Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 4:34 PM, for 9h 49m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1863, the 33rd Wisconsin Infantry leaves for the South:

The 33rd Wisconsin Infantry left Wisconsin for The South. It would go on to serve in Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana. It participated in the sieges of Jackson and Vicksburg, the Red River Expedition, the Battle of Nashville, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely. It would lose 202 men during service. Three officers and 30 enlisted men were killed. Two officers and 167 enlisted men died from disease.

Recommended for reading in full — ICE employees claim privilege to sex with detainees, what the blue wave in the House looks like, Trump’s beginning to lose white support, Trump shown to be so ignorant he didn’t know the difference between the Baltics and the Balkans, and video on the origins of the vacuum cleaner —

  Victoria López and Sandra Park write ICE Detention Center Says It’s Not Responsible for Staff’s Sexual Abuse of Detainees:

All 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government impose criminal liability on correctional facility staff who have sexual contact with people in their custody. These laws recognize that any sexual activity between detainees and detention facility staff, with or without the use of force, is unlawful because of the inherent power imbalance when people are in custody. Yet, one immigration detention center is trying to avoid responsibility for sexual violence within its walls by arguing that the detainee “consented” to sexual abuse.

E.D., an asylum-seeker and domestic violence survivor from Honduras, was sexually assaulted by an employee while she was detained with her 3-year-old child at the Berks Family Residential Center in Pennsylvania. At the time of the assault, E.D. was 19 years old.

She filed suit against the detention center and its staff for their failure to protect her from sexual violence, even though they were aware of the risk. The record in the case, E.D. v. Sharkey, shows that her assailant coerced and threatened her, including with possible deportation, while the defendants stood by and made jokes.

Although the employee pled guilty to criminal institutional sexual assault under Pennsylvania law, the defendants contend that they should not be liable for any constitutional violations. Their argument rests in part on their assessment that the sexual abuse was “consensual” and that they should be held to a different standard because the Berks Family Residential Center is an immigration detention facility rather than a jail or prison.

(There’s Trumpism in full: a claim of privilege for the degenerate acts of government employees.)

Mark Harris writes of the House results that 

If you’re tired of looking at a big red map even when Democrats win, this, from @nytimes, is what the new House of Representatives really looks like.

William H. Frey writes 2018 exit polls show greater white support for Democrats:

The 2018 exit polls indicate that a considerable share of Democratic gains came from shifts in white voting patterns, even as Democrats retained strong support from racial minorities. Moreover, in key Midwest statewide elections, Democrats lost fewer white working-class male votes while retaining support among white female college graduate voters.

….

Among those who voted, partisan differences by race remained in 2018, but shrank from their 2016 levels. Comparing the national vote for 2018 House of Representative members with the 2016 presidential vote, the white Republican vote advantage decreased by half, from a D-R margin (percent voting Democratic minus percent voting Republican) of -20 in 2016 to -10 in 2018. In contrast, positive D-R margins (favoring Democrats) remained the same or increased for non-white groups (Figure 2).

Mark Lowen writes of Trump’s ignorance: 

In today’s @lemondefr: When #Trump received the leaders of #Estonia, #Latvia and #Lithuania, he began by blaming them for the war in Yugoslavia. It took them a few moments to realise he’d mixed up the Balkans and the Baltics. @SylvieKauffmann

 So, Who Invented the Vacuum Cleaner?:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 52m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a ceasefire comes into effect following the surrender of Germany ending the First World War:

Contemporaneously described as the “war to end all wars”,[7] it led to the mobilisation of more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, making it one of the largest wars in history.[8][9] An estimated nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a direct result of the war, while it is also considered a contributory factor in a number of genocides and the 1918 influenza epidemic, which caused between 50 and 100 million deaths worldwide.[10] Military losses were exacerbated by new technological and industrial developments and the tactical stalemate caused by gruelling trench warfare. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history and precipitated major political changes, including the Revolutions of 1917–1923, in many of the nations involved. Unresolved rivalries at the end of the conflict contributed to the start of the Second World War about twenty years later.[11]

Recommended for reading in full — Trump cancels visit to American veterans’ cemetery in France due to rain, photo shows even a French cyclist could handle the light rain, Trump’s acting attorney general threatened consumers who lost life savings but they filed complaints against company he served anyway, DNR under Walker pressured to build on rare wetlands to suit Kohler, and video about a tiny island that was a big deal for lumberjacks —

  Luke Baker reports Trump cancels WW1 memorial at U.S. cemetery in France due to rain:

PARIS (Reuters) – President Donald Trump could not attend a commemoration in France for U.S. soldiers and marines killed during World War One on Saturday because rain made it impossible to arrange transport, the White House said.

The last minute cancellation prompted widespread criticism on social media and from some officials in Britain and the United States that Trump had “dishonored” U.S. servicemen.

….

The decision prompted a rash of criticism on Twitter, with Nicholas Soames, a British member of parliament who is a grandson of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, saying that Trump was dishonoring U.S. servicemen.

“They died with their face to the foe and that pathetic inadequate @realDonaldTrump couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to the Fallen”, Soames wrote on Twitter.

….

Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser for strategic communications under President Barack Obama, said the excuse about the inclement weather did not stand up.

“I helped plan all of President Obama’s trips for 8 years,” he wrote on Twitter. “There is always a rain option. Always.”

(Emphasis added.)

François Heisbourg writes:

A view of the weather in Paris which is supposed to have deterred @realDonaldTrump from paying his respects to the brave American soldiers who gave their lives for freedom at the AisneMarne war cemetery this afternoon. Nothing a cyclist can’t handle, let alone a presidential helo

Sarah Whites-Koditschek reports Former DNR employee: Staff pressured to OK Kohler golf course on rare Wisconsin wetlands and state park:

Trochlell said the DNR completed its environmental assessment before seeing detailed plans from Kohler — backwards of the normal process. She assumed Kohler’s request for a wetland permit, required to build the golf course, would never be granted. She was wrong.

Despite their assessment that rare wetlands would be impacted, the agency okayed the wetland permit for the 18-hole course, which would also require removal of up to 120 acres of forest. Trochlell believes the loss of trees, installation of fertilized turf and other changes would negatively affect the area’s dunes and wetlands.

Trochlell: DNR pressured to approve project
Trochlell determined the project did not meet state standards. But she said her bosses told her the permit should be approved no matter what.

“I was in a meeting with managers … and I asked the question of what would happen if we wouldn’t sign off on these permits, and I was told that if we didn’t sign off on these permits, we would be … moved to another job or fired, I think that’s how I interpreted it,” Trochlell recalled.

Diana Hembree writes ‘Scam’ Company Advised by Matthew Whitaker Threatened Victims, But Hundreds Filed Complaints Anyway:

The Iowa attorney Trump has named as the acting Attorney General has only been on the job a day or so, but he’s already enveloped in scandal.

Matthew Whitaker, who replaced Jeff Sessions after he was forced out by Trump, served on the advisory board of World Patent Marketing, a Florida-based “scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars,” according to a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

As part of a settlement with the FTC this May, the company was banned from the invention promotion business.  Documents in the FTC’s docket show that Whitaker, who served on the World Patent Marketing board from 2014 to 2017, was not just a paid advisory board member — he  threatened at least one victim who complained.

Whitaker and the Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The settlement resolved charges that the agency brought against it in 2017, which alleged that “consumers paid the defendants thousands of dollars to patent and market their inventions based on bogus ‘success stories’ and testimonials,” according to an FTC press release.

“After stringing consumers along for months or even years, the defendants did not deliver what they promised,” the agency charged, “and many people ended up in debt or lost their life savings with nothing to show for it.”

  This Tiny Island Was a Hub for Lumberjacks:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 54m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1969, Sesame Street premieres.

Recommended for reading in full —  Whitaker is unfit to serve as acting attorney general, Whitaker play a key role in a fraudulent company, Republicans really did get clobbered in the midterms, Trump’s trade war may have won Democrats the House, and video of people trying to toss pizza dough — 

The Washington Post editorial board writes There is no way this man should be running the Justice Department:

IS MATTHEW G. WHITAKER the legitimate acting attorney general? From approximately the second President Trump ousted Attorney General Jeff Sessions and tapped Mr. Whitaker to temporarily exercise the office’s vast authority, legal experts have sparred over whether Mr. Trump can unilaterally elevate someone from a role that does not require Senate confirmation to one that does. But regardless of whether the promotion is legal, it is very clear that it is unwise. Mr. Whitaker is unfit for the job.

….

First, there are Mr. Whitaker’s statements criticizing the Russia probe of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. At the least, they require him to consult Justice Department ethics counsel about whether he can oversee the inquiry with a plausible appearance of evenhandedness. He will do immediate and lasting harm to the Justice Department’s reputation, and to the nation, if he assumes the role of president’s personal henchman and impedes the Mueller probe.

Then there is Mr. Whitaker’s connection to a defunct patent promotion company the Federal Trade Commission called “an invention-promotion scam that has bilked thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.” Mr. Whitaker served on its board and once threatened a complaining customer, lending the weight of his former position as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa to the company’s scheme.

Finally, and fundamentally most damning, is Mr. Whitaker’s expressed hostility to Marbury v. Madison, a central case — the central case — in the American constitutional system. It established an indispensable principle: The courts decide what is and is not constitutional. Without Marbury, there would be no effective judicial check on the political branches, no matter how egregious their actions.

(Trumpism is a true kakistocracy, a rule by the worst: ignorant, dim-witted, or corrupt men & women otherwise rejected in a well-functioning society find themselves at the center of power by appointment from an ignorant, dim-witted, and corrupt autocrat.)

Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman report Federal investigators scrutinized Whitaker’s role in patent company accused of fraud, according to people with knowledge of case:

Federal investigators last year looked into whether Matthew G. Whitaker, as an advisory board member of a Miami patent company accused of fraud by customers, played a role in trying to help the company silence critics by threatening legal action, according to two people with knowledge of the inquiry.

Whitaker, named this week by President Trump as acting attorney general, occasionally served as an outside legal adviser to the company, World Patent Marketing, writing a series of letters on its behalf, according to people familiar with his role.

But he rebuffed an October 2017 subpoena from the Federal Trade Commission seeking his records related to the company, according to two people with knowledge of the case.

The FTC alleged in a 2017 complaint that the company bilked customers with fraudulent promises that it would help them market their invention. The FBI has also investigated World Patent Marketing, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

(There’s America’s ‘Acting Attorney General’: a man who rebuffed a federal subpoena over a fraud investigation.)

Jennifer Rubin observes Three days later: Hey, Republicans really did get clobbered:

n the House, as of this writing, the Democratic gains are up to 30 with about five more races still to be called — in which Democrats are leading. A gain of 35 seats would be the largest House pickup for Democrats since the first post-Watergate midterm election in 1974.

The Democrats picked up seven governorships, with Stacey Abrams, as of now, still fighting to make it to a runoff in Georgia, and Andrew Gillum trailing by 0.4 percentage points, enough to trigger a recount in Florida.

In the Senate, Democrats may not quite have pulled off an inside straight, but they had two aces — in Nevada and Arizona. With 26 seats to defend, many in red states, it now looks as if their losses will be small. Democrats won in Nevada and are now poised to pick up a seat in Arizona. In the latter, Rep. Kyrsten Sinemasurged into the lead as additional Maricopa County ballots were counted.)

….

If you then turn to exit polls, voters said by big margins: they disapprove of Trump (54 percent to 45 percent ); regard the GOP unfavorably (52 percent to 44 percent); think the country is on the wrong track (54 percent to 42 percent), thought Trump’s immigration policies were too harsh (46 percent, with 33 percent saying they were about right and 17 saying not tough enough); favor tougher gun laws (59 percent to 37 percent); think his foreign policy makes the country less safe (46 percent to 38 percent); disapprove of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh (47 percent to 44 percent); want to uphold Roe v. Wade (66 percent to 25 percent); think it is somewhat or very important to elect more minorities (72 percent to 24 percent) and somewhat or very important to elect more women (78 percent to 20 percent); think sexual harassment is a big problem (84 percent to 14 percent); and are more concerned about people being denied the right to vote than voter fraud (53 percent to 36 percent).

It drives Trump’s critics to distraction to watch him dominate every news cycle and repeat lies that have long since been debunked. They should be upset ; the president’s lies, racism, meanness and ignorance debase the presidency. However, Trump’s not helping himself or his party. To the contrary, Democrats just had an extremely successful election and are winning most major policy debates. They should send him a nice fruit basket or something for the holidays.

Jeff Stein writes Trump’s trade war may have helped Democrats win the House:

“It’s very clear, based on how they lost seats in the Upper Midwest, that declining agricultural markets likely led to the overturning of the GOP majority in the House,” said Joe Brusuelas, an economist with RSM, an international accounting firm. “It’s hard to imagine that these seats would have flipped anyway.”

….

Two of Democrats’ House pickups came in Iowa, where Abby Finkenauer beat incumbent Rep. Rod Blum (R) and Cindy Axne beat incumbent Rep. David Young (R). J.D. Scholten, a Democrat running against Rep. Steve King (R), lost but came closer than Democrats had in the last several cycles against King, a 15-year incumbent.

Farmers in Iowa districts who have voted Republican and supported Trump before were this year “discouraged and not as motivated to go out and vote” because of the tariffs, said Aaron H. Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union.

  50 People Try to Toss Pizza Dough

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.