Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see morning snow with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 56m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated today.

On this day in 1938, Nazis begin the Kristallnacht pogrom: 

…. a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938, carried out by SA paramilitary forces and German civilians. The German authorities looked on without intervening.[1][2] The name Kristallnacht comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings, and synagogues were smashed.

Estimates of the number of fatalities caused by the pogrom have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews were murdered during the attacks.[3] Modern analysis of German scholarly sources by historians such as Sir Richard Evans puts the number much higher. When deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbs into the hundreds. Additionally, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps.[3]

Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools were ransacked, as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers.[4] The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland,[5] and over 7,000 Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged.[6][7] The British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from the foreign journalists working in Germany sent shock waves around the world.[4]

Recommended for reading in full — Wisconsin can’t cover even existing programming,  Trump’s appointment of Whitaker as acting Attorney General is unconstitutional, threats to democracy, how Trump will become more dangerous after midterms, and video on saving lives with AI  — 

Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin needs $2 billion more to cover existing programs and schools in next budget:

Incoming Gov. Tony Evers and lawmakers would need to come up with more than $2 billion just to keep doing what the state already does and provide a healthy increase to schools, according to a new report.

Such a budget situation would be difficult in any year, but could prove particularly tricky with split control of state government for the first sustained period since 2011.

In a report released Friday, the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum found the state would need an additional $2.2 billion over two years to continue its existing programs. State revenue is unlikely to increase by that much, so Evers and legislators would probably have to make cuts or raise taxes to make ends meet.

(Not enough money for existing programs – there is the epitaph of the last eight years.)

 Neal K. Katyal and George T. Conway III write Trump’s Appointment of the Acting Attorney General Is Unconstitutional (“The president is evading the requirement to seek the Senate’s advice and consent for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and the person who will oversee the Mueller investigation”):

It means that Mr. Trump’s installation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States after forcing the resignation of Jeff Sessions is unconstitutional. It’s illegal. And it means that anything Mr. Whitaker does, or tries to do, in that position is invalid.

Much of the commentary about Mr. Whitaker’s appointment has focused on all sorts of technical points about the Vacancies Reform Act and Justice Department succession statutes. But the flaw in the appointment of Mr. Whitaker, who was Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, runs much deeper. It defies one of the explicit checks and balances set out in the Constitution, a provision designed to protect us all against the centralization of government power.

If you don’t believe us, then take it from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, whom Mr. Trump once called his “favorite” sitting justice. Last year, the Supreme Court examined the question of whether the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board had been lawfully appointed to his job without Senate confirmation. The Supreme Court held the appointment invalid on a statutory ground.

Justice Thomas agreed with the judgment, but wrote separately to emphasize that even if the statute had allowed the appointment, the Constitution’s Appointments Clause would not have. The officer in question was a principal officer, he concluded. And the public interest protected by the Appointments Clause was a critical one: The Constitution’s drafters, Justice Thomas argued, “recognized the serious risk for abuse and corruption posed by permitting one person to fill every office in the government.” Which is why, he pointed out, the framers provided for advice and consent of the Senate.

What goes for a mere lawyer at the N.L.R.B. goes in spades for the attorney general of the United States, the head of the Justice Department and one of the most important people in the federal government. It is one thing to appoint an acting underling, like an acting solicitor general, a post one of us held. But those officials are always supervised by higher-ups; in the case of the solicitor general, by the attorney general and deputy attorney general, both confirmed by the Senate.

Mr. Whitaker has not been named to some junior post one or two levels below the Justice Department’s top job. He has now been vested with the law enforcement authority of the entire United States government, including the power to supervise Senate-confirmed officials like the deputy attorney general, the solicitor general and all United States attorneys.

We cannot tolerate such an evasion of the Constitution’s very explicit, textually precise design. Senate confirmation exists for a simple, and good, reason. Constitutionally, Matthew Whitaker is a nobody. His job as Mr. Sessions’s chief of staff did not require Senate confirmation. (Yes, he was confirmed as a federal prosecutor in Iowa, in 2004, but Mr. Trump can’t cut and paste that old, lapsed confirmation to today.) For the president to install Mr. Whitaker as our chief law enforcement officer is to betray the entire structure of our charter document.

Jennifer Rubin writes Nice democracy you’ve got there:

Since the Democrats won the majority in the House, flipped at least seven governorships and won back majorities in multiple statehouses, President Trump has been on a tear. He:

• abused the media and violated the First Amendment by taking away Jim Acosta’s press credentials (while Trump’s press secretary sent around a doctored video, in true Stalinist fashion);
• threatened to investigate the House if the House does its oversight job;
• alleged, without any evidence, “Election Fraud” in two Florida counties, suggesting that he’d use “law enforcement” to secure a GOP win in the Senate race there”;
• unconstitutionally appointed a vocal critic of the Russia probe, Matthew Whitaker, as acting attorney general; and
• unilaterally plans to amend our asylum laws.

In case you thought Trump was going to straighten up, constitutionally speaking, after losing the protection of House Republicans, think again. Like a wounded animal, he is lashing out at the press, immigrants and Democrats.

Adam Serwer writes Trump Will Only Get More Dangerous (“The dismissal of Jeff Sessions makes this much clear: The Republicans’ midterm defeat has made the president more desperate to undermine the rule of law”):

Jeff Sessions was unfit to serve as attorney general of the United States. He had lied about his civil-rights record, claiming that he’d desegregated schools in Alabama when he hadn’t, as he later admitted under oath. He and his surrogates misled the public by insisting that he had begun his political life campaigning against the segregationist Lurleen Wallace, without mentioning that her GOP opponent was also a segregationist. He exaggerated his role in the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klansmen who lynched Michael Donald. He praised the racist 1924 immigration law that targeted nonwhites, Eastern and Southern Europeans, and Jews. He was rejected for a federal judgeship for allegedly calling a black attorney a “boy” and a civil-rights attorney a “race traitor.” On every crucial question of civil rights in the past 40 years, Sessions has been on the wrong side.

….

Yet in one important sense, Sessions’s forced departure is alarming. Sessions, for all his flaws, envisioned the position of attorney general as an office that should resist political pressure from the White House, and one whose ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution. It was that view that caused Sessions, under pressure, to agree to recuse himself from the Russia investigation. This runs contrary to the central tenet of Trumpism, which holds that the highest loyalty is not to the public, the nation, or the Constitution, but to Donald Trump. The president was enraged that Sessions’s recusal meant that he could not control the investigation himself. He will not make that mistake with his next choice of attorney general.

Trump’s losses in the midterms will not make him more cautious; they will only make him more dangerous. Trump’s only true ideological commitment is to his racially exclusive vision of American citizenship. His authoritarianism is more instinctive than ideological, closely tied to his desire to enrich himself and his allies without facing legal consequences. If the only way the president can save his own skin or that of others implicated in his corruption is to violate the rule of law, then he has no compunctions about doing so. With Democrats in charge of the House, the president is no doubt confident that he can blatantly break the law and still convince his supporters, sealed in an impenetrable bubble of pro-Trump propaganda, that he did no such thing. Protecting the rule of law will fall to a Republican majority in the Senate whose willingness  to do so is deeply in question.

Saving lives with AI:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-nine.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 59m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.1% of its visible disk illuminated today.

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

On this day in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his work) discovers X-rays:

On the evening of November 8, 1895, he found that, if the discharge tube is enclosed in a sealed, thick black carton to exclude all light, and if he worked in a dark room, a paper plate covered on one side with barium platinocyanide placed in the path of the rays became fluorescent even when it was as far as two metres from the discharge tube. During subsequent experiments he found that objects of different thicknesses interposed in the path of the rays showed variable transparency to them when recorded on a photographic plate. When he immobilised for some moments the hand of his wife in the path of the rays over a photographic plate, he observed after development of the plate an image of his wife’s hand which showed the shadows thrown by the bones of her hand and that of a ring she was wearing, surrounded by the penumbra of the flesh, which was more permeable to the rays and therefore threw a fainter shadow. This was the first “röntgenogram” ever taken. In further experiments, Röntgen showed that the new rays are produced by the impact of cathode rays on a material object. Because their nature was then unknown, he gave them the name X-rays. Later, Max von Laue and his pupils showed that they are of the same electromagnetic nature as light, but differ from it only in the higher frequency of their vibration.

Recommended for reading in full —   the WOW counties begin to lose their wow, the battle against Trumpism is just beginning, Trump leaves ruin, sizing up the blue wave, and video on the origin of the expression ‘a penny for your thoughts’ — 

Craig Gilbert observes 2018 midterms expose Wisconsin’s shifting political fault lines:

So many factors figured into the narrow defeat of GOP Gov. Scott Walker on Tuesday, among them a tsunami of Democratic votes in the blue bastions of Dane and Milwaukee counties.

But one with major implications for the future involved the suburban counties outside Milwaukee that have long been Walker’s political bedrock.

Instead, they contributed to his undoing Tuesday, when they failed to give Walker the same spectacular margins he had won in the past.

Waukesha and Ozaukee counties, two of the state’s wealthiest, most-educated and most-Republican counties, “underperformed” for Walker on Tuesday. The governor, who won Waukesha County by 46 points in 2014, carried it by 34 this time. He won Ozaukee by 41 points in 2014 but by 27 in 2018. Nowhere in Wisconsin did Walker’s winning margins decline as much as it did in those two counties.

You could write it off as a blip, but for four things:

One, these places had always come through for Walker. They were Walker Country.

Two, they were the same GOP counties where Republican Donald Trump showed striking weakness in 2016 despite his statewide victory. Comparing the Trump vote in 2016 to Mitt Romney’s presidential vote in 2012, nowhere in Wisconsin did Trump lag further behind the Romney vote than in Ozaukee and Waukesha.

Three, these counties until 2016 had entirely resisted a national demographic trend in which suburban areas in northern metros have moved away from the Republican Party.

And four, the suburbs have been a minefield for the GOP under Trump and they cost the party its House majority Tuesday.

(It’s point three that’s the most significant: the WOW counties are losing their wow for the GOP; others have speculated about the arrival of this change for years.  The Milwaukee suburbs weren’t going to be outliers forever.)

  Max Boot observes The battle with Trumpism is just beginning:

The glass-is-half-full nature of the election outcome is most evident at the Justice Department. The GOP’s enlarged Senate majority will make it easier for Trump to get rid of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and replace them with lickspittles eager to obstruct justice on the president’s behalf. But the Democratic majority in the House will make it impossible for Trump’s lackeys to bury special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report: Democrats can subpoena his findings.

Partisan rancor, already high, will reach stratospheric levels in the next two years. But that is the price of checks and balances — which have been mainly lacking so far. The election results restore some of my faith in our democracy, but I am sobered by the realization that the battle is far from over. It could last another two years, or even six years. It is quite possible the Democrats will overplay their hand and that Trump will use his demagogic skills to win reelection. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this is not the end of Trumpism. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Michael Gerson notes Trump is leaving a trail of ruin behind him:

In the spirit of the political season, I want to claim credit for the most STUPENDOUS, INSIGHTFUL and POWERFUL political strategy since Pericles boundthe DELIAN LEAGUE into an empire to resist THE PERSIANS. I urged voters to support reasonable Republican candidates in the Senate and to vote for every Democrat in House races. And the country rose up in TOTAL VINDICATION of my IDEOLOGICALLY INCOHERENT but PERFECTLY PRACTICAL suggestion for strategic voting.

Judged purely by their outcome, the 2018 midterm elections were significantly north of acceptable. Any evening in which future former congressman Dave Brat and and appears-to-be-ousted Dana Rohrabacher— who help constitute the right wing of GOP lunacy — feel dejected is emotionally satisfying. The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives will be a check on an administration in desperate need of checking. At the same time, the Senate will continue its originalist shift in the federal courts — the support of which separates conservative Never Trumpers from those who have simply become liberals.

With an economic growth rate above 3 percent, and an unemployment rate below 4 percent, and a relatively peaceful world — and following a Supreme Court nomination battle that rallied and united the GOP — the president and his party lost control of the House. The #MeToo movement rolled along, bringing the voices of younger women to Washington. Democrats carried independent voters. The “blue wall” was partially reconstructed in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It was, by any standard, a major defeat for the Republican Party. Or, as President Trump calls it, a major victory.

Derek Watkins, K.K. Rebecca Lai, Larry Buchanan, and Karen Yourish are Sizing Up the 2018 Blue Wave:

the overwhelming trend on Tuesday was a blue shift: 317 districts swung to the left.

….

The districts that flipped to Democrats had an average shift of 21 percentage points.

….

But the swing districts don’t tell the whole story — they represent the crest of the wave. The average district nationwide moved 10 percentage points to the left this year.

Where Did the Expression A Penny for Your Thoughts Come From?:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 10h 01m 33s of daytime.  The moon is new today.

There is scheduled a joint meeting of Whitewater’s Common Council, Community Development Authority, and Plan and Architectural Review Commission for 6 PM, and a Police & Fire Commission meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry fights in the Second Battle of Rappahannock Station, Virginia. The battle was a Union victory:

In all, 1,670 Confederates were killed, wounded, or captured in the brief struggle, more than eighty percent of those engaged. Union casualty figures, by contrast, were small: 419 in all.[3]

For the North the battle had been “a complete and glorious victory,” an engagement “as short as it was decisive,” reflecting “infinite credit upon all concerned.”[3] Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright noted that it was the first instance in which Union troops had carried a strongly entrenched Confederate position in the first assault. Brig. Gen. Harry Hays claimed to have been attacked by no less than 20,000 to 25,000 Union soldiers—a figure ten times the actual number.[3]

The battle had been as humiliating for the South as it had been glorious for the North. Two of the Confederacy’s finest brigades, sheltered behind entrenchments and well supported by artillery, had been routed and captured by an enemy force of equal size. Col. Walter H. Taylor of Lee’s staff called it, “the saddest chapter in the history of this army,” the result of “miserable, miserable management.” An enlisted soldier put it more plainly. “I don’t know much about it,” he said, “but it seems to be that our army was surprised.”[3]

Recommended for reading in full —  Evers wins, a record number of women in Congress, thinking about the national results, Russia’s continuing disinformation, and video on what it takes to become an astronaut  — 

 Patrick Marley and Molly Beck write Tony Evers denies Scott Walker a third term as Wisconsin’s governor:

MADISON – After upending Wisconsin politics and infuriating liberals across the country, Gov. Scott Walker narrowly lost his bid for a third term Tuesday to Tony Evers, the leader of the education establishment Walker blew up eight years ago.

The Associated Press called the race for Evers about 1:20 a.m. Wednesday based on unofficial returns.

The race was so close that Walker’s team said a detailed review of balloting and a recount were possible. But an unofficial tally had Evers winning by 1.1 percentage points — a margin that would be too large for a recount if it held.

“It’s time for a change, folks,” Evers, the state schools superintendent, told supporters in front of a large Wisconsin flag on the stage of Madison’s Orpheum Theater.

(A shorter, more apt, title would have been Evers Wins.)

Danielle Kurtzleben reports A Record Number Of Women Will Serve In Congress (With Potentially More To Come):

After Tuesday’s elections, a record number of women will serve in Congress come January 2019.

With results still coming in, 94 women have won or are projected to win their House races as of early Wednesday morning, up from the current 84. In addition, at least 13 women won win Senate seats. That’s in addition to the 10 female senators who were not up for re-election this year.

That means at least 117 women will serve in the 116th Congress, up from the current 107. And it will bring the share of Congress members who are women up from the current 20 percent to at least 22 percent.

These new records represent the culmination of a record-setting year for female candidates. In elections for Congress, governorships and state legislatures alike, the number of women who ran outstripped previous years, as did the number of women nominated.

Many first-time candidates this year were inspired to run for office at least in part by the 2016 presidential election — both the fact that the first female major-party nominee ever lost, and that Donald Trump, who is very unpopular among women (particularly Democratic women), won.

 The Washington Post editorial board sees A great day for democracy:

THE DEMOCRATS’ return to control over the House of Representatives is much more than a victory for one party. It is a sign of health for American democracy.

Distrustful of untrammeled majorities, the authors of the Constitution favored checks and balances, including, crucially, the check that the legislative branch might place upon the executive. Over the past two years, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have failed to exercise reasonable oversight. Now the constitutional system has a fresh chance to work as intended.

The Democratic victory is also a sign of political health, to the extent it is a form of pushback against the excesses, rhetorical and in terms of policy, committed by the Trump administration and propounded by President Trump during this fall’s campaign. Turning against the dominant party in Washington even in a moment of economic prosperity, voters from Key West to Kansas refused to accept the continued degradation of their nation’s political culture. Republicans retained control of the Senate, where the map this year favored their defense. But voters nationwide refused Mr. Trump’s invitation to vote on the basis of fear of immigrants; they did not respond to his depiction of his opposition as dangerous enemies.

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Russian Operatives Still Rampant:

Russian operatives continue to spread disinformation and divisive content online, but as social media platforms, tech companies, and intelligence experts become more aware of foreign interference efforts, Russian agents invent new ways to disguise their work.

….

Experts say foreign actors now are spending more time spreading homegrown divisive content and disinformation rather than creating it from scratch.

“We’ve done a lot research on fake news and people are getting better at figuring out what it is, so it’s become less effective as a tactic,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, a former National Security Agency official who is now a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future threat manager.

Instead, Russian accounts have been amplifying stories and internet “memes” that initially came from the U.S. far left or far right. Such postings seem more authentic, are harder to identify as foreign, and are easier to produce than made-up stories.

What It Takes To Become An Astronaut:

Good morning.

Election Day in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 10h 03m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1837, Burlington, Iowa becomes our temporary capital:

On this date Burlington, Iowa was chosen as a temporary capital of the Wisconsin Territory. A year earlier, legislators offered a bill making Madison the capital with a temporary capital in Dubuque until which time a permanent building could be constructed in Madison. Legislators also proposed the City of Belmont as a temporary capital. One month later, on December 12th, a fire destroyed the two-story temporary capital in Burlington. The new legislature moved its headquarters to the Webber and Remey’s store in Burlington where they conducted government affairs until June 1838.

Recommended for reading in full — fantasy at a Trump rally, consequences of Trump’s trade war, hacking attempts against election systems, Hannity as a Fox News Trump TV anchor,  and video about Apollo 8’s trip to the far side of the moon — 

Andrew Kragie reports Inside the Alternative Universe of the Trump Rallies:

He has a line that casts employment growth as beyond anyone’s expectations during the 2016 campaign: “If I would have told the kind of numbers that we’ve achieved, nobody would have believed it. They would not have let us get away with it,” he says in every city, pointing his index finger at the press pen directly opposite. A scattered round of boos breaks out. For anyone who doesn’t peruse economic data—most people—this allusion to a theoretical fact check from “the enemy of the people” makes his claim sound all the more impressive.

But federal data show fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first 21 months in office than during the last 21 months of the Obama administration—4.1 million after January 2017 versus 4.5 million up to then. (Trump prefers his election as the starting post, but the comparison stands: 4.5 million after November 2016 versus 5.0 million in the comparable period before.) While it’s notable that economic growth has continued so long since the Great Recession, Trump misleadingly creates the impression that gains have accelerated.

But supporters eat it up. “It was all doom and gloom under Obama. I lost a ton of money,” Charlotte Shiflett, the retired Tennessee bookkeeper, said of her 401(k)-retirement savings account. But the data show that while the stock market has been strong for two years, it was no weaker under Obama, whose tenure saw average annualized S&P 500 returns of 16.3 percent. It seems a symptom of the increasingly polarized views of the economy; for the last decade, the Pew Research Center has found that Americans increasingly assess the economy and even their own personal finances based on whether their party controls the presidency rather than on actual results.

Binyamin Appelbaum reports Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot:

President Trump sees tariffs as a tool to force changes in America’s economic relationships with China and other major trading partners. His tough approach, he says, will revive American industries like steel and auto manufacturing that have lost ground to foreign rivals. But that is coming at a steep cost for some industries, like farming, that have thrived in the era of globalization by exporting goods to foreign markets.

China and other trading partners hit with the tariffs, including the European Union, have sought to maximize the political impact of their reprisals. The European Union imposed tariffs on bourbon, produced in Kentucky, the home state of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, from Wisconsin, the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan. China’s decision to impose tariffs on soybeans squeezes some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters across the Midwestern farm belt.

(Emphasis added.)

Jana Winter reports Hackers targeting election networks across country prior to midterms:

Hackers have ramped up their efforts to meddle with the country’s election infrastructure in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterms, sparking a raft of investigations into election interference, internal intelligence documents show.

The hackers have targeted voter registration databases, election officials, and networks across the country, from counties in the Southwest to a city government in the Midwest, according to Department of Homeland Security election threat reports reviewed by the Globe. The agency says publicly all the recent attempts have been prevented or mitigated, but internal documents show hackers have had “limited success.”

The recent incidents, ranging from injections of malicious computer code to a massive number of bogus requests for voter registration forms, have not been publicly disclosed until now.

Peter Baker reports Fox News Personalities Embrace Trump at His Final Rally Before the Election:

On Sunday, the Trump campaign organization announced that Mr. Hannity and Mr. Limbaugh would join the president at the Cape Girardeau rally as “special guests.”

By Monday afternoon, Mr. Hannity was disputing that. “In spite of reports, I will be doing a live show from Cape Girardeau and interviewing President Trump before the rally,” he wrote on Twitter. “To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President. I am covering final rally for my show. Something I have done in every election in the past.” The Trump campaign news release was deleted from the web.

Except then he was on stage campaigning with the president. “Sean Hannity, come on up,” beseeched Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hannity climbed onto the stage and took the microphone. Referring to the news media pen in the back of the arena, Mr. Hannity echoed one of the president’s favorite lines. “By the way,” he said, “all those people in the back are fake news.” The crowd booed.

Presumably, he did not mean all those people since they included a crew from none other than Fox News with the correspondent Kristin Fisher.

How Apollo 8 Survived the Risky Trip to the Far Side of the Moon:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 4:41 PM, for 10h 06m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Lincoln removes McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac.

Recommended for reading in full — Wisconsin & other rural states struggle with infected water, using troops as political props, Estonia knows how to battle Russian propaganda, Trump State Dept. leaves key jobs empty,  and video about the shapes of different cheeses — 

Jack Healy reports Rural America’s Own Private Flint: Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink:

ARMENIA, Wis. — The groundwater that once ran cool and clean from taps in this Midwestern farming town is now laced with contaminants and fear. People refuse to drink it. They won’t brush their teeth with it. They dread taking showers.

Rural communities call it their own, private Flint— a diffuse, creeping water crisis tied to industrial farms and slack regulations that for years has tainted thousands of residential wells across the Midwest and beyond.

Now, fears and frustration over water quality and contamination have become a potent election-year issue, burbling up in races from the fissured bedrock here in Wisconsin to chemical-tainted wells in New Hampshire to dwindling water reserves in Arizona. President Trump’s actions to loosen clean water rules have intensified a battle over regulations and environmental protections unfolding on the most intensely local level: in people’s own kitchen faucets.

In Wisconsin and other Midwestern states where Republicans run the government, environmental groups say that politicians have cut budgets for environmental enforcement and inspections and weakened pollution rules.

(Not so long ago, some members of Whitewater’s local government proposed – but failed to justify, no matter how obstinately they tried  – a plan that would have degraded Whitewater’s environment, all in the name of putting this community in the waste-receiving business. Bad then, bad now, bad ten years from now. This beautiful city has more than her share of challenges, but one would battle all the world so that she would not become a waste dump.)

John Wagner reports Former defense secretary Hagel says Trump is using troops as ‘pawns’ at border:

Former defense secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday night accused President Trump of using U.S. troops as “pawns” as he moves to bolster the military presence at the southern border in response to migrant caravans making their way through Mexico.

“It’s clear to me that he’s using our military and our troops in a very political way. It really casts a lot of questions about the competency of his leadership,” Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska who served as defense secretary in the Obama administration, said during an interview on CNN.

Trump said Wednesday that he would deploy as many as 15,000 military personnel to the border, doubling the figure Pentagon officials have announced would be operating there. It was one of several steps the president has announced in response to the caravans of Central American migrants as he tries to make immigration a salient issue in advance of next week’s midterm elections.

Amie Ferris-Rotman and Ellen Nakashima report Estonia knows a lot about battling Russian spies, and the West is paying attention:

TALLINN, Estonia —When it comes to Russian spies, this tiny Baltic country has a piece of advice for its Western partners: Name the agents, then shame them.

So when the United States and major European allies did exactly that a month ago, Estonians felt a bit of quiet satisfaction.

After all, this former Soviet republic for years has manned the front lines against covert spy operations and apparent infiltrations by Moscow.

Since 2008, Estonian officials say, they have arrested at least 17 people on suspicion of spying for Russian intelligence services — and, often, the names of the suspects are given to the media, along with video from the investigation or arrest.

Suspected agents from Moscow’s military intelligence agency — still widely known by its former Soviet-era abbreviation GRU — were linked to cyberhacking attempts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. More recently, they were implicated in the poisoning in March of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The Kremlin denies any role.

Doyle McManus reports Almost Half the Top Jobs in Trump’s State Department are Still Empty (“In 18 countries, the White House has yet to designate a U.S. ambassador. That includes Australia, a close ally to America that is beginning to look to China instead”):

Australia is one of the United States’ closest allies anywhere. Its soldiers fought alongside Americans in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It’s a member of the world’s most exclusive intelligence club, the “Five Eyes” (the other four are the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand). Its conservative prime minister says he wants to help the United States curb China’s growing domination of East Asia.

So why can’t Australia get more respect from the Trump Administration?

For more than two years, the United States has failed to send an ambassador to Canberra, and Australians who pay attention to foreign policy see the omission as a slight. “It’s starting to really grate, particularly for true believers in the alliance,” James Curran, a foreign policy scholar at the University of Sydney, told me. “They fear it is a signal from Washington that Australia might not be so valued a partner after all.”

“Australia, from President Trump’s perspective, is a second-class ally,” the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

 So, Why Do Some Cheeses Come in Wheels and Others in Blocks? (Wisconsinites, we have this):

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 10h 08m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 11.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1847, the first class at Beloit College assembles.

Recommended for reading in full —  Trump Admin lets wrongdoers off easy, myths about immigrants, U.S. Army assessment puts migrant caravan in a realistic perspective, Trump operative Roger Stone’s shifting story, and video on turning science fiction into reality —

Ben Protess, Robert Gebeloff, and Danielle Ivory report Trump Administration Spares Corporate Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties:

In the final months of the Obama administration, Walmart was under pressure from federal officials to pay nearly $1 billion and accept a guilty plea to resolve a foreign bribery investigation.

Barclays faced demands that it pay nearly $7 billion to settle civil claims that it had sold toxic mortgage investments that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland was ensnared in a criminal investigation over its role in the crisis.

The three corporate giants complained that the Obama administration was being unreasonable and stood their ground, according to people briefed on the investigations. After President Trump took office, they looked to his administration for a more sympathetic ear — and got one.

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have yet to charge Walmart, and the Justice Department reached a much lower settlement agreement with Barclays in March, for $2 billion. R.B.S. paid a civil penalty, but escaped criminal charges altogether.

Across the corporate landscape, the Trump administration has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance, according to analyses of government data and interviews with more than 60 former and current federal officials. The approach mirrors the administration’s aggressive deregulatory agenda throughout the federal government.

Gretchen Frazee reports 4 myths about how immigrants affect the U.S. economy:

Myth #1: Immigrants take more from the U.S. government than they contribute
Fact: Immigrants contribute more in tax revenue than they take in government benefits

A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found immigration “has an overall positive impact on the long-run economic growth in the U.S.”
How that breaks down is important.

First-generation immigrants cost the government more than native-born Americans, according to the report — about $1,600 per person annually. But second generation immigrants are “among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.,” the report found. They contribute about $1,700 per person per year. All other native-born Americans, including third generation immigrants, contribute $1,300 per year on average.

….

Myth #2: Immigrants take American jobs
Fact: Immigrants workers often take jobs that boost other parts of the economy

Immigrants make up 17 percent of the U.S. labor force, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but few experts believe they’re taking jobs from Americans, as Trump claims.

“Most economists agree that in spite of being a very big part of the labor force, immigrants have not come at the cost either of American jobs, nor of American wages,” Peri, the UC Davis professor, said.

The reason is that immigrants often have jobs that Americans tend not to take. So instead of competing with Americans’ for work, immigrants tend to complement American workers.

Nick Miroff and Missy Ryan report Army assessment of migrant caravans undermines Trump’s rhetoric:

Military planners anticipate that only a small percentage of Central American migrants traveling in the caravans President Trump characterizes as “an invasion” will reach the U.S. border, even as a force of more than 7,000 active-duty troops mobilizes to prevent them from entering the United States.

According to military planning documents, about 20 percent of the roughly 7,000 migrants traveling through Mexico are likely to complete the journey. The unclassified report was obtained and published by Newsweek on Thursday. If the military’s assessment is accurate, it would mean the United States is positioning five soldiers on the border for every one caravan member expected to arrive there.

“Based on historic trends, it is assessed that only a small percentage of the migrants will likely reach the border,” the report says. It was prepared by U.S. Army North, a component of U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the mission dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot.

The assessment also indicates military planners are concerned about the presence of “unregulated armed militia” groups showing up at the border in areas where U.S. troops will operate.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:32 AM and sunset 5:44 PM, for 10h 11m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 19.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1804, a treaty at St. Louis leads to a significant land purchase for a paltry sum:

On this date Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occured in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]

Recommended for reading in full — Walker admin grants pedophiles professional licenses, common sense on the caravan, huge cost of Trump’s border deployments, the wrong approach in response to terror, video of what’s up for 2018   —

Daniel Bice reports Four pedophile ex-priests had their professional licenses granted under Gov. Scott Walker’s administration:

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign has spent the past year accusing Democratic foe Tony Evers of putting children in danger by not stripping the licenses of teachers found guilty of improper and immoral acts.

But it turns out that the second-term Republican governor’s administration has its own serious lapse involving the professional licenses of individuals of highly questionable character.

Records show one of Walker’s agencies — the state Department of Safety and Professional Services — either gave licenses to or renewed the licenses of four ex-priests who were defrocked for sexually abusing children.

The four former pedophile priests from the Milwaukee Archdiocese were given state approval to practice such professions as social work, nursing, alcohol and drug counseling and funeral work. All four appear on the archdiocese’s list of former Milwaukee priests with a “substantiated case of sexual abuse of a minor.”

The New York Times editorial board offers Common Sense on the Caravan (“A group of desperate migrants walking toward the Texas border is not a threat. We have laws to protect us — and them”):

Most of Mr. Trump’s description of the migrants is untrue or unwarranted. But none of it is surprising. Demonizing immigrants is his go-to move, from his “big, beautiful wall” to his call to end birthright citizenship. Not to mention the race-baiting campaign ad he tweeted featuring a Mexican immigrant who was convicted of killing two police officers.

The United States has clear laws governing refugees and well-funded agencies to enforce those laws, and it’s an embarrassing waste of money to send troops to the border.

Paul Sonne reports Trump’s border deployments could cost $200 million by year-end:

The total price of President Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above $200?million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to analyst estimates and Pentagon figures.

The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end.

Although the costs of the border deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716?billion annual defense budget, they arrive as the Trump administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures. The White House recently ordered the Pentagon to slash next year’s budget for the military by about $33?billion in response to the largest increase in the federal deficit in six years.

(Hundreds of millions for Trump’s political stunt, with genuine defense needs elsewhere)

Vann R Newkirk writes An American President Bends to the Demands of Terror (“After the attack in Pittsburgh, Trump again expressed his inclination to meet violence with the machinery of a police state”):

On Saturday morning, during Shabbat services, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. The investigation is ongoing, and early reports are often imprecise. But it appears that the suspect, a white male named Robert D. Bowers, killed and wounded multiple people and inflicted life-threatening injuries on police officers before being taken into custody. He reportedly shouted “All Jews must die” before shooting.

Later that morning, President Donald Trump responded. “Something has to be done,” he told reporters as he boarded Air Force One on his way to Indiana. The president denied that America’s gun laws had anything to do with this act of gun violence. He suggested that the victims would have averted disaster by arming themselves. “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better,” Trump said. With that, he expressed a position common in his responses to violence over the past two years: that the only way to combat terror is to yield to it.

Trump continues to argue that his casual bigotry and xenophobia, his exhortations of extralegal measures against political opponents, and his delegitimization of the media are inconsequential to the violence. Instead, Trumpism demands that violence be solved by local militarization: increased security at schools, the arming of teachers, and now, the adoption of guns in places intended quite literally to be sanctuaries from the scourges of the world. Taken altogether, what Trumpism seems to intend is the creation—or perhaps the expansion—of the machinery of a police state.

 Here’s What’s Up for November 2018:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 14m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 30.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1947, the legendary Hughes H-4 Hercules (‘Spruce Goose’) flies for the first – and only – time:

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the Spruce Goose; registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, it was nicknamed by critics the Spruce Goose, although it was made almost entirely of birch.[2][3] The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it has the largest wingspan of any aircraft that has ever flown.[4][N 1] The aircraft remains in good condition. After being displayed to the public for almost 11 years in Long Beach, California from 1980 to 1991, it is now displayed at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, United States.[5]

Recommended for reading in full —  Interior Secretary Zinke in trouble, defining violence accurately, an anti-Mueller smear falls apart in a crackpot press conference, the Saruman trap, and a trailer for the release of Orson Welles’s (never-before-released) last movie —

Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Lisa Rein report White House concerned Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke violated federal rules:

Trump told his aides that he is afraid Zinke has broken rules while serving as the interior secretary and is concerned about the Justice Department referral, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. But the president has not indicated whether he will fire the former Navy SEAL and congressman and has asked for more information, the officials said.

This week, Interior’s Office of Inspector General referred the inquiry — one of several probes into the secretary’s conduct — to the Justice Department to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. That referral concerns Zinke’s involvement in a Whitefish, Mont., land development deal backed by David J. Lesar, chairman of the oil services firm Halliburton.

(Trump’s worried about a cabinet member breaking rules? Oh, brother. Trump’s never met a rule he hasn’t broken; Zinke’s soon to be tossed overboard to keep the ship from listing yet farther.)

Jennifer Rubin observes These things are not the same:

Violence is defined “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”

Violence is sending bombs to President Trump’s political targets. Violence is body-slamming a reporter who dares to ask a question. Violence is driving a car into a crowd, killing a young woman. Violence is killing unarmed African American youths. Violence is wife beating, sexual assault and child molestation (not demanding that accused wife beaters and sexual predators be held accountable and at the very least disqualified from high office.) Violence is forcibly separating young children from their parents (not calling out such treatment as inhumane).

Violence is not refusing to serve a White House press secretary dinner at a farm-to-table restaurant. It is not yelling at people in restaurants. It is not making mean jokes at a charity event. It is not peacefully occupying a government building to protest.

One would think the distinction between violent acts and nonviolent acts should be easy for adults to grasp. And yet we are told “both sides” contribute to violence.

Will Sommer reports Mueller Smear Pushed by Pro-Trump Activists Falls Apart at Press Conference:

A press conference intended to publicize sexual assault claims against special counsel Robert Mueller collapsed in spectacular fashion on Thursday, after the pro-Trump operatives behind the event failed to demonstrate a grasp of even basic details about their accuser or explain why they had repeatedly lied about their project.

Mueller has asked the FBI to investigate the effort from publicity-hungry Washington lobbyist Jack Burkman and pro-Trump Twitter personality Jacob Wohl, which has been dogged by accusations that they offered women money to accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct.

But the prospect of an FBI investigation was the least of Wohl and Burkman’s problems on Thursday.

Throughout their 45-minute press conference, the two men repeatedly contradicted themselves and each other, giving cryptic non-answers that convinced approximately zero people in attendance that their allegations were anywhere close to the truth.

Eliot A. Cohen describes The Saruman Trap (“When power is corrupt, there is no way to escape its toxic influence”):

And that is where Tolkien comes in. His masterwork—the six books in three volumes, not the movies….addresses many themes relevant to our age, not least of which is that temptation.

At the beginning of Book II, elves, men, and dwarfs have gathered at Rivendell, home of Lord Elrond. There they debate what to do about the ring of the Dark Lord, Sauron, which has by a curious chance fallen into the possession of the hobbit Frodo. Toward the end of their deliberations they hear a report from Gandalf, the wizard who had befriended Frodo, and who had been taken prisoner by Saruman, the most senior wizard of his order, and escaped. Saruman had learned that the Ring had fallen into the possession of the hobbit, and he wanted Gandalf to help him get it. Gandalf reports Saruman’s pitch as follows.

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

The stakes are not nearly as high for conservative thinkers as they were for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, but the basic idea is worth pondering. Some of them wish to walk back their condemnation of Trump, the animosities that he magnifies and upon which he feeds, the prejudices upon which he plays and the norms he delightedly subverts. They do so not because their original judgments have been proved unjust—far from it—but because, weary of unyielding opposition, they would like to shape things, or at least to hold communion with those who are in the room where the deals are done. But as Gandalf and Galadriel could teach them, the height of wisdom is to fear their own drive for power, to fight the fight in a darkening world even if it looks likely to end in failure, and, above all, to choose to remain their better selves.

 Chris Foran reports One of this month’s most anticipated movies comes from a Kenosha director who’s been dead for 33 years:

One of November’s more anticipated new movies is by a filmmaker from Kenosha who has been dead for 33 years.

On Friday, Netflix begins streaming “The Other Side of the Wind,” the fabled “last” movie by Orson Welles. Welles — the director of such masterworks as “Citizen Kane” who died in 1985 at age 70 — began shooting the movie in 1970, but the production ran into a string of almost surreal delays.

In “The Other Side of the Wind,” John Huston, the Oscar-winning writer-director, plays a legendary filmmaker who returns to Hollywood after years in exile to make a comeback project. His arrival is accompanied by a swirl of paparazzi, former acolytes, hangers-on and colleagues trying to figure out what he and his movie are all about.

A satire of the 1970s’ “New Hollywood,” the movie also stars director-actor Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Random, Susan Strasberg and Oja Kodar, Welles’ longtime partner who also shares screenwriting credit with him.