Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 59m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 33.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM, and along with the agenda the city has posted an Ehlers Financial Managment Plan for presentation at the council session.

Quick note on upcoming posts this week: By comment or mail, readers have asked me to review Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies, the new documentary Active Measures, and also to consider to Franklin Foer’s contention that Elizabeth Warren is a capitalist (‘Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism‘).  The requests and the posts responding to them – happily received, happily written – will go up this week, Wednesday to Friday.

On this day in 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus uses the state National Guard to prevent the lawful integration of Central High School in Little Rock:

After a series of legal proceedings the Federal District Court ordered the Little Rock School District to proceed with its integration plans when school opened on September 4, 1957. Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957, because he said he had evidence (although none was shown) that there was “…imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace and the doing of violence to persons and property.”[2] The governor initially ordered to state duty the State Headquarters Detachment, the Base Detachment at Adams Field and any other units the Adjutant General felt necessary to “accomplish the mission of maintaining or restoring law and order and to preserve the peace, health, safety and security of the citizens of Pulaski County, Arkansas.”[3] On September 4, Elizabeth Eckford was the only student to enter the school due to lack of communication. It is commonly but mistakenly believed that she was taking this stand on her own, but rather it was because she was the only student who didn’t have a phone, so nobody could contact her to let her know the integration wasn’t happening until the next day.[4]

Major General Sherman T. Clinger, the Adjutant General of Arkansas, assembled a force of 289 soldiers under command of Lieutenant Colonel Marion Johnson.[5] On September 4, 1957, Johnson told nine black students who were attempting to enter Central High School to return home. The National Guard presence gradually decreased to a fifteen-man day and night shift. By court order,[6] the National Guard was replaced by the Little Rock City Police on Friday, September 20, 1957.[3]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Catherine Rampell writes Trump promised farmers ‘smarter’ trade deals. Now he has to bail them out:

“Trade, not aid.”

That’s what farmers, ranchers and their elected officials keep telling the Trump administration they want. They have worked hard over the years to grow their export opportunities, forging critical relationships in China, Mexico, the European Union, Canada and other markets. Customers around the world have gobbled up U.S.-produced pork, soybeans, fruits and other goods.

Yet in a matter of months, President Trump has managed to fray — and possibly sever — many of those ties.

For bogus “national security” reasons, among other rationales, he has provoked nearly every one of our major trading partners into slapping retaliatory tariffs on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American-made agricultural products.

(Trump is a profoundly ignorant man, seemingly unaware – truly – of centuries of economic insight.)

  Chuck Todd contends It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back:

Bashing the media for political gain isn’t new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then, as now, that hatred was artificially stoked by people who found that it could deliver them some combination of fame, wealth, and power.

Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine.

  Tamara Keith reports President Trump’s Description of What’s ‘Fake’ Is Expanding:

The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about “fake books,” “the fake dossier,” “fake CNN,” and he added a new claim – that Google search results are “RIGGED” to mostly show only negative stories about him. He also accused NBC News’ Lester Holt of “fudging” the tape of his May 2017 interview conducted shortly after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

An NPR analysis found that in the month of August, Trump sent out 46 tweets containing the words “fake” or “phony,” far surpassing his previous record. (Two of the tweets were later deleted to fix typos).

  Consider merely the first four years of the WEDC:

The first four years after @ScottWalker‘s WEDC popped up $700 million in grants went Walker campaign donors. Sixty percent of all handouts went to Scott Walker donors. Our full report from 2015. https://t.co/KiSayMGTPG pic.twitter.com/mwSLnswQ6g

— One Wisconsin Now (@onewisconsinnow) August 30, 2018

Watch the Incredible Moment a Diver Hypnotises a Shark:

Good morning.

Labor Day in Whitewater will see an occasional thunderstorm with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 02m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the Treaty of Paris is signed:

The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War. The treaty set the boundaries between the British Empire in North America and the United States, on lines “exceedingly generous”[2] to the latter. Details included fishing rights and restoration of property and prisoners of war.

This treaty and the separate peace treaties between Great Britain and the nations that supported the American cause — France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic — are known collectively as the Peace of Paris.[3][4] Only Article 1 of the treaty, which acknowledges the United States’ existence as free, sovereign, and independent states, remains in force.[5]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Pawan Naidu reports Secret cash aided politicians who rewrote Wisconsin law to block claims of lead-poisoned children:

At age 2, Yasmine Clark was lead-poisoned so severely that she had to be hospitalized for emergency chelation treatment to cleanse her blood of life-threatening levels of the heavy metal.

At age 5, Yasmine was again diagnosed with lead poisoning. She suffered significant brain damage. Her IQ declined. She developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

So, in 2006, at age 5, Yasmine became a plaintiff in a Milwaukee County lawsuit filed against multiple paint companies, including National Lead, now called NL Industries, which had made lead paint like that found in the rental homes where she was raised in Milwaukee.

She was among about 170 Wisconsin children named as plaintiffs in lawsuits against the paint companies. The suits sought compensation for medical expenses and other damages for what their attorneys said were severe and permanent injuries from ingesting lead-tainted paint chips.

While these children had compelling personal stories, NL Industries had something even more powerful on its side: Republican politicians facing recall elections in 2011 and 2012 who secretly benefitted from $750,000 contributed by NL’s owner, Harold Simmons, to an “independent” political group.

At the request of NL’s lobbyist, Republicans inserted a handful of words into the 2013-15 state budget that sought to halt such lead-paint lawsuits, including the one filed by Yasmine, according to a memo obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning watchdog organization that exposes corruption in government.

  Matthew Rosenberg, Michael LaForgia, and Andrew E. Kramer report Wife of Former N.R.A. President Tapped Accused Russian Agent in Pursuit of Jet Fuel Payday:

Ms. Butina’s [Maria Butina, whom American prosecutors now accuse of being a covert Russian agent] efforts to deal in Russian jet fuel, detailed in hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails, were notable not just for their whiff of foreign intrigue but for whom they involved: David Keene, a former president of the National Rifle Association and a prominent leader of the conservative movement, who has advised Republican candidates from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney. They also involved Mr. Keene’s wife, Donna, a well-connected Washington lobbyist, and Ms. Butina’s boyfriend, Paul Erickson, who ran Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and who moved in rarefied conservative circles despite allegations of fraud in three states.

Their attempt to secure the fuel deal illustrates a reality that investigators have had to navigate in bringing a federal case against Ms. Butina. During her time in the United States, she surrounded herself not only with high-profile American conservatives but also with dubious characters who seemed bent on making a fast buck — and it was not always easy to tell one from the other.

….

The driving force behind the jet fuel negotiations appears to have been Mr. Erickson, 56, a former board member of the American Conservative Union who was accused of defrauding investors in California, South Dakota and Virginia. The other major players were the Keenes, who first raised the idea of brokering a sale of Russian jet fuel and then put Ms. Butina and Mr. Erickson in touch with prospective buyers.

  Nelson D. Schwartz and Steve Lohr report Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration:

The Trump administration is using the country’s vast and nearly opaque immigration bureaucracy to constrict the flow of foreign workers into the United States by throwing up new roadblocks to limit legal arrivals.

The government is denying more work visas, asking applicants to provide additional information and delaying approvals more frequently than just a year earlier. Hospitals, hotels, technology companies and other businesses say they are now struggling to fill jobs with the foreign workers they need.

With foreign hires missing, the employees who remain are being forced to pick up the slack. Seasonal industries like hotels and landscaping are having to turn down customers or provide fewer services. Corporate executives worry about the long-term impact of losing talented engineers and programmers to countries like Canada that are laying out the welcome mat for skilled foreigners.

  Aaron Blake ponders How big is the GOP’s Trump-can-shoot-a-guy-on-Fifth-Avenue caucus?:

Matthew Miller’s reaction to the new Washington Post-ABC News poll Friday caught my eye. The poll showed just 18 percent of Americans believed President Trump should pardon Paul Manafort.

“This is the ‘shoot someone on 5th Avenue’ caucus, and it’s much lower than Trump would have you believe,” the former Obama-era Justice Department official tweeted.

….

That reference, of course, is to Trump’s famous 2016 campaign claim that his supporters would stick by him even if he pulled out a gun and shot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The implication was that Trump could do pretty much whatever he wants and his devotees wouldn’t blink. It doubles as an ego trip for Trump and a handy way for journalists and pundits to describe how Trump skates past controversies, no matter how jaw-dropping they are, because his base shrugs. (Rudy Giuliani rekindled it somewhat in a different context.)

Which got me thinking: How big is the “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” caucus in America?

The answer I arrived at as anywhere from 1 in 8 to 1 in 5 Americans — between 12 and 20 percent, around where Miller pegged it. These are the people who seem prepared to justify and/or forgive pretty much anything Trump has done or even has threatened to do. It represents half or less of Trump supporters.

Here’s how I arrived at that number. [Analysis follows in full article.]

(Blake’s assessment is compelling.  Trump’s true hardcore – his diehard base – probably amounts to 20% or fewer of all Americans.  They’re cocooned, probably watch a steady diet of pro-Trump news, talk to like-minded supporters, and hear all sorts of stories about how they’re ‘winning,’ etc.  This twenty percent is on the losing side of a national conflict, but their intense support, and biases that confirm their views, leave them unwilling or unable to see that most Americans reject Trump and Trumpism.  It’s Trump vs. an America that works [that is, Trump versus a productive and dynamic America].)

   Consider The Logo Design Revolution:

The fields of graphic design and semiotics are inextricably linked. In this way, the first logo creators were most likely the ancient Egyptians, who designed images to convey socio-cultural values and established visual codes of representation. But as the industrial revolution began to give rise to consumer culture as we know it, logo design remained mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.

Then came Paul Rand with his iconic rendering of the IBM logo in 1956. Many design historians see this as the definitive turning point in logo design. Shortly thereafter, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded a design firm that would take things one step further.

“They revolutionized the field when they created simple, bold, memorable, and whimsical identities for companies in a time when soulless corporate modernism was the trend,” said Dan Covert, whose short documentary, 60 Years of Logos, details the contributions of the grandfathers of logo design. “And because of that, their work has stood the test of time.”

These days, said Covert, it’s rare to find a logo that survives five years before it is redesigned. “If you look back at the list of companies Chermayeff and Geismar designed logos for that are still around in their original or slightly altered form, that’s enough to argue their staggering contribution to the field,” he added. Among the companies that boast a Chermayeff and Geismar-designed logo: Chase Bank, PBS, Barney’s, NBC, National Geographic, NYU, The Smithsonian, Cornell University, Brown University, HarperCollins, Showtime, Mobil Gas, PanAm, and Merck.

In the film, Chermayeff and Geismar say that their theory of design reflects a company’s identity more so than it does a company’s purpose. “We interview a lot of people, and you get a sense of the culture,” says Chermayeff. “[In the interviews,] we’re not talking about design; we are talking about what they do, who they are, and how might they best be portrayed. It’s a process of investigation, creativity, and politics.”

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see showers and thunderstorms with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 13h 05m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, Imperial Japan formally surrenders:

The surrender of Imperial Japan was announced on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the British Empire and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being “prompt and utter destruction”. While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan’s leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the “Big Six”) were privately making entreaties to the still-neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets were preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the United States and the United Kingdom at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM local time, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Sixteen hours later, American President Harry S. Truman called again for Japan’s surrender, warning them to “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Late in the evening of August 8, 1945, in accordance with the Yalta agreements, but in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and soon after midnight on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Later in the day, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Following these events, Emperor Hirohito intervened and ordered the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to accept the terms the Allies had set down in the Potsdam Declaration for ending the war. After several more days of behind-the-scenes negotiations and a failed coup d’état, Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on August 15. In the radio address, called the Jewel Voice Broadcast….he announced the surrender of Japan to the Allies.

On August 28, the occupation of Japan led by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers began. The surrender ceremony was held on September 2, aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri, at which officials from the Japanese government signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, thereby ending the hostilities.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mary Kate McCoy writes More Than One-Third Of Wisconsin Households Can’t Afford Basic Necessities, Report Says:

More than one-third of Wisconsin households can’t afford the basic necessities, according to a new report from the United Way of Wisconsin.

The household survival budget includes housing, food, transportation, health insurance, for families that have children, child care, and new this year — the cost of a cell phone.

Statewide it takes about $60,000 to get by on those basic necessities for a family of four, according to the report, which also breaks cost of living down county by county. And that budget is very conservative, said Charlene Mouille, executive director of United Way of Wisconsin.

“What’s interesting too about the survival budget is this really is basic need,” said Martha Cranley, director of community impact for United Way of Dane County.

(There’s much to consider another time about this analysis, including areas where it falls short of the mark, and others where it is likely spot on.  It’s worth considering at length, in detail.)

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

Nurses at the state’s troubled juvenile prison failed to detect for three days in 2016 that a 14-year-old inmate’s appendix was about to burst and gave him crackers and Gatorade instead of rushing him to a hospital — putting him at risk of dying, records show.

Prison officials fired one nurse over the situation but didn’t discipline others, including a nurse who failed to contact a doctor about the boy even though he should have under Department of Corrections policies because his pulse was so elevated.

The doctor who performed emergency surgery on the inmate said she saw widespread problems with the way he was treated at the prison.

“I mean, if this had happened at the hospital, I would demand that the nurse be fired for absolute incompetence,” physician Kristen Wells told a sheriff’s investigator without naming the nurse she was referring to. “She has no idea what she’s looking at. What we call it in the hospital setting is ‘failure to rescue.’ ”

  Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman report National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All:

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.

But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.

….

“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.

  Jennifer Rubin writes Voters don’t buy ‘No collusion!’:

Suffolk University’s latest poll has reassuring news for those concerned about the rule of law:

A majority of Americans (55 percent) trust special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but 59 percent don’t trust President Donald Trump’s denial that his campaign was involved, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY national poll. The survey also shows unfavorable views of President Donald Trump rising 6 points since June.

Fifty-eight percent of likely voters said they hold an unfavorable view of the president, compared to 52 percent in June, while his favorable rate has held steady at 40 percent since the early-summer poll. Trump’s job approval numbers tell a similar story, with 56 percent of voters either disapproving or strongly disapproving of his job performance, and 40 percent of voters saying they approve or strongly approve. . . . , with 57 percent saying that corruption in the nation’s capital has gotten worse under the Trump administration.

While Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight counts bolstered faith in Mueller, it’s surprising that the person who hurt Trump the most is none other than Michael Cohen. (“36 percent of voters said these convictions gave them more confidence in Mueller’s ongoing investigation, while 21 percent said less, and 35 percent said they had no effect.”). Voters seem to give a whole lot of weight to Cohen’s pointing to Trump as the man who directed the illegal campaign scheme with “61 percent saying that such legal developments raise significant questions about the president’s own behavior, while 27 percent said that the Cohen case has little to do with Trump.”

  Bird Is the Word in These Four Stories:

Good morning.

September begins with a rainy day with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 08m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1775, George III refuses the Olive Branch Petition:

The Olive Branch Petition was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 5, 1775, and signed on July 8, in a final attempt to avoid a full-scale war between Great Britain and the Thirteen Colonies in America. The Congress had already authorized the invasion of Canada more than a week earlier, but the petition affirmed American loyalty to Great Britain and beseeched King George III to prevent further conflict. The petition was followed by the July 6 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms, however, which made its success unlikely in London.[1] In August 1775, the colonies were formally declared to be in rebellion by the Proclamation of Rebellion, and the petition was rejected by Great Britain—even though King George had refused to read it before declaring the colonists traitors.[2]

….

On August 21, Penn and Lee provided a copy of the petition to Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, followed with the original on September 1. Penn and Lee reported back on September 2: “we were told that as his Majesty did not receive it on the throne, no answer would be given.”[6] In response to the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the King had already issued the Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition on August 23, declaring the North American colonies to be in a state of rebellion and ordering “all Our officers…and all Our obedient and loyal subjects, to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion.”[7]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Natasha Bertrand reports Trump’s Top Targets in the Russia Probe Are Experts in Organized Crime (“Some of President Trump’s favorite targets in the Russia probe have spent their careers in the Justice Department and FBI investigating organized crime and money laundering, particularly as they pertain to Russia”):

Bruce Ohr. Lisa Page. Andrew Weissmann. Andrew McCabe. President Trump has relentlessly attacked these FBI and Justice Department officials as dishonest “Democrats” engaged in a partisan “witch hunt” led by the special counsel determined to tie his campaign to Russia. But Trump’s attacks have also served to highlight another thread among these officials and others who have investigated his campaign: their extensive experience in probing money laundering and organized crime, particularly as they pertain to Russia.

As Trump praised and defended Russian President Vladimir Putin along the campaign trail, financial analysts and money-laundering experts questioned whether the real-estate mogul had any financial incentives—including business ties or outstanding debt—to seek better relations with Moscow. Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed in May 2017 to investigate a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Moscow to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, assembled a team with revealing expertise in fraud, racketeering, money laundering, and other financial crimes.

Trump’s latest obsession is with Bruce Ohr, a career Justice Department official who spent years investigating Russian organized crime and corruption—an expertise he shared with another Trump target named Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence operative who provided valuable intelligence on Russia to the State Department and the FBI’s Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force prior to authoring the Trump-Russia dossier in 2016. Ohr and Steele met in 2007, according to The New York Times, and stayed in touch as a result of their shared interests and mutual respect. Trump has tweeted about Ohr nearly a dozen times this month alone, complaining about his relationship with Steele and Ohr’s wife’s past work for Fusion GPS—the opposition-research firm that hired Steele in 2016 to research Trump’s Russia ties.

  Of Bruce Ohr specifically, Eric Tucker and Chad Day report AP sources: Lawyer was told Russia had ‘Trump over a barrel’:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A senior Justice Department lawyer says a former British spy told him at a breakfast meeting two years ago that Russian intelligence believed it had Donald Trump “over a barrel,” according to multiple people familiar with the encounter.

The lawyer, Bruce Ohr, also says he learned that a Trump campaign aide had met with higher-level Russian officials than the aide had acknowledged, the people said.

The previously unreported details of the July 30, 2016, breakfast with Christopher Steele, which Ohr described to lawmakers this week in a private interview, reveal an exchange of potentially explosive information about Trump between two men the president has relentlessly sought to discredit.

  Julia Davis explains The Real Reason Russia Is Rooting for Republicans in the Midterms (“State-controlled media joke about abetting Trump and believe his tough talk on sanctions is just a ploy. If the Republicans win the midterms, they say, he’ll come around”):

Pro-Kremlin experts and propagandists have no doubt that the Republicans will fall in line with Trump’s agenda, unless they’re “suicidal” in terms of their political prospects. Konstantin Zatulin, first deputy chairman of the committee for relations with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Russian nationals abroad or the Duma, or lower house, is a leading figure in Putin’s United Russia party.

In discussing the outcome of the Helsinki summit, Zatulin asserted: National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “just sat there. Did you hear them voicing any accusations against Russia?… Naturally, Trump’s team—if they aren’t suicidal—will find arguments in support of the president. Those who don’t, won’t be on his team—or maybe they won’t be in Congress.”

(“Suicidal” seems to be a favorite Russian word for anyone who dares oppose Trump.)

“Our methods will work, they’ll be effective—I’m certain of that.” — Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov

According to recent reports, Pompeo requested a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov prior to the deadline for imposing sweeping new sanctions against Russia. Diplomats familiar with the effort told The Washington Post that this outreach is being directed personally by President Trump.

  Conservative Michael Gerson writes This is the new GOP: Angry and afraid:

President Trump’s recent remarks to evangelical Christians at the White House capture where Republican politics is heading. “This November 6 election,” Trump said, “is very much a referendum on not only me, it’s a referendum on your religion.” A direct, unadorned appeal to tribal hostilities. Fighting for Trump, the president argued, is the only way to defend the Christian faith. None of these men and women of God, apparently, gagged on their hors d’oeuvres.

If religious get-out-the-vote efforts are insufficient, according to the president, “that will be the beginning of ending everything that you’ve gotten.” The gates of hell will not prevail against the church, but evidently Nancy Pelosi would.

“It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that [Democrats] will overturn everything that we’ve done, and they will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence.” Here Trump is preparing his audience for the possibility of bloodshed by predicting it from the other side. Christians, evidently, need to start taking “Onward, Christian Soldiers” more literally.

This is now what passes for GOP discourse — the cultivation of anger, fear, grievances, prejudices and hatreds.

  Here’s What’s Up for September 2018:

Good morning.

August 2018’s last day in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 6:19 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 10m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Battle of Jonesborough begins:

The Battle of Jonesborough (modern name Jonesboro) was fought August 31–September 1, 1864, during the Atlanta Campaign in the American Civil War. Two Union armies led by Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman maneuvered to draw the Army of Tennessee (led by John Bell Hood) away from their defenses at Atlanta, Georgia, where it could be destroyed.

Although Hood’s army was not destroyed, the city of Atlanta was abandoned and then occupied by Union troops for the rest of the war. The fall of Atlanta also had far-reaching political as well as military effects on the course of the war.

Among those supporting the defense of the Union, “[t]he 1st, 12th, 16th, 17th, 21st, 24th, 25th and 32nd Wisconsin Infantry regiments along with the 5th and 10th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries fought in this battle.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Parker reports ‘Totally dishonest’: Trump asserts only he can be trusted over opponents and ‘fake news’:

Over roughly the past day, President Trump has decried the “totally dishonest” media, with its “fake news” and “fake books.” He has argued that Google is biased against conservatives. And he has accused NBC News of “fudging” the tape of an interview with him that has been available online for more than a year.

The president has even declared there is no chaos in his White House, which he claimed is a “?‘smooth running machine’ with changing parts,” despite the tumult that emanates almost daily from within its walls.

Trump’s assertions — all on Twitter, some false, some without clear evidence — come just over nine weeks before the midterm elections that could help determine his fate, and they are bound by one unifying theme: All of his perceived opponents are peddling false facts and only Trump can be trusted.

(The serial liar seeks to inoculate himself against refutation by claiming that only his words are believable.)

Ali Veshi shows how simply and plainly Trump’s claims are refuted:

This is unusual even by the standards of dishonest @realDonaldTrump tweets. Here’s the entire, unedited Trump interview with Lester Holt, that has been available to anyone who’s wanted to see it from the beginning. https://t.co/Oj5e4VeaTf https://t.co/6F3P9HMXQo

— Ali Velshi (@AliVelshi) August 30, 2018

Jeff Horwitz reports Tabloid that kept Trump secrets faces losses, legal trouble:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Enquirer has long explained its support for Donald Trump as a business decision based on the president’s popularity among its readers. But private financial documents and circulation figures obtained by The Associated Press show that the tabloid’s business was declining even as it published stories attacking Trump’s political foes and, prosecutors claim, helped suppress stories about his alleged sexual affairs.

The Enquirer’s privately held parent company, American Media Inc., lost $72 million for the year ending in March, the records obtained by the AP show. And despite AMI chairman David Pecker’s claims that the Enquirer’s heavy focus on Trump sells magazines, the documents show that the Enquirer’s average weekly circulation fell by 18 percent to 265,000 in its 2018 fiscal year from the same period the year before — the greatest percentage loss of any AMI-owned publication. The slide follows the Enquirer’s 15 percent circulation loss for the previous 12 months, a span that included the presidential election.

More broadly, the documents obtained by the AP show that American Media isn’t making enough money to cover the interest accruing on its $882 million in long-term debt and that the company expects “continued declines in circulation and advertising revenues” in the current year. That leaves AMI reliant on debt to keep its operations afloat and finance a string of recent acquisitions that are transforming the tabloid news industry.

Holger Roonemaa and Inga Springe report This Is How Russian Propaganda Actually Works In The 21st Century (“Skype logs and other documents obtained by BuzzFeed News offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine”):

TALLINN, Estonia — The Russian government discreetly funded a group of seemingly independent news websites in Eastern Europe to pump out stories dictated to them by the Kremlin, BuzzFeed News and its reporting partners can reveal.

Russian state media created secret companies in order to bankroll websites in the Baltic states — a key battleground between Russia and the West — and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

The scheme has only come to light through Skype chats and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News, Estonian newspaper Postimees, and investigative journalism outlet Re:Baltica via freedom of information laws, as part of a criminal probe into the individual who was Moscow’s man on the ground in Estonia.

The Skype logs and other files, obtained from computers seized by investigators, reveal the secrets and obfuscating tactics used by Russia as it tries to influence public opinion and push Kremlin talking points.

The websites, all called Baltnews, presented themselves as independent news outlets, but in fact, editorial lines were dictated directly by Moscow.

Go Behind the Scenes of the ‘Walking With Dinosaurs’ Show:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:18 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 13m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 84% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Wisconsin troops rest at the White House lawn:

The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fought in the Second Battle of Bull Run. By the end of this third day, more than 18,000 soldiers had been killed or wounded and Union forces had been pushed back to Washington, D.C. When the Wisconsin regiments arrived in Washington, they rested on the White House lawn. According to historian Frank Klement, “President Lincoln came out with a pail of water in one hand and a dipper in the other. He moved among the men, offering water to the tired and thirsty. Some Wisconsin soldiers drank from the common dipper and thanked the President for his kindness.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Bruce Vielmetti reports Milwaukee County Jail inmate who remained shackled, handcuffed during childbirth sues county, sheriff:

A former Milwaukee County Jail inmate whom deputies ordered to wear leg shackles before, during and after she gave birth in a hospital has sued the county and Acting Sheriff Richard Schmidt over her ordeal.

According to Sandra Robles’ federal civil rights lawsuit, the chain between her feet was so short she couldn’t reach the stirrups when it came time to push during labor. In addition, one hand was chained to the bed.

Deputies refused medical staff requests to remove Robles’ shackles at least during labor.

After she gave birth, Robles wore the shackles to the restroom, and the arm chain prevented her from having full skin contact with her newborn, she said. An armed deputy was present for her entire hospital stay.

Kevin Sieff reports U.S. is denying passports to Americans along the border, throwing their citizenship into question:

PHARR, Tex. — On paper, he’s a devoted U.S. citizen.

His official American birth certificate shows he was delivered by a midwife in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. He spent his life wearing American uniforms: three years as a private in the Army, then as a cadet in the Border Patrol and now as a state prison guard.

But when Juan, 40, applied to renew his U.S. passport this year, the government’s response floored him. In a letter, the State Department said it didn’t believe he was an American citizen.

As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown.

(Note well that the Trump Administration has no specific reason to doubt any given American’s citizenship – they’re relying on a mere and general suspicion, and shifting the burden of proof to the citizen to prove his status. That general suspicion is cast on Latinos without particular evidence. In a free society, the burden of proof should rest with the state, not the citizen.)

Josh Rogin sets Trump straight on how a free press works:

Trump may not like that his media coverage is negative, but unlike Xi he doesn’t have the power to censor critics. If he wants to know why Google searches on “Trump News” return negative results, he should put down Twitter and pick up a mirror. https://t.co/rJEWnDYtfU

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) August 29, 2018

Natasha Bertrand considers Devin Nunes’s Curious Trip to London (“The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee flew to London to gather intel on Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer who compiled the dossier alleging Trump-campaign ties with Russia. But MI5, MI6, and GCHQ didn’t seem interested”):

According to two people familiar with his trip across the pond who requested anonymity to discuss the chairman’s travels, Devin Nunes, a California Republican, was investigating, among other things, Steele’s own service record and whether British authorities had known about his repeated contact with a U.S. Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. To that end, Nunes requested meetings with the heads of three different British agencies—MI5, MI6, and the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. (Steele was an MI6 agent until a decade ago, and GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, was the first foreign-intelligence agency to pick up contacts between Trump associates and Russian agents in 2015, according to The Guardian.)

A U.K. security official, speaking on background, said “it is normal for U.K. intelligence agencies to have meetings with the chairman and members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.” But those meetings did not pan out—Nunes came away meeting only with the U.K.’s deputy national-security adviser, Madeleine Alessandri. The people familiar with his trip told me that officials at MI6, MI5, and GCHQ were wary of entertaining Nunes out of fear that he was “trying to stir up a controversy.” Spokespeople for Alessandri and Nunes did not return requests for comment, and neither did the press offices for MI5 and MI6. GCHQ declined to comment.

(Nunes has so little credibility that allied officials know to shun him.)

Engineering a Racing Yacht to Cross the Pacific Ocean: 

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see occasional morning showers and a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:33 PM, for 13h 16m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Joint Review Board meets today at 4 PM.

On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina makes its second landfall:

Hurricane Katrina was an extremely destructive and deadly Category 5 hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage from central Florida to eastern Texas. Subsequent flooding, caused largely as a result of fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system[3] around the city of New Orleans, precipitated most of the loss of lives. The storm was the third major hurricane of the record-breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, as well as the third most intense tropical cyclone on record to make landfall in the United States, behind only the 1935 Labor Day hurricane and Hurricane Camille in 1969.

….

Overall, at least 1,245 people died in the hurricane and subsequent floods, making it the deadliest United States hurricane since the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane. Severe property damage occurred in numerous coastal areas, such as Mississippi beachfront towns where boats and casino barges rammed buildings, pushing cars and houses inland; water reached 6–12 miles (10–19 km) from the beach. Total property damage was estimated at $125 billion (2005 USD),[2][1] roughly four times the damage wrought by Hurricane Andrew in 1992,[6] tying Katrina with Hurricane Harvey of 2017 as the costliest Atlantic tropical cyclone on record.[7]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Molly Beck reports Wisconsin corrections officials don’t have current info for nearly 3,000 sex offenders:

MADISON – State corrections officials don’t have current information for nearly 3,000 people convicted of sexual crimes, a new state analysis shows.

Of the more than 25,000 offenders on the state’s Sex Offender Registry, 2,735 are considered noncompliant as of Aug. 20 — which could mean the offender has reported a false address to the Department of Corrections or they haven’t updated their place of employment with the state, among other violations.

Among the offenders who are noncompliant, 308 have absconded — or are refusing to keep in touch with DOC agents, according to a recent Legislative Fiscal Bureau analysis.

….

DOC spokesman Tristan Cook said the number of sex offenders who have intentionally stopped communicating with agents is in the hundreds, not thousands.

(Honest to goodness, the supposed defense from Walker’s Department of Corrections is that the number sex offenders who have intentionally stopped communicating is in the hundreds? That’s not a defense, it’s an admission.)

Mary Spicuzza and Patrick Marley report Scott Walker declares Zoo Interchange is done, even as years of work remain:

Walker on Monday celebrated the completion of the core of the Zoo Interchange, even though work on the interchange’s north leg is behind schedule. The overall construction project has for years tormented Milwaukee-area commuters.

“The Zoo Interchange Core is completed on time and on budget,” the GOP governor said in a statement.

….

In 2011, Walker promised to complete the entire Zoo Interchange project by 2019. He’s meeting that deadline for the core of the project, but not its north leg.

RELATED: No gridlock relief: Wisconsin DOT makes — then abandons — plans to ease Zoo Interchange traffic.

That work now isn’t expected to be done until 2023 at a cost of $232.6 million — 16 percent more than last year’s estimate of $202.6 million, according to the Daily Reporter.

That work will get done by 2023 only if the governor and Legislature approve the funding in next year’s state budget. Walker hasn’t decided yet whether to make enough money available to meet that already-delayed deadline, according to this office.

Katelyn Ferral reports Wisconsin DOT report shows total transportation funding has fallen under Scott Walker:

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation reports that total funding across all state transportation programs has fallen since Gov. Scott Walker took office in 2011, despite statements Walker has made insisting he has made historic investments.

According to a DOT report on 2018-2019 budget trends released last week, spending has fallen across every road program, including major highway development, local road aid and assistance and southeast Wisconsin freeways, which saw the most dramatic decline.

From fiscal year 2011-2012, funding for major highway development decreased by 31.2 percent, highway improvement funding fell by 23.8 percent and local road funding fell 13.4 percent in constant 2017 dollars. Funding for southeast freeways dropped by 51.1 percent.

Debt service on transportation borrowing has increased 66.9 percent since fiscal year 20121-12, according to the report.

 CBS reports on an even worse hurricane than Katrina:

Last year, President Trump implied that Hurricane Maria was not “a real catastrophe, like Katrina.” Today, new estimates reveal that over a thousand more people died in Puerto Rico than in Katrina. https://t.co/QygQgHx9ng pic.twitter.com/SHUqQeXinh

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 28, 2018

See also Hurricane Maria caused an estimated 2,975 deaths in Puerto Rico, new study finds.

A fireball streaking through Midwest sky was visible from 8 states: