

President Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary said Tuesday he believes dairy farms can stay in business, but they may have to get bigger to do so.

“I think the 2018 farm bill will stem the flow of that” loss of dairy farms in recent years, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters.

“Now what we see, obviously, is economies of scale having happened in America — big get bigger and small go out. … It’s very difficult on economies of scale with the capital needs and all the environmental regulations and everything else today to survive milking 40, 50, 60 or even 100 cows, and that’s what we’ve seen.”

Perdue made his comments after holding a town hall meeting with farmers and dairy industry officials at the kickoff of the annual World Dairy Expo at Madison’s Alliant Energy Center.

Grant County dairy farmer Jerry Volenec expressed frustration with Perdue’s comments.

“What I heard today from the secretary of agriculture was there’s no place for me,” said Volenec, who spoke at a news conference organized by the state Democratic Party.

Nearly 3,000 U.S. dairy farms folded in 2018, about a 6.5% decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.

Wisconsin lost nearly 700 — almost two a day — as even dairy farmers used to enduring hard times called it quits in the fourth year of a downturn in milk prices.

See also How Walker and Trump Destroyed Dairies in America’s Dairyland.

Why NBA Players Out Earn Other US Athletes:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 6:35 PM, for 11h 42m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1890, an act of Congress creates Yosemite National Park.

Recommended for reading in full:

Devlin Barrett, Shane Harris, and Matt Zapotosky report Barr personally asked foreign officials to aid inquiry into CIA, FBI activities in 2016:

Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter.

Barr’s personal involvement is likely to stoke further criticism from Democrats pursuing impeachment that he is helping the Trump administration use executive branch powers to augment investigations aimed primarily at the president’s adversaries.

….

The direct involvement of the nation’s top law enforcement official shows the priority Barr places on the investigation being conducted by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who has been assigned the sensitive task of reviewing U.S. intelligence work surrounding the 2016 election and its aftermath.

The attorney general’s active role also underscores the degree to which a nearly three-year-old election still consumes significant resources and attention inside the federal government. Current and former intelligence and law enforcement officials expressed frustration and alarm Monday that the head of the Justice Department was taking such a direct role in reexamining what they view as conspiracy theories and baseless allegations of misconduct.

Reminder: What Attorney General Barr said vs. what the Mueller report said:

Ishaan Tharoor writes China’s 70th anniversary party can’t hide a sense of unease:

The rise of “a true opposition movement would take a systemic crisis — say, a real economic meltdown or a climate-induced catastrophe — that doesn’t yet seem likely,” Beijing-based journalist Ian Johnson noted. “And so, superficially at least, the Communist Party seems to go from strength to strength, relying on China’s capable civil service to make sure the high-speed trains run on time, the highways hum with new cars, and the aircraft carriers get built.”

But there’s a tension burrowed inside this seeming stability, Johnson concluded: “It is precisely this return to prosperity that has given people the opportunity to contemplate a century-old question: what exactly holds their country together other than brute force?”

Tonight’s Sky for October 2019: