Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 39m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1968, NBC broadcasts the Heidi Bowl:

The Heidi Game or Heidi Bowl was an American Football League (AFL) game played on November 17, 1968, between the Oakland Raiders and the visiting New York Jets. The game was notable for its exciting finish, in which Oakland scored two touchdowns in the final minute to win the game 43–32, but got its name for a decision by the game’s television broadcaster, NBC, to break away from its coverage of the game on the East Coast to broadcast the television film Heidi, causing many viewers to miss the Raiders’ comeback.

Recommended for reading in full —  Wisconsin statewide results, Trump’s ignorance about NATO, the midterm message for Republicans, How Evers defeated Walker, and video with a tasty turkey recipe —

  Dylan Brogan writes No contest (“Dems sweep statewide offices in midterms but remain underrepresented in Assembly”):

….

UW-Madison journalism professor Mike Wagner says if the GOP supermajority in the Assembly seems lopsided, “that’s probably why there is a lawsuit.”

“A court-drawn map or bipartisan commission map certainly wouldn’t promise a Democratic majority,” Wagner says. “But it would be far more likely to have a more representative result given the partisan makeup of the state. Wisconsin is very competitive. That we know.”

An Assembly that more accurately represents the electorate may be in the future — Democrats will just have to wait four years. With Evers as governor, Republicans won’t have complete control of the redistricting process when new lines are drawn in 2021. In past divided governments, the courts ultimately drew the district lines.

“The hard part for us is the maps probably don’t change for 2020. I’ve talked to a lot of our potential candidates who said they are interested in running. They just want to run when there are fair maps again,” Hintz says. “But with Tony Evers winning, we at least know there is light at the end of the tunnel.”

  Richard Fontaine writes Trump Gets NATO Backwards The U.S. defends Europe out of self-interest:

Returning from the World War I armistice commemoration in Paris, President Donald Trump reemphasized his view of America’s European allies. “We pay for large portions of other countries’ military protection,” he wrote on Twitter, and “it is time that these very rich countries either pay the United States for its great military protection, or protect themselves.” Trump’s criticisms are, of course, nothing new—since the 2016 campaign he has routinely highlighted the ways in which free-riding allies purportedly take advantage of American largesse.

But underlying the president’s position lies an assumption that is now worthy of close consideration: that the United States defends Europe, and stations troops on the continent, based on an impulse that is either fundamentally charitable, anachronistic, or both. As a result, it follows that we’ve been played by allies enriching themselves under our protection. Trump seems to believe that such altruism merits gratitude; the French, he observed, were “starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along.”

The truth, however, is that the U.S. helps Europe because, in so doing, it helps itself. Twice in the first half of the 20th century, the United States went to Europe to end wars that had engulfed the world. These were not acts of charity, but of national self-interest. Following the Second World War, American leaders resolved not to permit such catastrophes to reoccur. Their solution was to remain in Europe, commit to its defense, and deploy troops there as a way to keep the peace. The bargain has been straightforward: America gets bases and a guarantee that we won’t have to fight alone; European allies get protection from the world’s foremost military. All get stability and peace on the continent.

(Trump is a profoundly ignorant man who gives encouragement – and receives support from – a hardcore base composed of the most ignorant of Americans.)

  Ron Brownstein writes The Midterms Sent an Unmistakable Message to Republicans:

Whatever it augurs for Trump’s own chances, though, the 2018 results underscored how he has truncated the opportunities for congressional Republicans. So long as the party is defined by his racially infused nationalism, it will be a strong competitor in states and House districts dominated by older, blue-collar, and evangelical white voters. But at the same time, the party seems guaranteed to struggle in suburban areas. It will also face growing challenges in Sun Belt states from Democrats who can mobilize an urbanized coalition of Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites. This year, those voters elected to the Senate Sinema in Arizona and Jacky Rosen in Nevada. And they allowed O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race to run more competitively than any Democrat had in those states for decades. That same formula in 2020 could threaten Republican Senate seats in Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, and possibly Texas.

Over the past two years, Republicans up and down the ballot could have tried to establish an identity divorced from Trump. Instead, led by Ryan and Mitch McConnell, they sent voters an unmistakable signal that they would not act in any meaningful way to restrain, or even to oversee, him. In 2018, voters in turn sent Republicans an equally unmistakable signal: that their fate is now inextricably bound to the volatile president they have embraced as their leader.

Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report Timing, Trump and turning down the volume: How low-key Tony Evers defeated Scott Walker:

It was a 67-year-old former elementary school principal from Plymouth who indulges in Egg McMuffins and games of euchre.

Six years after Walker became the first governor in U.S. history to survive a recall election and four years after he secured a second term, state schools Superintendent Tony Evers narrowly defeated him this month by focusing on kitchen-table issues — education, roads and health care.

Both sides saw early warning signs for Walker because of his brief presidential run and the Democratic response to President Donald Trump and Republican control of Congress.

Walker made his name nationally by going to war with unions in 2011, prompting massive protests and the recall effort. By 2018, he was tacking to the middle on health care and education, which made him look like “the incredible shrinking governor,” said Democratic strategist Joe Zepecki.

“The longer Scott Walker was governor, the smaller he got,” he said.

Roast Turkey With Garlic and Anchovies:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 41m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1896, Wisconsin’s first Rural Free Delivery route is established: “On this date the first Rural Free Delivery route in Wisconsin was established at Sun Prairie. Rural Free Delivery routes were free government mail delivery services in rural areas.”

Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s revocation of a press pass overturned, Assange secretly charged, has Whitaker already compromised the Mueller investigation, the moral and ethical rot at Facebook, and video explaining why there are rectangular icebergs —

  Kevin Breuninger reports Judge orders Trump administration to restore CNN reporter Jim Acosta’s White House press pass:

A federal judge on Friday granted CNN’s request for a court order that would temporarily reinstate network correspondent Jim Acosta’s White House press pass, which had been suspended indefinitely in the wake of a fiery exchange between the reporter and President Donald Trump a week earlier.

The ruling from Judge Timothy Kelly, who was appointed by Trump, was the first victory for CNN in the ongoing case.

“I want to thank all of my colleagues in the press who supported us this week, and I want to thank the judge for the decision he made today,” Acosta said outside U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

“Let’s go back to work!” he added.

(There may be more litigation, but this was not a hard call, and Trump’s legal position was weak, with his staff’s justifications shifting opportunistically.)

Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Michael S. Schmidt report Julian Assange Is Secretly Charged in U.S., Prosecutors Mistakenly Reveal:

Seamus Hughes, a terrorism expert at George Washington University who closely tracks court cases, uncovered the filing and posted it on Twitter.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to say on Thursday what led to the inadvertent disclosure. It was made in a recently unsealed filing in an apparently unrelated sex-crimes case charging a man named Seitu Sulayman Kokayi with coercing and enticing an underage person to engage in unlawful sexual activity. Mr. Kokayi was charged in early August, and on Aug. 22, prosecutors filed a three-page document laying out boilerplate arguments for why his case at that time needed to remain sealed.

While the filing started out referencing Mr. Kokayi, federal prosecutors abruptly switched on its second page to discussing the fact that someone named “Assange” had been secretly charged, and went on to make clear that this person was the subject of significant publicity, lived abroad and would need to be extradited — suggesting that prosecutors had inadvertently pasted text from a similar court filing into the wrong document and then filed it.

“Another procedure short of sealing will not adequately protect the needs of law enforcement at this time because, due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged,” prosecutors wrote.

They added, “The complaint, supporting affidavit, and arrest warrant, as well as this motion and the proposed order, would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”

Max Boot asks Did Matthew Whitaker compromise the Mueller investigation?:

Whitaker can do great damage even if he does nothing more than read all of Mueller’s files – as he now will have the right to do – and share that information with the White House. Sure, he would be risking impeachment or even prosecution for obstruction of justice, but Whitaker is not someone who has exactly exemplified devotion to the rule of law: He believes that Marbury v. Madison, the seminal 1803 case establishing legal review of legislation, was wrongly decided, and he has said that only Christians should serve as judges.

There is already cause for concern that Whitaker may have tipped off the White House. On Thursday, Trump tweeted, “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want. They are a disgrace to our Nation.” Trump has never used the phrase “inner workings” before. Maybe he was just spouting off. Maybe he was reacting to information shared with him by witnesses Mueller has interrogated. Or maybe he has suddenly gained a vantage point on the “inner workings of the Mueller investigation” that he did not have before Whitaker’s appointment.

Helaine Olen sees The moral and ethical rot at Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg’s Facebook:

As the Times reports, Zuckerberg and Sandberg were less than aggressive in addressing Russian use of the site to spread propaganda, and pushed out high-ranking executives who tried to address the issue in a more forceful way. At the same time, the company was able to successfully convince powerful politicians such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) (whose daughter — surprise! — is employed by the Facebook swamp) to pressure other politicians to go easy on the company. They also hired a Washington-based public affairs firm, which went on to aggressively take on Facebook’s opponents, including in a claim straight out of the alt-right sewer saying that boogeyman-for-all-seasons George Soros was responsible for the “broad anti-Facebook movement.” Facebook itself at one point asked Jewish advocacy groups to characterize critics of the company as engaging in anti-Semitism. (Both Zuckerberg and Sandberg are Jewish.) This is the sort of stuff the Yiddish word “chutzpah” describes.

And, in what surely counts as one of the great missed opportunities of all time, the Times reported that Zuckerberg was personally horrified in 2015 about Donald Trump’s raging about Muslim immigration and asked Sandberg whether Trump could be tossed from the site for violating Facebook’s engagement rules. She turned to several Facebook executives, including a Republican lobbyist she hired named Joel Kaplan. (That would be the same Joel Kaplan who was prominently seated behind Brett Kavanaugh during his recent Senate confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court). They told her not to do it. You know the rest.

All of this was apparently done in the service of protecting Facebook’s enormous profits, and heading off the threat of increased privacy legislation out of Washington by placating Democrats, who are increasingly concerned about the power of big business over our lives, and Republicans, who are specifically concerned about less accurate complaints that Facebook is hostile for conservatives.

How Are Perfectly Rectangular Icebergs Formed?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 43m 22s of daytime.  The moon is in its first quarter with 50.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority is scheduled to meet at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1864, Sherman’s March to the Sea begins:

Sherman’s March to the Sea (also known as the Savannah Campaign) was a military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia from November 15 until December 21, 1864, by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. The campaign began with Sherman’s troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces followed a “scorched earth” policy, destroying military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property and disrupting the Confederacy’s economy and its transportation networks. The operation broke the back of the Confederacy and helped lead to its eventual surrender. Sherman’s bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be one of the major achievements of the war.

Recommended for reading in full — Facebook’s many excuses, investigating Trump’s possible money laundering for Russians, incompetence and authoritarianism are both dangerous, years of damage from Trumpism, and video of a dog who traveled three thousand miles to be reunited with its owner —

  Sheera Frenkel, Nicholas Confessore, Cecilia Kang, Matthew Rosenberg, and Jack Nicas report Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis:

But as evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

Dan Friedman reports House Democrats May Investigate Alleged Trump Ties to Russian Money Laundering:

Rep Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, has signaled plans to use his newly won subpoena power to aggressively investigate whether Russian interests laundered money through Donald Trump’s businesses and used the connection as leverage over the president, a line of inquiry sure to enrage Trump.

Schiff and other committee Democrats have recently said they do not intend to launch an entirely new Russia probe but will instead pursue investigative angles that other inquiries have not delved into. Schiff has repeatedly asserted that the question of whether Trump’s businesses relied on laundered Russian funds tops that list.

“No one has investigated the issue of whether the Russians were laundering money through the Trump Organization and this is the leverage that the Russians have over the president of the United States,” Schiff said at a Brookings Institution panel discussion last month, before Democrats regained control of the House in the midterm elections. He reiterated that sentiment in an NPR interview on Wednesday.

Matthew Yglesias writes Trump’s incompetence and authoritarianism are both scary:

While promoting an excellent article by Weekly Standard editor Jonathan Last about President Donald Trump’s tendency to be the vaporware president, New York Times columnist David Brooks offers an unfortunate false dichotomy, saying that Americans should fear Trump’s incompetence rather than his authoritarianism.

This is a frequent theme among intelligent conservative commentators who find themselves trapped between the bombast of the MAGA-maniacs and the ideological betrayals of the hardcore Never Trumpers. Ross Douthat wrote in January in the New York Times, for example, that “Trump so far is more farce than tragedy.”

….

Trump’s primary interest is in putting people in place who will aggressively support Trump rather than people who know what they are doing. Consequently, he’d rather have a DHS head who suggests arresting local politicians for disagreeing with Trump than a DHS head who advises Trump to avoid doing illegal stuff.

This is simultaneously a recipe for vaporware and for autocracy. Homan, at the end of the day, probably won’t actually go around arresting liberal mayors — it’s just something that sounded good to say. But when you fill your Cabinet with people who make these kinds of suggestions and make it clear that’s what you want to hear from your top lieutenants, sooner or later, someone goes and does it.

Max Boot writes America will need years to clean up the toxins Trump has released:

But that is the Trump effect: He is pushing otherwise sane Republicans down conspiratorial rabbit holes. It is big news when Republican Martha McSally in Arizona is willing to graciously concede her Senate race without claiming she was the victim of fraud. What used to be routine is now extraordinary.

McSally is, after all, a member of the same party as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). He tweeted a video of a man handing currency to women and girls under the caption: “BREAKING: Footage in Honduras giving cash 2 women & children 2 join the caravan & storm the US border @ election time. Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” Trump retweeted the video, writing: “Can you believe this, and what Democrats are allowing to be done to our Country?” It turned out the footage was from Guatemala, not Honduras, and it showed local merchants contributing money to the refugee caravan. There was no connection to George Soros, but that hasn’t stopped Trump, Gaetz & Co. from trafficking in this anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Trump also hasn’t been shy about insulting the intelligence of African Americans. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), one of the longest-serving members of the House, is an “extraordinarily low I.Q. person.” CNN anchor Don Lemon is “the dumbest man on television” and makes LeBron James “look smart, which isn’t easy to do.” CNN reporter Abby Phillip, a Harvard University graduate, asks “a lot of stupid questions.” Stacey Abrams, a Yale Law School graduate and former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, is “not qualified” to be governor of Georgia. Trump insults lots of people, including whites such as CNN’s Jim Acosta (“a rude, terrible person”), but his barbs about intelligence are primarily aimed at minorities.

Dog Travels 3000 Miles To Reunite With Soldier:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 45m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 40.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission is scheduled to meet at 5 PM.

On this day in 1851, the American edition of Moby-Dick is “published and the same day reviewed in both the Albany Argus and the Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer.”

Recommended for reading in full — Whitaker’s shabby past, Maryland sues over Whitaker appointment, hate crime data up for 2017, Trump pouts over election losses, and video on growing crops in the desert with sea water —

  Ryan Foley and David Pitt report Whitaker abandoned taxpayer-funded project in Iowa in 2016:

While in private business, acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker walked away from a taxpayer-subsidized apartment-rehabilitation project in Iowa after years of cost overruns, delays and other problems, public records show.

The city of Des Moines ultimately yanked an affordable housing loan that Whitaker’s company had been awarded, and another lender began foreclosure proceedings after Whitaker defaulted on a separate loan for nearly $700,000. Several contractors complained they were not paid, and a process server for one could not even find Whitaker or his company to serve him with a lawsuit.

Beginning in February 2015, city officials said they repeatedly communicated the urgency of finishing the project to Whitaker during meetings, letters and phone calls. But by March 2016, an inspection showed “there had been minimal, if any, additional rehabilitation work completed since the previous inspection” several months earlier, city planner Mary Neiderbach wrote to Whitaker on April 1, 2016.

“In addition, more damage had occurred to the building’s interior because of what appears to be a roof leak and missing downspouts on the back of the building,” she wrote, adding that Whitaker’s company “appears to have abandoned the property.”

The letter informed Whitaker that the city was terminating the loan agreement and gave him 30 days to pay back $151,620 that he had been advanced. It noted that the city had to complete the work by the end of 2016 or repay HUD, and that it did not have confidence Whitaker’s company was up to that task.

(Kakistocracy: confidence men, liars, and frauds otherwise properly rejected have found a home in Trumpism.)

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Maryland Sues Over Whitaker Appointment:

The State of Maryland filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in federal court Tuesday asking that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein replace Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general, arguing Whitaker’s appointment is unconstitutional.

NYT:

Maryland is asking a judge — Ellen L. Hollander of the Federal District Court for the District of Maryland, a 2010 Obama appointee — to rule on who is the real acting attorney general as part of a lawsuit in which it sued [former Attorney General Jeff] Sessions in his official capacity. Because Mr. Sessions is no longer the attorney general, the judge must substitute his successor as a defendant in the litigation, so she has to decide who that successor legally is.

Devlin Barrett reports Hate crimes rose 17 percent last year, according to new FBI data:

Reported hate crimes in America rose 17 percent last year, the third consecutive year that such crimes increased, according to newly released FBI data that showed an even larger increase in anti-Semitic attacks.

Law enforcement agencies reported that 7,175 hate crimes occurred in 2017, up from 6,121 in 2016. That increase was fueled in part by more police departments reporting hate crime data to the FBI, but overall there is still a large number of departments that report no hate crimes to the federal database.

The sharp increase in hate crimes in 2017 came even as overall violent crime in America fell slightly, by 0.2 percent, after increases in 2015 and 2016.

(See also Hate crimes are soaring but many jurisdictions still don’t report any.)

Eli Stokols reports Trump, stung by midterms and nervous about Mueller, retreats from traditional presidential duties:

For weeks this fall, an ebullient President Trump traveled relentlessly to hold raise-the-rafters campaign rallies — sometimes three a day — in states where his presence was likely to help Republicans on the ballot.

But his mood apparently has changed as he has taken measure of the electoral backlash that voters delivered Nov. 6. With the certainty that the incoming Democratic House majority will go after his tax returns and investigate his actions, and the likelihood of additional indictments by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Trump has retreated into a cocoon of bitterness and resentment, according to multiple administration sources.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, painted a picture of a brooding president “trying to decide who to blame” for Republicans’ election losses, even as he publicly and implausibly continues to claim victory.

(For all his braggadocio, Trump is a pouty, petulant man.)

Growing Crops in the Desert with Seawater:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 47m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 31.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1858, the Heileman Brewery is founded:

 [O]ne of Wisconsin’s best-known breweries was established by John Gund and Gottlieb Heileman (1824-1878). By the time Gund retired in 1872, the firm’s annual beer production had increased from 500 barrels in 1860 to 3,000. By the turn of the century, as this postcard shows, it had become one of the city’s largest manufacturing concerns, and throughout the 20th century its storage tanks (painted to resemble a six-pack of beer) were a LaCrosse landmark.

Recommended for reading in full — North Korea continues missile deployment despite Trump’s optimism, America’s struggle for moral coherence, trolls work to get around social media bans, GOP rep Steve King caught lying, and video on whether peanut butter is the new condiment for burgers —

  David E. Sanger and William J. Broad report In North Korea, Missile Bases Suggest a Great Deception:

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

The existence of the ballistic missile bases, which North Korea has never acknowledged, contradicts Mr. Trump’s assertion that his landmark diplomacy is leading to the elimination of a nuclear and missile program that the North had warned could devastate the United States.

“We are in no rush,” Mr. Trump said of talks with the North at a news conference on Wednesday, after Republicans lost control of the House. “The sanctions are on. The missiles have stopped. The rockets have stopped. The hostages are home.”

….

The secret ballistic missile bases were identified in a detailed study published Monday by the Beyond Parallel program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a major think tank in Washington.

(The only thing that’s stopped is any reason to take Trump at his word on North Korea policy. To be honest, credulity on the topic never should have started.)

Andrew Delbanco considers lessons opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law in America’s Struggle for Moral Coherence:

Through most of his career, Lincoln himself tried to walk the line between compliance and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. Repulsed by the Southern demand that “we must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure,” he nevertheless pledged to respect the law. Even after his election as president and well into the Civil War, he continued trying to reconcile his revulsion at slavery with his devotion to the union. Accused from the right of being an antislavery radical, he was reviled from the left for dragging his feet in the struggle against slavery for the sake of the illusory dream that the union could be preserved.

In that sense, Lincoln was the embodiment of America’s long struggle to remake itself as a morally coherent nation. Under his leadership, the Civil War finally resolved the problem of fugitive slaves by destroying the institution from which they had fled. By the time of his death, some 4 million black Americans were no longer at risk of forcible return to their erstwhile masters. They had entered the limbo between the privations of their past and the future promise of American life—a state of suspension in which millions of black Americans still live.

The problem of the 1850s was a political problem specific to a particular time and place. But the moral problem of how to reconcile irreconcilable values is a timeless one that, sooner or later, confronts us all.

Ben Collins reports In secret chats, trolls struggle to get Twitter disinformation campaigns off the ground:

In some cases, Twitter’s algorithm could not catch up with persistent trolls working together in private chats. NBC News witnessed trolls developing new strategies on the fly to circumvent the bans. Several were successful in creating unique identities that appeared to be middle-aged women who posted anti-Trump rhetoric as part of a long-term effort to build up followings that could later be used to seed disinformation to hundreds or thousands of followers.

One troll who stole a woman’s identity came up with a plan to skirt reverse image search programs that would show users the real identity of the woman in its stolen profile picture.

“If you want a Twitter pic that is a completely unique photo and not an actual person, use the Snapchat filter where you can layer another face,” said one user. “It will be a completely unique face.”

Kristine Phillips reports Steve King dared a conservative magazine to release audio of him calling immigrants ‘dirt.’ It did:

Rep. Steve King, the newly reelected Iowa Republican with a history of incendiary comments about race and immigration, dared a conservative magazine to show evidence that he had called immigrants “dirt.”

“Just release the full tape,” King, who eked out a victory last week despite affiliations with white nationalists, told the Weekly Standard’s online managing editor Saturday on Twitter. Days earlier, the magazine reported that King had made an inflammatory joke about immigrants.

The Weekly Standard released the recording — a two-minute audio in which King can be heard bantering with a handful of supporters at the back of an Iowa restaurant during a campaign stop on Nov. 5, the magazine reported. He talked about pheasant hunting and his “patented pheasant noodle soup” sprinkled with whole jalapeño peppers he had grown himself. Around the 1:20 mark, King joked that he’d have to get some “dirt from Mexico” to grow his next batch of peppers because they didn’t have enough bite.

Is Peanut Butter The New Burger Condiment?:

For more about this tune, see Library of Congress, notated music, Pine Apple Rag.