Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM, for 12h 02m 22s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets today at 10:00 AM.

On this day in 1864, the 41st Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 41st Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving on garrison duty, railroad guard and picket duty at Memphis and in that vicinity for 90 days.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jane Mayer reports  How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump (“A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive”):

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”

David Leonhardt contends The Supreme Court Is Coming Apart (“It’s not just the Kavanaugh mess. Over the long term, the court risks a crisis of legitimacy”):

There are two fundamental problems. The first is that the court has become an intensely partisan institution that pretends otherwise.

The founders envisioned the justices as legal sages, free from the political scrum. They receive lifetime appointments to protect their independence. The justices themselves cherish this image. John Roberts, the chief justice, has famously equated himself with an umpire who merely calls balls and strikes. The comparison is meant to suggest that justices don’t have their own opinions: They just follow the law.

But this is laughable. In almost every major decision last term — and many others over the past decade — the justices divided neatly along partisan lines. The five justices chosen by a Republican president voted one way, and the four chosen by a Democrat voted the other. If the justices are umpires, it sure is strange that Republican and Democratic umpires use vastly different strike zones.

….

The second major threat to the court comes from the radicalness of Republican-appointed justices.

It’s true that the Democratic-appointed justices are more reliably liberal than in the past. There are no more conservatives like Byron White (a John Kennedy appointee) or Felix Frankfurter (a Franklin Roosevelt appointee). But the court’s Democrats still range from moderate to progressive. Stephen Breyer is only somewhat to the left of White and well to the right of Sonia Sotomayor, academic analysis shows. Merrick Garland, Obama’s jilted nominee, was also a moderate.

There are no more Republican moderates. With Anthony Kennedy gone, every Republican justice is on the far end of the spectrum — among the most conservative since World War II. Kavanaugh would almost certainly join them, as would any other Trump nominee.

Adrian Higgins reports Scientists thought they had created the perfect tree. But it became a nightmare:

The U.S. Agriculture Department scientists who gave us the Bradford pear thought they were improving our world. Instead, they left an environmental time bomb that has now exploded.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, the callery pear was the urban planner’s gift from above. A seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion.

The Bradford pear seemed to leap from an architect’s idealized rendering. But in this case, reality outshone the artist’s vision. It was upright and symmetric in silhouette. It exploded with white flowers when we most needed it, in early spring. Its glossy green leaves shimmered coolly in the summer heat, and in the fall, its foliage turned crimson, maroon and orange — a perfect New England study in autumnal color almost everywhere it grew. And it grew everywhere. It flourished in poor soil, wet or dry, acidic or alkaline. It shrugged off pests and diseases, it didn’t drop messy fruit like mulberries or crab apples. Millions of Bradford pears would be planted from California to Massachusetts and would come to signal the dream and aspirations of postwar suburbia. Like the cookie-cutter suburbs themselves, the Bradford pear would embody that quintessentially American idea of the goodness of mass-produced uniformity.

But like a comic book supervillain who had started off good, the Bradford pear crossed over to something darker. It turned from thornless to spiky, limber to brittle, chaste to promiscuous, tame to feral. Most of all, it became invasive. It is now an ecological marauder destined to continue its spread for decades, long after those suburban tract houses have faded away. Generations yet to be born will come to know this tree and learn to hate it.

Dan Friedman writes Giuliani Has Been Told to Stop Advocating for Foreign Interests but Just Did It Anyway:

“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” Giuliani told the audience. “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.”

Giuliani also said that sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration after the United States pulled out of a deal in which Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons “are working” by damaging Iran’s economy. “These are the conditions that lead to successful revolution,” he said.

This statement conflicts with official US policy. The State Department says the United States does not support regime change in Iran and announced last week that Giuliani “does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy.” During an appearance on CNN Sunday, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley also responded to the suggestion by the president’s lawyer. “The United States is not looking to do a regime change in Iran,” Haley said.

Giuliani was paid through his “firm” to deliver the speech, he told The Daily Beast last week. He declined to disclose his fee. Giuliani does not reveal all his clients, but he has recently worked for foreign entities including the government of Qatar, a member of Ukrainian political party that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort admitted he illegally lobbied for, and Turkish officials prosecuted in the United States for circumventing prior US sanctions on Iran.

What’s Actually In a Camel’s Hump?:

Anura Wijewikrama fishes two hours each morning and two hours each evening. And like his grandfather and father before him, he does so on handmade stilts driven into the sand. He is one of the few still carrying on the practice, which is exclusively found in the stunning waters off Sri Lanka. What started as a World War II-era reaction to food and boat shortages is now done to keep tradition alive, with stilt fishermen like Anura taking on other jobs to make ends meet.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 05m 16s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

The sixth-annual Discover Whitewater Series, a local half marathon, 5K, and kids’ run, takes place today.

On this day in 1779, Captain John Paul Jones is victorious over the British:

Shortly after 7 p.m. the Battle of Flamborough Head began. Serapis engaged Bonhomme Richard, and soon afterwards, Alliance fired, from a considerable distance, at Countess. Quickly recognizing that he could not win a battle of big guns, and with the wind dying, Jones made every effort to lock Richard and Serapis together (his famous, albeit possibly apocryphal, quotation “I have not yet begun to fight!” was uttered in reply to a demand to surrender in this phase of the battle), finally succeeding after about an hour, following which his deck guns and his Marine marksmen in the rigging began clearing the British decks.

….

[British] Captain Pearson of Serapis accepted that prolonging the battle could achieve nothing, so he surrendered. Most of Bonhomme Richard‘s crew immediately transferred to other vessels, and after a day and a half of frantic repair efforts, it was decided that the ship could not be saved, so it was allowed to sink, and Jones took command of Serapis for the trip to neutral (but American-sympathizing) Holland.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Rick Barrett reports New tariffs threaten Wisconsin’s Trek Bicycle, soybean farmers as trade war with China heats up.

From bicycles to beans, Wisconsin and much of the nation are caught in the crossfires of President Donald Trump’s trade war.

Starting Monday, the Trump administration will begin taxing $200 billion more in Chinese goods. The tariffs will start at 10 percent and rise to 25 percent in 2019.

The product list is huge, and it includes goods from some of Wisconsin’s most well-known companies, such as Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle Corp.

If Trump delivers on the 25 percent tariff, Trek says it would pay an additional $30 million in tariffs each year on bikes imported from China.

(If Trek pays, then consumers will almost surely pay in higher costs.)

Anthony Cormier and Jason Leopold report The Planners Of The Trump Tower Meeting Moved Millions, And Mueller Is Now Investigating:

On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. received one of the most striking emails of the presidential campaign, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump.”

Trump Jr. responded 17 minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it.”

That email led to a meeting at Trump Tower that has become a central focus of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.

But the very day that email was sent, another exchange was taking place behind the scenes.

Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that $3.3 million began moving on June 3 between two of the men who orchestrated the meeting: Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate developer close to both Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime Agalarov employee once investigated for money laundering.

That money is on top of the more than $20 million that was flagged as suspicious, BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month, after the money ricocheted among the planners and participants of the Trump Tower meeting. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has been investigating whether any individuals colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, is examining the suspicious transactions, four federal law enforcement officials said. A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.

Although the documents do not directly link the $3.3 million to the meeting, they show that officials at three separate banks raised red flags about the funds. Many of the transfers seemed to have no legitimate purpose, bankers noted. Kaveladze quickly moved money to other accounts he controlled, and appeared to use some of it to make payments on Agalarov’s behalf — including more than $700,000 to pay off American Express charges.

Joshua Brustein and Nate Lanxon report How Electric Scooters Are Reshaping Cities:

One of the biggest stories in technology this year is the exploding popularity of Bird, Lime, Skip, Spin and Scoot. They’re all electric scooter-rental services, and their vehicles are suddenly buzzing along city streets and sidewalks around the world. These startups allow riders to locate and unlock scooters with an app. When they reach their destination, they just walk away. Some drivers and pedestrians see the scooters as dangerous contrivances that must be stopped, while some urban planners consider them, along with bikes, the future of city transport.

1. What accounts for the rise of scooters?

Cars often aren’t the quickest way to travel in dense, urban areas. Many cities looked to bicycle-sharing services and bike lanes as a better option for shorter trips and as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Electric scooters, which can cost less than $2 per ride, are an offshoot of that. Investors looking for the next Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., the app-based car-hailing services, are adding to scooter-mania by pouring money into companies like Bird and Lime, touching off a city-by-city race to become the premier scooter brand. Not to be left behind, even Uber and Lyft are launching competing scooter businesses.

2. How prevalent are scooters?

Bird, started by a former executive of Lyft and Uber, operates scooter services in about 40 U.S. cities, while Lime is in 23. Bird kicked off the trend in late 2017 with its launch in Santa Monica, California, and suddenly it seemed scooters were everywhere. Scores of unattended vehicles on city sidewalks have resulted in pushback from people complaining of urban chaos, and some cities have started to cap the number of scooters they’ll allow. But in most U.S. cities with sharing services, the number of scooters barely exceeds 1,000. By comparison, 45,000 Uber and Lyft drivers worked in San Francisco in 2017, according to the city’s attorney.

(It’s more accurate to say scooters could reshape cities than to say they are doing so, but there’s a definite potential to them.)

 Alex Finley, John Sipher, and Asha Rangappa write Putin Had a Win-Win Strategy for Life Post-2016; Trump, Not So Much:

Given Putin’s overall objective of sowing discord in the U.S. by driving an even deeper wedge in our already existent social and cultural divisions, the outcome of the election would have mattered little to him. A Clinton presidency could have still provided an environment that was ripe for exploitation. In fact, it might have been even easier to exploit, and Trump would have been a perfect post-election tool. Putin never wanted to use Trump because he respects or loves the man. Putin wanted to use Trump because Trump causes chaos.

It wouldn’t have taken a lot of foresight to have noticed a few years ago that Trump would make a great disruptor. While Trump has always been an outspoken provocateur, his potential for disruption became abundantly clear during the Obama administration. Even before Trump traveled to Russia to put on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, he began questioning the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It’s worth noting that Trump’s “birther” conspiracy echoed the Russian playbook in other elections – for example, the fake social media conspiracies that questioned the “authenticity” of Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko (who happens to be the longtime political rival of Paul Manafort’s previous top Ukrainian client: Victor Yanukovych) in 2014. The similarity in tactics might be coincidence, but Trump’s embrace of “birtherism” – and the traction it gained in mainstream American politics – demonstrated to Putin that Trump was willing to promote fringe conspiracies and polarize political discussion.

For Russia’s part, having Trump as a “useful idiot on the sidelines” might have been a better role for them in many ways than his actually being president. No one would have questioned his repeating Russian propaganda word for word – while it might have been provocative, he would have had no oath or public trust he was expected to uphold. Russia also wouldn’t need to worry that the foreign policy establishment might get to him or even change his mind on questions of U.S. policy toward Russia. And there would be no Mueller investigation (although presumably the FBI would still be investigating), which is as much a thorn in Putin’s side as it is in Trump’s, since it has galvanized Congress to pass more sanctions against his oligarch friends.

Meet The Last of the Stilt Fishers in Sri Lanka:

Anura Wijewikrama fishes two hours each morning and two hours each evening. And like his grandfather and father before him, he does so on handmade stilts driven into the sand. He is one of the few still carrying on the practice, which is exclusively found in the stunning waters off Sri Lanka. What started started as a World War II-era reaction to food and boat shortages is now done to keep tradition alive, with stilt fishermen like Anura taking on other jobs to make ends meet.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater, the first day of fall, will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-six.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:51 PM, for 12h 08m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Lincoln issues a Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation:

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary warning that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863.[7] None of the Confederate states restored themselves to the Union, and Lincoln’s order was signed and took effect on January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation outraged white Southerners (and their sympathizers) who envisioned a race war. It angered some Northern Democrats, energized anti-slavery forces, and undermined elements in Europe that wanted to intervene to help the Confederacy.[8] The Proclamation lifted the spirits of African Americans both free and slave. It led many slaves to escape from their masters and get to Union lines to obtain their freedom, and to join the Union Army.

….

In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation. In the battle, though the Union suffered heavier losses than the Confederates and General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland. On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam occurred, and while living at the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.[62] According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told Cabinet members that he had made a covenant with God, that if the Union drove the Confederacy out of Maryland, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.[63][64] Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin,[65] an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, “as a necessary war measure” as the basis of the proclamation, rather than the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment. Some days after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the “institution”; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand.”[66]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mary Spicuzza and Daniel Bice report Milwaukee health staffer scaled back cleanups of homes with lead-poisoned children, records show:

A top Milwaukee Health Department staffer scaled back efforts to clean up homes with lead-poisoned children living in them, newly released records say.

During the last two years — 2016 and 2017 — the city didn’t clean up a single house with lead-poisoned children living in it, the records also show.

Those were among the findings documented in hundreds of pages of records linked to personnel investigations into two former leaders of the city’s troubled lead poisoning prevention program. The documents were released by the city Friday following Journal Sentinel records requests.

RELATED: Milwaukee health officials privately worried that problems in ‘messed up’ lead program would become public

RELATED: Milwaukee consistently failed to protect lead-poisoned children in homes with paint risks

RELATED: Protecting Milwaukee’s children: What we know about the latest problems with the city’s lead poisoning prevention efforts

The documents blame former health staffers Lisa Lien and Richard Gaeta for creating a toxic work environment full of bullying, intimidation and harassment. Following the personnel investigations, Lien resigned and Gaeta was fired.

Lien, then the city’s home environmental health manager, had previously gotten a 10-day suspension last year. Both Lien and Gaeta were placed on paid administrative leave in March.

Gaeta’s discharge notice accuses him of “insubordination” and “offensive conduct or language.” It also says he was “incompetent or inefficient” in doing his job as Milwaukee’s environmental field supervisor.

Patrick Marley reports Scott Walker top aide talks to London financier about selling Wisconsin roads, rejects idea:

Gov. Scott Walker’s transportation secretary told business officials and others last week he had talked to a London financier about selling off Wisconsin’s highways but had rejected the idea.

Transportation Secretary Dave Ross told a group last week that Walker’s administration was adopting new ways of getting its work done and mentioned in passing his discussion about selling off roads, according to people familiar with the meeting.

He then said he was not pursuing the proposal because Wisconsin has good contractors to maintain the state’s roads.

Philip Bump writes Robert Mueller may have just eliminated one of Trump’s biggest complaints (“Trump likes to complain about the cost of the Mueller probe. It might just have paid for itself”):

It’s not just that the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is, in President Trump’s estimation, a biased partisan “witch hunt.” No, that’s just one small aspect of why Trump is frustrated by Mueller’s work.

There’s Trump’s worry that the probe “endangers our country,” as he told reporters on Air Force One last week. Why? Because it is “hard for us to deal with other countries” because of it.

And then there’s the cost. In June, he took issue with the cost as reported by Mueller’s team.

….

But here’s the thing, pointed out by journalist Marcy Wheeler on her personal site: The Mueller probe may have just paid for itself.

Why? Because part of the plea agreement reached between Mueller and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort includes forfeiture of certain property to the government. While it’s not clear how much value will be extracted from that forfeiture, there’s reason to think that it could more than pay for what Mueller has incurred so far.

Jeremy W. Peters and Sapna Maheshwari report Viral Videos Are Replacing Pricey Political Ads. They’re Cheaper, and They Work:

These are not the stories that candidates usually turn to the camera and open up about in ads.

One talked about her father’s violent temper and how she once watched him throw her mother through a plate glass door. Another recalled watching his brothers struggle to find steady work because of their criminal records. A third spoke of suffering a decade of sexual abuse as a child.

The wave of female, minority and outsider candidates that is breaking cultural barriers and toppling incumbents in the Democratic Party is also sweeping aside a longstanding norm in campaigns: That the public image of politicians — especially women — should be upbeat, uncontroversial and utterly conventional.

For many of these Democrats who were running against better-financed rivals, the breakthrough moment came after they got personal in relatively low-cost videos that went viral, reaching millions of people. Using documentary-style storytelling, which can last for several minutes, candidates have found a successful alternative to the traditional model of raising huge sums of money that get spent on expensive, 30-second television commercials.

The videos are chiefly intended as ads, but they also served a fund-raising purpose. For a fraction of the cost, these videos can help to spread a candidate’s story in a way that is easily shareable and can inspire donations.

See Rare Electric Blue Clouds Observed by NASA Balloon:

On the cusp of our atmosphere live a thin group of seasonal electric blue clouds. Forming fifty miles above the poles in summer, these clouds are known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds — PMCs. A recent NASA long-duration balloon mission observed these clouds over the course of five days at their home in the mesosphere. The resulting photos, which scientists have just begun to analyze, will help us better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, as well as in oceans, lakes, and other planetary atmospheres, and may even improve weather forecasting.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sunshine, with a high of sixty-five.  Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:53 PM, for 12h 11m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold’s treason against his own nation becomes concrete:

Early in May 1779, Arnold met with Philadelphia merchant Joseph Stansbury[66] who then “went secretly to New York with a tender of [Arnold’s] services to Sir Henry Clinton”.[67] Stansbury ignored instructions from Arnold to involve no one else in the plot, and he crossed the British lines and went to see Jonathan Odell in New York. Odell was a Loyalist working with William Franklin, the last colonial governor of New Jersey and the son of Benjamin Franklin. On May 9, Franklin introduced Stansbury to Major André, who had just been named the British spy chief.[68] This was the beginning of a secret correspondence between Arnold and André, sometimes using his wife Peggy as a willing intermediary, that culminated more than a year later with Arnold’s change of sides.[52]

….

Arnold and [British major John] André finally met on September 21 [1780] at the Joshua Hett Smith House. On the morning of September 22, the outpost at Verplanck’s Point under command of Col. James Livingston fired on HMS Vulture, the ship that was intended to carry André back to New York. This action did sufficient damage that she retreated downriver, forcing André to return to New York overland. Arnold wrote out passes for André so that he would be able to pass through the lines, and he also gave him plans for West Point.[90]

André was captured near Tarrytown, New York on Saturday, September 23 by three Westchester militiamen named John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams.[91] They found the papers exposing the plot to capture West Point and sent them to Washington, and Arnold’s intentions came to light after Washington examined them.[92] Meanwhile, André convinced the unsuspecting Colonel John Jameson, to whom he was delivered, to send him back to Arnold at West Point. However, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, a member of the Culper Ring established under Washington’s orders,[93] insisted that Jameson order the prisoner to be intercepted and brought back. Jameson reluctantly recalled the lieutenant who had been delivering André into Arnold’s custody, but then sent the same lieutenant as a messenger to notify Arnold of André’s arrest.[94]

Arnold learned of André’s capture the morning of September 24 when he received Jameson’s message, and he learned that Jameson had sent Washington the papers which André was carrying. He received the letter while waiting for Washington, with whom he had planned to have breakfast.[95] He immediately hastened to the shore and ordered bargemen to row him downriver to where HMS Vulture was anchored, which then took him to New York.[96] From the ship, he wrote a letter to Washington,[97] requesting that Peggy be given safe passage to her family in Philadelphia—a request that Washington granted.[98]

Washington remained calm when he was presented with evidence of Arnold’s activities. He did, however, investigate its extent, and suggested that he was willing to exchange André for Arnold during negotiations with General Clinton concerning André’s fate. Clinton refused this suggestion; after a military tribunal, André was hanged at Tappan, New York on October 2. Washington also infiltrated men into New York in an attempt to capture Arnold. This plan very nearly succeeded, but failed when Arnold changed living quarters prior to sailing for Virginia in December.[99]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Abha Bhattarai reports ‘This could be catastrophic’: Small businesses say new tariffs will make it even harder to compete:

Andre Phillips says he has no choice but to raise prices by as much as 10 percent.

Phillips, a manager at Wyckes Furniture Outlet in San Diego, says manufacturers began notifying him two weeks ago that they would begin charging him 5 percent to 10 percent more on everyday goods such as dining chairs and bookcases beginning Monday, as the Trump administration’s latest round of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods goes into effect. And if he doesn’t pass on that increase to shoppers, he says he’ll lose money on each item he sells.

The furniture retailer, which has three stores in California, is already struggling to compete with giants such as Amazon and Wayfair, which often undercut the company’s prices on everything from coat racks to bedroom furniture. Now Phillips says tariff-related expenses will put him at an even bigger disadvantage against his largest competitors.

“To be told suddenly that you’re going to be hit with a 10 percent surcharge on items that you planned for and ordered six months ago — well, that’s very hard to recover from,” said Phillips, who says he’s expecting price increases on roughly $80,000 worth of furniture that is already en route from China. “Today’s customers want the best price they can get, and if we’re not cheaper than Amazon, there’s no reason anybody is going to buy from us.”

 Frances Robles and Jugal K. Patel report On Hurricane Maria Anniversary, Puerto Rico Is Still in Ruins:

FEMA’s housing help was slow in arriving, plagued by bureaucratic delays and regulations that failed to take into account the hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico who had no clear title to their properties.

Time and again, people asked for help in getting the most basic kinds of repairs — for missing roofs, collapsed walls, dangerous mold, soaked belongings — then waited for months and often did not get enough to even start the process.

Of the 1.1 million people who requested help from FEMA, about 58 percent were denied. Among those who appealed, 75 percent were rejected again. The median grant given to repair homes was $1,800, compared with about $9,127 paid out to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, according to a Times analysis.

All told, FEMA spent nearly twice as much for housing repair grants in Texas as it did in Puerto Rico, though the money went to 51,000 fewer people.

Ron Nixon reports U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find:

The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.

The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.

In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.

The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.

Monika Bauerlein contends It’s Time for Journalism to Stand for Something (“Pretending to have no values serves no one except propagandists”):

Fairness and accuracy are not served by pretending to have no point of view. They are served by acknowledging where you’re coming from and then being rigorous about following the facts where they lead.

….

Because journalism couldn’t afford to make enemies, it gave up its moral compass.

….

The truth is, the press is the enemy—of secrecy, corruption, and manipulation. And it should be the enemy of white supremacy and other anti-democratic lies.

This Cartoonist Is Drawing Her Way up the Pacific Coast:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see morning showers, then afternoon clearing, with a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:54 PM, for 12h 13m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 82.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, ends:

For three days, 58,000 Union troops had faced off against 66,000 Confederates in the war’s second-bloodiest battle. The battle left Union troops pinned inside Chattanooga, Tennessee, and temporarily halted their advance into the heart of the Confederacy. Nine Wisconsin regiments participated.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Greg Miller shares an excerpt from ‘The Apprentice’ book excerpt: At CIA’s ‘Russia House,’ growing alarm about 2016 election interference:

The warren of cubicles was secured behind a metal door. The name on the hallway placard had changed often over the years, most recently designating the space as part of the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia. But internally, the office was known by its unofficial title: “Russia House.”

The unit had for decades been the center of gravity at the CIA, an agency within the agency, locked in battle with the KGB for the duration of the Cold War. The department’s prestige had waned after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and it was forced at one point to surrender space to counterterrorism officers.

But Russia House later reclaimed that real estate and began rebuilding, vaulting back to relevance as Moscow reasserted itself. Here, among a maze of desks, dozens of reports officers fielded encrypted cables from abroad, and “targeters” meticulously scoured data on Russian officials, agencies, businesses and communications networks the CIA might exploit for intelligence.

In the months leading up to the 2016 election, senior Russia House officials held a series of meetings in a conference room adorned with Stalin-era posters, seeking to make sense of disconcerting reports that Moscow had mounted a covert operation to upend the U.S. presidential race.

By early August, the sense of alarm had become so acute that CIA Director John Brennan called White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. “I need to get in to see the president,” Brennan said, with unusual urgency in his voice.

Brennan had just spent two days sequestered in his office reviewing a small mountain of material on Russia. The conference table at the center of the dark-paneled room was stacked with dozens of binders bearing stamps of TS/SCI — for “top secret, sensitive compartmented information” — and code words corresponding to collection platforms aimed at the Kremlin.

There were piles of finished assessments, but Brennan had also ordered up what agency veterans call the “raw stuff” — unprocessed material from informants, listening devices, computer implants and other sources. Clearing his schedule, Brennan pored over all of it, his door closed, staying so late that the glow through his office windows remained visible deep into the night from the darkened driveway that winds past the headquarters building’s main entrance.

The description of Brennan and this article is adapted from “The Apprentice: Trump, Russia and the Subversion of American Democracy,” a Washington Post book, which will be published Oct. 2 by Custom House.

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti report The Plot to Subvert an Election (“Unraveling the Russia Story So Far”):

ON AN OCTOBER AFTERNOON BEFORE THE 2016 ELECTION, a huge banner was unfurled from the Manhattan Bridge in New York City: Vladimir V. Putin against a Russian-flag background, and the unlikely word “Peacemaker” below. It was a daredevil happy birthday to the Russian president, who was turning 64.

In November, shortly after Donald J. Trump eked out a victory that Moscow had worked to assist, an even bigger banner appeared, this time on the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington: the face of President Barack Obama and “Goodbye Murderer” in big red letters.

Police never identified who had hung the banners, but there were clues. The earliest promoters of the images on Twitter were American-sounding accounts, including @LeroyLovesUSA, later exposed as Russian fakes operated from St. Petersburg to influence American voters.

The Kremlin, it appeared, had reached onto United States soil in New York and Washington. The banners may well have been intended as visual victory laps for the most effective foreign interference in an American election in history.

For many Americans, the Trump-Russia story as it has been voluminously reported over the past two years is a confusing tangle of unfamiliar names and cyberjargon, further obscured by the shout-fest of partisan politics. What Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel in charge of the investigation, may know or may yet discover is still uncertain. President Trump’s Twitter outbursts that it is all a “hoax” and a “witch hunt,” in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, have taken a toll on public comprehension.

But to travel back to 2016 and trace the major plotlines of the Russian attack is to underscore what we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come. Acting on the personal animus of Mr. Putin, public and private instruments of Russian power moved with daring and skill to harness the currents of American politics. Well-connected Russians worked aggressively to recruit or influence people inside the Trump campaign.

Caitlin Dickson reports Exclusive: With more immigrant children in detention, HHS cuts funds for other programs — like cancer research:

The Department of Health and Human Services is diverting millions of dollars in funding from a number of programs, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, to pay for housing for the growing population of detained immigrant children.

In a letter sent to Sen. Patty Murray, D.-Wash., and obtained by Yahoo News, HHS Secretary Alex Azar outlined his plan to reallocate up to $266 million in funding for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, to the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) program in the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

Nearly $80 million of that money will come from other refugee support programs within ORR, which have seen their needs significantly diminished as the Trump administration makes drastic cuts to the annual refugee numbers. The rest is being taken from other programs, including $16.7 million from Head Start, $5.7 million from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program and $13.3 million from the National Cancer Institute. Money is also being diverted from programs dedicated to mental and maternal health, women’s shelters and substance abuse.

Eric Boehm writes Trump’s Tariffs Will Cost More Than Obamacare’s Taxes:

Put another way, the potential costs of Trump’s trade war could be even more difficult for the president to swallow. The import taxes imposed by the Trump administration will end up being a larger burden for the economy next year than all the taxes associated with the Affordable Care Act—a law that Trump has often described as “a disaster” for Americans.

While Trump has described tariffs as being “the greatest” and promised that his bellicose trade policies will ultimately benefit American workers and the economy, these two new assessments of the costs of those policies should raise questions among Republicans, who largely favored the tax cuts and opposed the new taxes created by Obamacare.

And both assessments come at a pivotal moment in the trade war. On Monday, Trump announced a new round of tariffs targeting $200 billion in Chinese imports, on top of about $50 billion in goods already subject to tariffs. It is a clear escalation of the trade war, and Trump has already signaled a willingness to go further. “If China takes additional retaliatory action, which is almost certain, we will immediately pursue phase three,” the White House said in a statement, “which is tariffs on approximately $267 billion of additional imports.”

China has already announced plans to retaliate.

We’re probably at least several months away from all that coming to pass. The new tariffs announced this week will take effect on September 24, ramping up from 10 percent to 25 percent after the holiday season passes. (The timing seems like a deliberate attempt to shield American shoppers from some of the consequences of the trade war during retailers’ most wonderful time of the year.) Any additional trade barriers are likely to remain only threats until after that.

Here’s What Makes A Formula 1 Race Car So Fast:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon showers, with a high of seventy-six.  Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:56 PM, for 12h 16m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1832, the Sauk and Fox cede Iowa lands:

On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. Some sources place the date as September 21. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 160-161]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley reports Teen prison guard fired in incident that left teen brain damaged gets reinstated and nearly $30,000 in back pay:

A fired prison guard who falsely claimed she had repeatedly checked on a teen inmate before the inmate hanged herself in her cell has won reinstatement — with back pay.

Taxpayers must pay guard Rosemary Esterholm about $29,000 after the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission determined last week that she was wrongly fired in March and must get her job back.

The decision follows a round of firings in March around the time the state reached an $18.9 million settlement with a former 16-year-old inmate who was severely brain damaged after she hanged herself at Copper Lake School for Girls.

Copper Lake and Lincoln Hills School for Boys, which sit on the same campus north of Wausau, have been under criminal investigation since 2015 for prisoner abuse and child neglect. The facilities are slated to close by 2021.

Lauren Bauer writes Behind the numbers: Millions seeking a path out of poverty:

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 39.7 million Americans experienced poverty last year – statistically the same as last year. In order to effectively craft policies to combat poverty, we need to know exactly who is poor – not just whether their pre-tax income falls below a given number.  Millions of Americans – including children and their parents, senior citizens, people with disabilities, and workers – make up the national number of people living in poverty.

Each year, the U.S. Census Bureau calculates how many people overall in the United States were living in poverty in a given year by both the official and supplemental poverty measure. Specifically, the official poverty measure utilizes a formula (pre-tax income must be less than the current value of three times a minimum food diet in 1963 adjusted by family composition), that determines whether family is below the poverty threshold.

….

For the past several years, I have worked with my colleagues at The Hamilton Project to produce an annual update characterizing those who are living below the official poverty line—with a particular focus on working-age adults. Today, we learn in broad strokes who lived below the poverty line in 2017.

12.8 million children lived in poverty.

3.5 million fewer children lived in poverty than at the depths of the Great Recession in 2010. The share of children in poverty continues to decline; children made up a smaller share (32.2 percent) of those in poverty than at any point in the past 30 years. This is a welcome development, but children still represent an unacceptably large share of those in poverty given that we know that childhood is a time for indispensable and cost-effect investments.

4.7 million senior citizens lived in poverty.

Senior citizens are decreasingly likely to live in poverty, but because the U.S. population is aging, the number of senior citizens living in poverty will likely continue to increase. Senior women are twice as likely to experience poverty as men; a recent Hamilton Project at Brookings proposalrecommends that Social Security beneficiaries be permitted to voluntarily forgo some benefits to in exchange for an enhanced benefit in the event of one’s own disability or the death of a spouse.

3.8 million working-age adults with a disability lived in poverty.

The share of working-age adults in poverty – who reported not working due to disability – has doubled in the past 30 years, rising from a 10.9 percent share of the working-age poor in 1986 to a 20.5 percent share in 2016. A quarter of working-age adults with a disability lived in poverty in 2017. Different policy solutions are required for those who are not capable of achieving economic self-sufficiency through work than for those who are, including reforming and modernizing disability insurance programs.

Natasha Bertrand writes ‘Carter Page Is a Very Unlikely GOP Hero’ (“President Trump and House Republicans are declassifying documents to allege the campaign aide was spied on by Hillary Clinton partisans, but the FBI had been investigating Page’s ties to Russian intelligence for years”):

Intelligence and law-enforcement veterans broadly agree that President Donald Trump’s latest directive to the FBI and Justice Department—issued after much urging from a small group of his GOP supporters in Congress—to declassify portions of a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (fisa) warrant and other documents that are part of the ongoing Russia investigation is remarkable.

“This appears to be an unprecedented use of the president’s discretionary authority to declassify information for purely partisan political reasons,” said David Laufman, a former high-ranking DOJ official who served as the chief of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section before leaving in February. “I believe it raises the resignation issue more forcefully than anything the president has done so far,” said John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA.

But one of the more bizarre subplots in the ongoing saga of Trump and House Republicans condemning alleged “deep state” corruption has been the martyrdom of Carter Page—a former Trump campaign adviser suspected by the FBI of acting as a foreign agent for Russia, and the subject of the fisawarrants that Trump and his allies now want declassified. “Carter Page is a very unlikely GOP hero,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told me. “But there’s a desperation by Republicans to cast the initiation of the Russia investigation as illegitimate. And that includes creating a completely different story around Carter Page.”

….

But it’s looking more and more like House Republicans have chosen to die on a hill that’s shifting below their feet. “Be careful what you wish for,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Tuesday. He was indicating, according to an aide, that “it’s simply impossible to review the documents” on Page and conclude anything other than that the FBI “had ample reason” to investigate him. It’s not only Democratic senators who believe that: Republican Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN in July that he believes the fisa judges had “sound reasons” for issuing the Page surveillance warrant to the FBI. “I don’t think I ever expressed that I thought the fisa application came up short,” Burr said at the time.

 Denise Clifton writes Trump’s Lies Have Grown Far More Frequent—and More Dangerous (“The president is accelerating a dark phenomenon called ‘truth decay'”):

Although Washington Post journalists and other fact-checkers have dutifully documented President Donald Trump’s now more than 5,000 misleading statements and outright lies, the American public may no longer pay much attention to the exhausting flood of misinformation. Now, a book-length study from the nonpartisan RAND Corporation warns that a growing disregard for basic facts could have dire longterm consequences for American democracy.

From June through August, Trump averaged more than 15 bogus statements a day—more than triple his daily rate in 2017. Recently, he went after Google, falsely claiming the country’s biggest information search tool is “rigged” to make him look bad. He sowed confusion over a key statement he made about the Russia investigation by falsely accusing NBC News of doctoring video of his famous interview with Lester Holt (which has been publicly available in full since May 2017). And in his startling rebuke of an official government-commissioned report concluding that 2,975 people in Puerto Rico died in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, Trump falsely claimed that the report was a Democratic hit job and that the toll “did not go up by much” beyond 6 to 18 deaths.

This unprecedented behavior from a US president is akin to dumping gasoline on a long-smoldering trend RAND researchers call “Truth Decay”: a deepening disagreement over basic facts that is increasingly undercutting the fundamentals of our democracy, from elections to policymaking. When Trump’s personal lawyer makes the argument that “truth isn’t truth” in Robert Mueller’s investigation, or argues that “facts develop” to explain away a shifting story about the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, this misinformation coming from the highest levels of the US government fuels blind partisanship. And it could potentially leave the public confused and mistrustful during crucial times, from national votes to a national security crisis.

Watch as a Baboon Hitches Ride On Car Roof:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a mix of sunshine, clouds, and occasional thunderstorms, with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 6:58 PM, for 12h 19m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1863, Wisconsin troops prepare for battle at Chickamauga:

Major General Alexander McCook’s command, including the 15th Wisconsin Infantry, arrived at Chickamauga, Georgia, the night before the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia. The 1st, 10th, 15th, 21st, and 24th Wisconsin Infantry regiments along with the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry and the 3rd, 5th, and 8th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries would participate in some of the fiercest fighting.

Recommended for reading in full — 

► Grigor Atanesian reports How Hackers Could Attack Wisconsin’s Elections And What State Officials Are Doing About It (“Cybersecurity Experts Warn Private Vendors, Modems, Removable Memory Devices Make State’s Decentralized Voting System Vulnerable To Attack”):

In July, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism reported that Russian hackers have targeted websites of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the state Department of Workforce Development and municipalities including Ashland, Bayfield and Washburn. Elections in this swing state are administered by 1,853 municipal clerks, 72 county clerks and the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Top cybersecurity experts from the United States, Canada and Russia interviewed by the Center said some practices and hardware components could make voting in Wisconsin open to a few types of malicious attacks, and that Russian actors have a record of these specific actions.

And it is not just Wisconsin — this is a nationwide threat, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine stated in its newly released report, Securing the Vote.

“With respect to foreign threats, the challenge is compounded by the great asymmetry between the capabilities and resources available to local jurisdictions in the United States and those of foreign intelligence services,” according to the report.

► Anna Nemtsova writes Russia Shows Us What Happens to ‘Enemies of the People’: Bloodied Heads, Murdered Reporters, Poisoned Dissidents:

Media experts have monitored an increasing number of attacks on journalists all over Russia. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 38 reporters have been targeted for murder in Russia since 1992, and in 33 of those cases the killers acted with impunity. Just speak with any independent reporter in Russia today and you will hear stories of death threats and violence.

After three years of covering anti-Putin rallies, 22-year-old Polukeeva had plenty of experience as an “enemy of people” and has no patience with those, like U.S. President Donald Trump, who try to inspire hatred for journalists with phrases like that.

“Journalists should feel safe to be able to do their job—that is what the president should understand and explain to the nation, that we reporters work for the society,” Polukeeva told The Daily Beast. “We have to be in the field to prove that this is not fake news, that OMON [Russia’s special riot police] is being more violent—than ever.”

► Caitlin Dickerson reports Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever:

Even though hundreds of children separated from their families after crossing the border have been released under court order, the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors, the data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services suggests. Some of those who work in the migrant shelter network say the bottleneck is straining both the children and the system that cares for them.

► The Washington Post editorial board writes of China’s Orwellian tools of high-tech repression:

THE TOTALITARIANISM of the 21st century is being pioneered in a vast but remote region of western China inaccessible to most outsiders and subject to a media blackout by China’s Communist authorities. In Xinjiang province, twice the size of Germany, an estimated 1 million people have been forcibly confined to political reeducation camps, where they are required to memorize and recite political songs and slogans in exchange for food. The rest of the region’s 23 million people are subjected to an extraordinary network of surveillance based in part on the collection of biometric data such as DNA and voice samples, and the use of artificial intelligence to identify, rate and track every person. Those rated as suspicious — possession of certain phone apps is sufficient — are sent to the camps without process, trial or even a fixed term.

A new report by Human Rights Watch, which pieced together information about the repression based on interviews with 58 former Xinjiang residents, adds new details about what the group calls human rights violations “of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.” Not only is the regime of Xi Jinping persecuting millions of people based on their ethnicity and religion, but also it is developing tools of high-tech repression that could be used by dictatorships around the world. Yet China, says the report, “does not foresee a significant political cost to its abusive Xinjiang campaign.” That must change.

The principal target of the crackdown, which began in 2014 but accelerated two years ago, are the some 11 million ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang, who are predominantly Muslim, along with several other smaller Muslim ethnic groups. Some Uighur individuals have supported separatist groups, and there have been a handful of violent attacks on Chinese targets. But nothing could justify Beijing’s response, which Human Rights Watch concluded aims at the eradication of “any non-Han Chinese sense of identity.”

► How SpaceX, Blue Origin, And Virgin Galactic Plan On Taking You To Space: