Good morning.

 Monday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 42m 37s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, Union forces, including 27th and 28th Wisconsin Infantry regiments, win engagements at Bayou Fourche and Little Rock, Arkansas.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley reports Scott Walker’s ex-DOT secretary says governor isn’t telling the truth about roads:

Gov. Scott Walker’s former transportation secretary says the GOP governor isn’t telling the truth about road projects and is taking a high-risk gamble that could see the state invest billions of dollars in obsolete highways.

Walker has been “increasingly inaccurate” when describing the state’s highway system, said Mark Gottlieb, a Republican who was in the Assembly for eight years and served as Walker’s transportation secretary from 2011 to 2017.

Gottlieb is the third former top aide to Walker to speak out against the governor in recent months as he faces a re-election challenge from Democrat Tony Evers, the state schools superintendent.

….

Gottlieb said state and federal officials go through a lengthy process to determine when to add lanes to roads to reduce traffic congestion and accidents. The governor contended people may drive less in the future, but Gottlieb noted traffic has been increasing since the country climbed out of the 2008 recession.

Matthew DeFour reports Scott Walker took 127 more flights last year than scrutinized New York governor:

Republican Gov. Scott Walker took 65 percent more taxpayer-funded flights last year than the Democratic governor of New York, whose flying was noted in a recent news report for being more frequent than any governor among the 10 most populous states.

….

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took 195 trips in taxpayer-funded planes and helicopters in 2017, the New York Times reported Friday. The article noted that while he is entitled by law to fly the fleet, the Democrat’s frequent trips this election year have raised questions of whether state aircraft gives him an unfair advantage over his primary opponent, Cynthia Nixon.

Walker, now running for a third term in a tough match-up with Democratic State Superintendent Tony Evers, took 322 flights last year. That was down from the 351 he took in 2016. Only about a dozen over both years were reimbursed by the campaign.

David Leonhardt considers The Urgent Question of Trump and Money Laundering (“How Bruce Ohr, President Trump’s latest Twitter target, fits a suspicious pattern of [Trump’s] behavior on Russia”):

The latest reason to be suspicious is Trump’s attacks on a formerly obscure Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ohr and called for him to be fired. Ohr’s sin is that he appears to have been marginally involved in inquiries into Trump’s Russian links. But Ohr fits a larger pattern. In his highly respected three-decade career in law enforcement, he has specialized in going after Russian organized crime.

It just so happens that most of the once-obscure bureaucrats whom Trump has tried to discredit also are experts in some combination of Russia, organized crime and money laundering.

It’s true of Andrew McCabe (the former deputy F.B.I. director whose firing Trump successfully lobbied for), Andrew Weissmann (the only official working for Robert Mueller whom Trump singles out publicly) and others. They are all Trump bogeymen — and all among “the Kremlin’s biggest adversaries in the U.S. government,” as Natasha Bertrand wrote in The Atlantic. Trump, she explained, seems to be trying to rid the government of experts in Russian organized crime.

I realize that this evidence is only circumstantial and well short of proof. But it’s one of many suspicious patterns about Trump and Russia. When you look at them together, it’s hard to come away thinking that the most likely explanation is coincidence.

Nate Beck reports Mount Pleasant’s bond rating downgraded amid millions in Foxconn-related borrowing:

Mount Pleasant’s millions in borrowing to support the construction of Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion factory there have led to a one-notch downgrade in the village’s credit rating over fears that the massive factory may not produce the economic benefits officials had promised.

See the sights from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover on Vera Rubin Ridge (360 View):

Good morning.

 Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 45m 27s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress official declares the United States the name for the new country:

The Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia on this day in 1776, declared that the name of the newly formed nation fighting for its independence from Great Britain would be “The United States.” This designation replaced the term “United Colonies,” then in general use.

….

The National Archives cites the first known use of the formal term “United States of America” as being found in the Declaration of Independence, recognizing Jefferson, its chief author and subsequently the nation’s third president, as its originator.

When it was written in June 1776, Jefferson’s “rough draught” employed a headline in capital letters that read: “A Declaration by the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in General Congress assembled.” In the final edit, however, that language was changed to read: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” To archivists, the fact that the phrase “United States of America” appears in both versions of the Declaration offers sufficient evidence to credit Jefferson with having coined the phrase.

Historians have also noted the existence of a resolution prepared by Lee, another Virginian, which was presented to the delegates in Philadelphia on June 7, 1776, and approved on July 2, resolved: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Peter Suderman writes Scott Walker’s Anthem-Flag Bitmoji Is Republicanism Under Donald Trump (“To understand what has happened to the Republican Party, consider the trajectory of the Wisconsin governor”):

To understand what has happened to the Republican Party under Donald Trump, consider the case of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

There was a time, not too many years ago, when Walker looked like a plausible, even likely, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Walker, who spent nearly all of his adult life running for and holding office, rose to national prominence after a highly visible showdown with his state’s public sector unions. He wrote a book about the experience and toured the country touting his policy record and his state’s strong economy in the years after the recession. In many ways, he looked like—or at least played the role of—a serious, governance-focused conservative politician.

….

Among those who have fallen in line is Scott Walker, who spent part of yesterday—the first day of the NFL’s regular season—tweeting inane pablum about the kneeling players and asking whether Tony Evers, his Democratic opponent in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, supports the player protests. (Walker and Evers are currently tied in the polls.) Among those tweets was this heart-on-flannel Bitmoji, which resembles a goofy parody of flag-waving GOP patriotism.

….

Walker’s policy record since exiting the presidential race (like his record prior to entering it) is rife with shady local deal making in the name of job creation, including a county-led plan to locate a FoxConn facility in the state using state subsidies and the threat of eminent domain. That effort was backed by none other than President Trump.

Walker is no longer a figure of national significance, nor is his political trajectory all that unusual. His tweets are embarrassing, but not in a way that stands out, particularly when compared to Trump himself.

But Walker’s evolution from policy-focused governor to figure of pure political pandering illustrates the overall trajectory of the GOP, which has surrendered itself almost entirely to Trump’s hostile takeover. Donald Trump’s victory over Scott Walker, and the Republican Party, is all but complete.

Jon Swaine reports Sheriffs who cheered Trump’s attack on press have their own media run-ins (“A group of sheriffs gave the president a troubling ovation after he called journalists ‘very, very dishonest’. Here is a taste of local media scrutiny of 10 of them):

A review of coverage produced by regional media outlets over recent years found that many of the sheriffs who cheered the president have come under sharp scrutiny from the press for their own actions – or for those of the officers in their departments.

They have been held accountable by local journalists for incidents including the leaving of a service pistol in a casino bathroom, alleged mistreatment in jails, the wearing of blackface by an officer, and various other actions.

Here, the Guardian has compiled some of the notable reporting on the sheriffs who appeared with Trump:

1. Sheriff Ana Franklin, Morgan county, Alabama

Franklin is under investigation by the FBI and state authorities after a local news blogger, Glenda Lockhart, disclosed last year that the sheriff used $150,000 in public money to invest in a now-bankrupt used car dealership that was part-owned by a convicted fraudster. The money was taken from a fund meant for feeding inmates in the county jail.The sheriff’s office recruited Lockhart’s grandson as an informant as they attempted to find a source leaking information to the blogger. The grandson said he was paid to install spyware on Lockhart’s computer. Franklin’s deputies raided Lockhart’s home and seized her computer. Franklin was found by a judge to have broken the law.

Lockhart’s findings have been built upon by several local reporters, including WAAY-31 television’s investigations team and the Decatur Daily. In a statement posted to Facebook in April, Franklin incorrectly described the stories about her as “misinformation, false reports and slander”.

(The Guardian lists nine more sheriffs, all in the photo with Trump, who have had clashes with a free press.)

Anne Applebaum writes Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country:

In occupied countries, large public events can spontaneously take on political overtones, too. When the Czech hockey team beat the Soviet Union at the world championships in 1969, one year after the Soviet invasion of the country, half a million people flooded the streets in a celebration that became a show of political defiance. In 1956, 100,000 people came to the reburial of a Hungarian politician who had been murdered following a show trial. The funeral oratory kicked off an anti-communist revolution a few days later.

I am listing all these distant foreign events because at the moment they have strange echoes in Washington. Sen. John McCain’s funeral felt like one of those spontaneous political events. As in a dictatorship, people spoke in code: President Trump’s name was not mentioned, yet everybody understood that praise for McCain, a symbol of the dying values of the old Republican Party, was also criticism of the authoritarian populist in the White House. As in an occupied country, people spoke of resistance and renewal in the funeral’s wake. Since then, public officials have also described, anonymously, new forms of “patriotic treason” within the White House and in comments to Bob Woodward and the New York Times. As in an unlawful state, these American officials say they are quietly working “within the system,” in defiance of Trump, for the greater good of the nation.

There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt. As the anonymous op-ed writer put it in the New York Times, despite “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” none of the secret patriots “wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis” and backed off.

Craig Torres and Christopher Condon report Larry Summers Calls Fed Bank Stress Test Results ‘Absurd’:

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the results of the most recent Federal Reserve stress test of the largest banks “comically absurd,” and called on regulators to boost capital at financial institutions.

Summers made the comments after a presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on the persistence of low interest rates in global economies, a phenomenon which he explained as excess savings pursuing a shortage of investments. That trend has been partially mitigated by fiscal programs, he said, such as Social Security and Medicare in the U.S., which reduce to some extent the propensity to save.

“If we are likely to live in a world of systematically lower interest rates, systematically more higher asset price multiples than we have in the past,” then the case “for prudential regulation and for high levels of capital requirements in banks and more financial institutions is greatly increased,” Summers said.

Continually low interest rates, a feature of the nine-year-old U.S. expansion where the policy rate is only 1.75 percent to 2 percent currently, can produce asset bubbles.

Behold a Superpod of Common Dolphins in Monterey Bay:

There are few things more magical in this world than hundreds of dolphins racing through the wild Monterey Bay on a foggy fall morning. For the last week, a superpod of common dolphins hundreds strong has been racing the Monterey Bay, hot on the tails of billions of baitfish. This video was filmed on Labor Day just off of Point Pinos in Pacific Grove, and is being played back at half speed.

Good morning.

 Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 48m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin sinks in Lake Michigan:

On this date the steamship Lady Elgin was lost on Lake Michigan and was one of the lake’s most tragic maritime disasters. The ship had been chartered by Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guards who had been in Chicago attending a fund raiser in order to purchase weapons to arm their unit. Their ship was struck by an unlit lumber schooner and sank. At least 300 lives were lost, many from Milwaukee’s Irish Third Ward community. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride, p. 17]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Patrick Marley reports Scott Walker administration waited 2 years to alert nursing regulators of teen inmate who almost died:

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration waited more than two years to tell the state Board of Nursing about a 14-year-old inmate who nearly died when nurses didn’t get him to a doctor for three days, according to state agencies.

Once the complaint was filed in July, the Board of Nursing — which itself is overseen by the Walker administration — waited seven weeks to process it, according to the board. Officials entered the complaint into the board’s electronic system on Tuesday, the first business day after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an article about the February 2016 incident.

RELATED: ‘Absolute incompetence’: Prison nurses didn’t get teen at risk of dying to hospital for 3 days in 2016.

Registered nurses at the state’s juvenile prison, Lincoln Hills School for Boys, gave the teen Sierra Mist, Gatorade and crackers for days when he was repeatedly vomiting because his appendix was at risk of bursting. A doctor who performed emergency surgery on him at the time called the nurses’ actions inexcusable and said they should have known to get him to a doctor three days earlier.

A spokesman for Walker’s Department of Corrections wouldn’t say why the agency held off seeking the review for 30 months. Likewise, Board of Nursing officials did not explain why the board waited a month and a half to process the complaint.

Jonathan O’Connell reports GSA chief may have misled Congress about White House involvement in FBI headquarters, according to draft of inspector general report:

The administrator of the General Services Administration, which manages the FBI headquarters project, may have misled Congress about White House involvement in the project, according to a portion of a soon-to-be published report from the agency’s inspector general that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Last year the GSA and the FBI scrapped a long-delayed plan to build an FBI headquarters campus in the Washington suburbs in favor of a proposal to build a smaller headquarters in downtown D.C. and relocate some staff to Alabama, Idaho and West Virginia.

President Trump has said he supported the new plan. Although GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee in April, mentioned discussions of funding with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, she downplayed the role of the White House in the decision-making process.

The conclusions section of the inspector general’s report, which is expected to be released publicly in the coming weeks, states Murphy’s testimony “was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials about the project.”

Michael Carpenter writes Russia Is Co-opting Angry Young Men (“Fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serve as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries”):

On the streets of the French city Marseille, Russian soccer hooligans sporting tattoos with the initials of Russia’s military intelligence service, GRU, brutally attacked English soccer fans in June 2016, sending dozens of bloodied fans to the hospital. Alexander Shprygin, an ultranationalist agitator and the head of the All-Russian Union of Supporters (a soccer fan club that he claims was established at the behest of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB), was arrested during the melee and deported from France.

In Budapest’s Fiumei Road Cemetery in May 2017, a Russian motorcycle gang carrying giant red flags displaying the Soviet hammer and sickle rode up to a World War II memorial. Somewhat incongruously, the tattooed bikers, accompanied by pinstriped Russian Embassy diplomats, disembarked from their motorcycles to lay red carnations in front of the memorial and then posted a video clip of it online.

It seems almost too strange to be true: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries. It sounds more like an episode of The Americans with a dash of Mad Max and Fight Club mixed in. Yet this is exactly what is happening across Europe and North America as Russia’s intelligence services co-opt fringe radicals and angry young men to try to undermine Western democracies from within. And not just in the virtual world, but in real life.

  Mark Potok writes To Russia With Love: Why Southern U.S. Extremists Are Mad About Vladimir Putin (“The League of the South hates black people, Jews, and lots of other people. But there’s one country, and one man, it really, really likes”):

The League of the South, America’s leading neo-secessionist group, is a white supremacist organization that describes the Deep South as “White Man’s Land.” It speaks often of a coming race war, which its leader warns black people will surely lose. It hates Jews. It believes the antebellum South was a rare remnant of true Christianity in a godless world. It denounces egalitarianism as a “fatal heresy.” It openly embracesthe Ku Klux Klan and other extremists.

And it really, really likes Russia.

A few weeks ago, the League made that crystal clear with the introduction of a new Russian-language section of its website. In an essay headlined “To Our Russian Friends,” League President Michael Hill—a former academic who started out as a relatively moderate Southern nationalist but now urges followers to arm themselves in preparation for civil war—spelled out the reasons why.

….

The politics of contemporary Russia are certainly different than those of the Soviet Union. But it is wildly naïve, not to say densely stupid, for groups like the League to see it as a natural ally. It’s true that Russia has cultivated extreme-right links in Europe and the U.S., but it does so in a cynical, opportunistic way.

“American right-wing radicals oppose communism, but modern Russia actively propagates the Soviet past, its symbolism, the cult of the KGB and Stalin,” Kseniya Kirillova, a respected Russian journalist living in the U.S. who specializes in analyzing Russian propaganda and influence operations abroad, told me.

Brave Pooches Attend UK’s First Surfing School For Dogs:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 51m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On the night of September 6-7, 1776, American forces make the first use in history (sadly unsuccessful) of a submarine in combat:

Turtle (also called American Turtle) was the world’s first submersible vessel with a documented record of use in combat. It was built in 1775 by American David Bushnell as a means of attaching explosive charges to ships in a harbor, for use against Royal Navy vessels occupying North American harbors during the American Revolutionary War. Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull recommended the invention to George Washington, who provided funds and support for the development and testing of the machine.

….

Just before midnight at 11:00 pm on September 6, 1776, Sgt. Lee piloted the submersible toward Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, Eagle, then moored off Governors Island.

On that night, Lee maneuvered the small craft out to the anchorage. It took two hours to reach his destination, as it was hard work manipulating the hand-operated controls and foot pedals to propel the submersible into position. Adding to his difficulties was a fairly strong current and the darkness creeping overhead, which made visibility difficult.

The plan failed. Lee began his mission with only twenty minutes of air, not to mention the complications of operating the craft. The darkness, the speed of the currents, and the added complexities all combined to thwart Lee’s plan. Once surfaced, Lee lit the fuse on the explosive and tried multiple times to stab the device into the underside of the ship. Unfortunately, after several attempts Lee was not able to pierce Eagle’s hull and abandoned the operation as the timer on the explosive was due to go off and he feared getting caught at dawn. A popular story held that he failed due to the copper lining covering the ship’s hull. The Royal Navy had recently begun installing copper sheathing on the bottoms of their warships to protect from damage by woodworms and other marine life, however the lining was paper-thin and could not have stopped Lee from drilling through it. Bushnell believed Lee’s failure was probably due to an iron plate connected to the ship’s rudder hinge.[38] When Lee attempted another spot in the hull, he was unable to stay beneath the ship, and eventually abandoned the attempt.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Lee Bergquist reports Torrent of stormwater spills from Foxconn construction site after heavy weekend rains:

Stormwater rushed from the construction site of Foxconn Technology Group in Mount Pleasant this week after a deluge pummeled many areas of southern Wisconsin in recent days.

A video taken by a resident on Monday afternoon shows rain pooled in low-lying areas and surging off the Foxconn property in Racine County near Highway H and KR and into a ditch that flows to the Pike River.

A group of residents has expressed concerns to village officials about how Foxconn would manage water at the massive complex — both during construction and after the $10 billion industrial project is completed.

One of those is Kelly Gallaher, who took the video of conditions about 3 p.m. Monday and posted it on Facebook.

“The biggest concern is that with all of these different consultants, what the village told us is that there wasn’t going to be a problem,” said Gallaher, who is a member of A Better Mount Pleasant, a local group.

“Clearly, this past weekend, the last few days, there has been a problem.”

(Perhaps the local business lobby, the Greater Whitewater Committee, so very attentive and solicitous of the state operative overseeing Foxconn, is even now hatching a plan to help residents whose properties are threatened. However much one might credit an effort, should there even be one, it seems probable that an after-the-fact assistance of any kind won’t be half so valuable as a before-the-fact recognition of the project’s risks.)

 Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report GOP leader says teen prison is ‘a mess’ that Scott Walker’s team should have addressed sooner:

“Obviously, Lincoln Hills has been a mess,” the Juneau Republican said. “It’s been a mess for some time. So, often times when you read these articles (about problems there), I’m not necessarily shocked, but very disappointed that there wasn’t more action taken directly by DOC at the time.”

  Julia Davis – whose work is valuable and compelling – shows readers what a fifth columnist looks like:

Pro-Trump commentator Scottie Nell Hughes has landed a full-time position as an anchor on the Russian propaganda network RT. Her multiyear deal was described as “lucrative.””It’s an honor and privilege to anchor RT America’s weeknight newscasts,” she said. https://t.co/PckMnndFhP

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 7, 2018

(Sympathy to America’s foreign adversaries makes one a fellow traveler. Working for them, however, makes one a fifth columnist. There’s no way back from that. RT – formerly Russia Today – is a tool of Russian state propaganda, so much so that it has had by our law to register as a foreign agent, that is, as something like a foreign-paid lobbyist.)

  Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson concludes We are a superpower run by a simpleton:

What we are finding from books, from insider leaks and from investigative journalism is that the rational actors who are closest to the president are frightened by his chaotic leadership style. They describe a total lack of intellectual curiosity, mental discipline and impulse control. Should the views of these establishment insiders really carry more weight than those of Uncle Clem in Scranton, Pa.? Why yes, in this case, they should. We should listen to the voices of American populism in determining public needs and in setting policy agendas — but not in determining political reality.

We should pay attention to the economic trends that have marginalized whole sections of the country. We should be alert to the failures and indifference of American elites. But we also need to understand that these trends — which might have produced a responsible populism — have, through a cruel trick of history, elevated a dangerous, prejudiced fool. Trump cannot claim the legitimacy of the genuine anxiety that helped produce him. The political and social wave is real, but it is ridden by an unworthy leader. The right reasons have produced the wrong man.

The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things. Woodward’s book recounts one story in which then-economic adviser Gary Cohn heads off U.S. withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement by removing documents from Trump’s Oval Office desk. Think on that a moment. A massive change in economic policy was avoided — not by some brilliant stratagem — but by swiping a piece of paper and trusting in Trump’s minuscule attention span.

Go Inside the Cajun Navy: How Volunteers are Training to Rescue Hurricane Victims:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sun, with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 53m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 14% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets this evening at 6 PM.

On this day in 1976, Soviet fighter pilot Viktor Belenko defects to Japan:

Belenko was born in Nalchik, Russian SFSR, in a Ukrainian family. Lieutenant Belenko was a pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, Soviet Air Defence Forces based in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai. On 6 September 1976, he successfully defected to the West, flying his MiG-25 “Foxbat” jet fighter to Hakodate, Japan.[2]

This was the first time that Western experts were able to get a close look at the aircraft, and it revealed many secrets and surprises. His defection caused significant damage to the Soviet Air Force.[3] Belenko was granted asylum by U.S. President Gerald Ford, and a trust fund was set up for him, granting him a very comfortable living in later years. The U.S. Government debriefed him for five months after his defection, and employed him as a consultant for several years thereafter. Belenko had brought with him the pilot’s manual for the MiG-25 “Foxbat”, expecting to assist U.S. pilots in evaluating and testing the aircraft.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  All America’s pondering a New York Times op-ed entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration:

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

(Candidly, I don’t know what to make of this op-ed, except to say that from my own view there is a broad resistance to Trump, much more than only ‘from the left,’ and that in any event those within this administration look more like collaborators than members of the resistance.

One is reminded of a line from the musical Hamilton: “If there’s a fire you’re trying to douse, you can’t put it out from inside the house.” Indeed. This does show, however, how much a failure Trump is at what he does.)

  Craig Gilbert and Patrick Marley report Former Gov. Tommy Thompson says he regrets his part in the Wisconsin prison building boom:

Former Gov. Tommy Thompson, the author of a new memoir, has done many things in public life he’s very proud of.

But among his regrets, he said Wednesday, is getting caught up decades ago in the “hysteria” of locking people up. He wishes he hadn’t built so many prisons.

“We lock up too many people for too long. It’s about time we change the dynamics. I apologize for that,” Thompson, the state’s Republican governor from 1987 to 2001, said at the Marquette University Law School.

….

Thompson did not criticize Walker directly over the issue Wednesday.

“I wouldn’t say he’s wrong. It’s just that I have matured over the years and I’ve seen the prison systems inside and out. … I’ve studied it. The way we warehouse prisoners right now is not the right way. … Some people have to be in prison, there is no question about it. But we have too many people locked up that should be rehabilitated, retrained and allowed to get out and take a job. We need the workers,” Thompson told reporters after the Marquette event. He said he has made his case to Walker on the subject.

(Emphasis added.  Thompson’s saying Walker’s wrong without saying the mere words ‘Walker’s wrong.’)

  PolitiFact concludes McCabe hits the mark on Minnesota vs. Wisconsin prison rates:

https://t.co/RUFbOSUA1z pic.twitter.com/lwuVURCUbG

— Share the Facts (@sharethefact) September 5, 2018

  The Committee to Investigate Russia writes British Police Name Spy Poisoning Suspects:

British authorities have charged two Russian military intelligence officers in the attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England last March.

The Guardian:

Police said the two men were travelling on authentic Russian passports under the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and arrived in the UK on an Aeroflot flight days before the attack. The Crown Prosecution Service said there was enough evidence to charge them.

The prime minister, Theresa May, told the House of Commons on Wednesday that the two men had been identified as officers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

The CPS said it had charged the two men with conspiracy to murder the Skripals and DS Nick Bailey, who fell ill after going to the Skripal home after the Russian pair were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury.

The two Russian suspects are also charged with the use and possession of novichok, contrary to the Chemical Weapons Act. They are also charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Yulia Skripal and DS Bailey.

They have not been charged with the later poisoning that killed Dawn Sturgess and left Charlie Rowley seriously ill, after they became unwell on 30 June at an address in Amesbury, Wiltshire.

However, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has concluded the novichok that killed Sturgess and poisoned Rowley was the same as that used on the Skripals.

So, What was the First Horror Movie?:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with an afternoon thunderstorm, and a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:21 PM, for 12h 56m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1905, a Russo-Japanese peace treaty is signed:

The Russo-Japanese War comes to an end as representatives of the two nations sign the Treaty of Portsmouth in New Hampshire. Russia, defeated in the war, agreed to cede to Japan the island of Sakhalin and Russian port and rail rights in Manchuria.

On February 8, 1904, following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan launched a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. The Russian fleet was decimated. During the subsequent Russo-Japanese War, Japan won a series of decisive victories over the Russians, who underestimated the military potential of its non-Western opponent. In January 1905, the strategic naval base of Port Arthur fell to Japanese naval forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo; in March, Russian troops were defeated at Shenyang, China, by Japanese Field Marshal Iwao Oyama; and in May, the Russian Baltic fleet under Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski was destroyed by Togo near the Tsushima Islands.

These three major defeats convinced Russia that further resistance against Japan’s imperial designs for East Asia was hopeless, and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905. (He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this achievement.) Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power and set its sights on greater imperial expansion. The Russian military’s disastrous performance in the war was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Aaron Blake reports Transcript: Phone call between President Trump and journalist Bob Woodward:

Bob Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, sought an interview with President Trump as he was writing “Fear,” a book about Trump’s presidency. Trump called Woodward in early August, after the manuscript had been completed, to say he wanted to participate.

Over the course of 11-plus minutes, Trump repeatedly claimed his White House staff hadn’t informed him of Woodward’s interview request — despite also admitting Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had told him Woodward wanted to talk. He also started the phone call by saying Woodward had “always been fair” to him, but by the end he said the book would be “inaccurate.”

This is a transcript of that call, with key sections highlighted and annotated. To see an annotation, click on the yellow, highlighted text. [Full article includes transcript]

  Jennifer Rubin explains The dilemma Woodward’s book raises about Trump:

The White House is worse than you imagine. That’s the essential message from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” As my colleague Aaron Blake puts it, the details “are damning in a way we simply haven’t seen before — both for their breadth and degree.”

In part, the out-sized impact the book is having can be attributable to Woodward’s reputation, sourcing (hundreds of people) and possession of scores of taped interviews. It is noteworthy that so many people around President Trump spoke to him, even those still at the White House. Moreover, accounts in the book are entirely credible because incidents he describes explain certain events (e.g., John Dowd quitting as Trump’s lawyer after the president couldn’t hold up during a mock interview with the special counsel). More so than Michael Wolff (who seemed to have gotten the details wrong in various episodes), Woodward’s book raises unavoidable, legitimate issues as to the president’s fitness to serve. (A responsible Congress would begin contacting people such as former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former economic adviser Gary Cohn to determine the president’s capacity to function.) The president’s insistence all of this is made up simply doesn’t fly except with the most devoted cultists.

[Paul Waldman: Woodward’s reporting reveals that in Trump’s world, everybody hates everybody]

This is not a story of what Trump’s critics or neutral observers think of him. This is an account by those who know him best. It is they who believe he cannot be trusted to do his job. From the Post’s report: “The combination of [anecdotes] in one book is something we simply haven’t seen. It suggests a White House full of top aides who have almost no confidence in the man they’re serving and feel as if they are constantly averting calamity.” They think he’s an “idiot” (Chief of Staff John F. Kelly), or “unhinged” (Kelly again), or has the mental capacity of a “fifth- or sixth-grader”(Defense Secretary Jim Mattis). They deliberately thwart him because he tells them to do dangerous things (e.g., taking a document off his desk so he won’t pull out of a South Korea trade deal, an assassination of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad).

  Max Boot concludes President Trump is unfit for office. Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ confirms it:

These revelations will be greeted among Republicans not as a sign of Trump’s unfitness for office — which they are — but as more evidence of a conspiracy among the “fake news media” against their electoral hero. That is the genius of Trump’s attacks on the press and on truth itself: He has largely inoculated his base against all of the damaging revelations that continue to emerge about the most corrupt and dysfunctional administration in U.S. history. And by keeping the support of his base (78 percent of Republicans approve of him in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll), Trump protects himself from removal either via the 25th Amendment or the Article II impeachment process.

Kelly is right. We really are in Crazytown. But Trump is far from the craziest person in town. His defects are no secret — they were obvious before his election. The really crazy people are the Republicans who think we should continue to entrust a man manifestly unfit to be Queens Borough president with the presidency of the United States of America.

  Conservative & Republican Tom Nichols writes Want to save the GOP, Republicans? Vote for every Democrat on this year’s ballot:

In the parliamentary systems of our allies, such as Canada or the United Kingdom, a vote for a candidate at any level is almost always a vote for a governing party and its leadership: The party that gains the most legislative seats gets to form a government and choose a prime minister.

By contrast, one of the great virtues of the American system of separated powers is that voters, usually, can ignore party affiliation if they feel a candidate is worth their support. Our model forces the legislative and executive branches to seek separate mandates from the electorate. In our system, voters can separate the party from its leader. They can split their tickets regionally, nationally and by party. They can even vote for divided government, and choose to place the executive and legislative power in opposing hands.

For now, however, those days are over — at least for the Republican Party. Rather than acting like a national party, entrusted with separate but coequal branches of government, the GOP at every level and in every state has been captured by the personality cult that has congealed around President Trump, and it is now operating like a parliamentary party, utterly submissive to its erratic but powerful prime minister. Republican elected officials, from Congress to the state houses, have chosen to become little more than enablers for an out of control executive branch.

The only way to put a stop to this is to vote against the GOP in every race, at every level in 2018. It’s tough medicine. But as someone who’s voted Republican for nearly 40 years, who favors limited government and public integrity, and who believes America still needs a credible, responsible center-right party, I see no alternative.

(Well said. I am not a Republican but rather a libertarian, and yet, I, too, see the necessity of Nichols’s approach: every last pillar and prop of Trumpism has to go.  One must be both relentless and patient, prepared not merely for a single election but for so many seasons and years as it takes. The Republican Party cannot be a normal party until Trumpism is exorcised from it.)

Here’s How Your Body’s Internal Clock Might Be Messing With Your Sleep: