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:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 6:16 AM and sunset 7:35 PM, for 13h 19m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, the Iron Brigade fights its first battle:

On this date the Iron Brigade (Western soldiers) fought their first battle at Browner Farm. The unit was composed of the 2nd Infantry, 6th Infantry, 7th Wisconsin Infantry, and the 19th Indiana Infantry, 24th Michigan Infantry, and Battery B of the 4th U.S. Light Artillery and was well known for its valor at such Civil War battles as Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  David Fickling and Anjani Trivedi report Trump’s Mexico Trade Deal Looks Like a Lemon (“Peer under the hood, and these auto rules pack less punch”):

The key elements certainly look dramatic: lifting rules-of-origin requirements to 75 percent to avoid import tariffs, and a separate rule that 40 percent to 45 percent of content come from factories paying more than $16 an hour. The wage rule in particular is about twice what Mexican assembly-line workers make, and four times the average at parts companies there.

When you take a look under the hood, though, there’s a lot less than meets the eye.

….

Based on the NHTSA’s data [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration], there are just three models made in Mexico that are currently exempt but would attract tariffs under the new regime: Nissan Motor Co.’s Versa Sedan, Audi AG’s SQ5, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV’s Fiat 500. Of these, only the Versa sells more than a handful of models in the U.S., with 106,772 vehicles shipped in 2017.

 Tim Arango, Adam Nagourney, and Jose A. Del Real report Duncan Hunter’s Political Promise Foiled by Hard Partying and a Corruption Scandal:

SAN DIEGO — In Alpine, Calif., a suburban Southern California enclave, Duncan Hunter was a good neighbor. He’d help people do yard work, or move heavy furniture. He drove the same dented-up truck for years. At parties, he’d have a beer, two tops, and he might go off and sneak a cigarette so his wife wouldn’t see. He rarely talked about his job as a congressman.

In Washington, Mr. Hunter was a fixture on the bar scene, and spent lavishly — over $400 for 30 tequila shots at a bachelor party, and countless fancy dinners. He visited one of his favorite bars sometimes multiple times a day, piling up thousands of dollars in tabs. On occasion, he would get into loud arguments with patrons, once over the choice of music on the jukebox (he hated Celine Dion).

Those divergent lives — between the watering holes and halls of power in Washington and the suburban tracts and chain stores of Southern California — intersected for years, prosecutors say, as Mr. Hunter and his wife funded their personal lives with campaign donations, the dimensions of which were revealed in an indictment last week.

David Frum writes The President Is a Crook (“The country now faces a choice between the Trump presidency and the rule of law”):

So now it’s confirmed, as a matter of legal record, that President Donald Trump organized a scheme to violate federal election laws. He directed his longtime personal attorney to pay at least one woman for silence. That attorney got the money by lying to a bank to get a home-equity line of credit.

It’s a matter of legal record, too, that Trump’s campaign chair was a huge-scale crook. Despite his desperate financial straits, he volunteered to work for Trump for free—and Trump accepted.

These two cases complete the beginnings of the story. They are not the story in full. The Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort cases are like the first rocky outcroppings a ship passes as it makes landfall. They are examples of the kind of people willing to work for Trump—and the way that those people carried on their business. They indicate why one of Trump’s sons would write “I love it” when offered stolen information about the Hillary Clinton campaign by a purported representative of the Russian government, how so much doubtful money flowed into the Trump Organization after 2006, and why Trump dares not publish his tax returns.

Ashely Parker writes President non grata: Trump often unwelcome and unwilling to perform basic rituals of the office:

Shunned at two funerals and one (royal) wedding so far, President Trump may be well on his way to becoming president non grata.

The latest snub comes in the form of the upcoming funeral for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), which, before his death, the late senator made clear he did not want the sitting president to attend. That the feeling is mutual — Trump nixed issuing a statement that praised McCain as a “hero” — only underscores the myriad ways Trump has rejected the norms of his office and, increasingly, has been rejected in turn.

Less than two years into his first term, Trump has often come to occupy the role of pariah — both unwelcome and unwilling to perform the basic rituals and ceremonies of the presidency, from public displays of mourning to cultural ceremonies.

Self-Driving Cars Need Lessons On Human Drivers:

Good morning.

 Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five.  Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:37 PM, for 13h 21m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, the Library Board at 6:30 PM, and at 7 PM Whitewater’s School Board convenes in open session at Central Office.

On this day in 1883, Krakatoa erupts:

The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) began in the afternoon of Sunday, 26 August 1883 (with origins as early as May of that year), and peaked in the late morning of Monday, 27 August when over 70% of the island and its surrounding archipelago were destroyed as it collapsed into a caldera. Additional seismic activity was reported to have continued until February 1884, though reports of seismic activity after October 1883 were later dismissed by Rogier Verbeek’s investigation into the eruption. The 1883 eruption was one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history. At least 36,417 deaths are attributed to the eruption and the tsunamis it created. Significant additional effects were also felt around the world in the days and weeks after the volcano’s eruption.

….

On August 27, four enormous explosions occurred. At 5:30 am, the first explosion was at Perboewatan, triggering a tsunami heading straight to Telok Betong, now known as Bandar Lampung. At 6:44 am, Krakatoa exploded again at Danan, with the resulting tsunami stretching eastward and westward. The largest explosion, at 10:02 am, was so violent that it was heard 3,110 km (1,930 mi) away in Perth, Western Australia, and the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues near Mauritius, 4,800 km (3,000 mi) away, where they were thought to be cannon fire from a nearby ship. The third explosion has been reported as the loudest sound heard in historic times.[2][3]:79 The loudness of the blast heard 160 km (100 mi) from the volcano has been calculated to have been 180 dB.[4] Each explosion was accompanied by tsunamis estimated to have been over 30 meters (98 feet) high in places. A large area of the Sunda Strait and a number of places on the Sumatran coast were affected by pyroclastic flows from the volcano. The energy released from the explosion has been estimated to be equal to about 200 megatons of TNT,[5] roughly four times as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. At 10:41 am, a landslide tore off half of Rakata volcano, causing the final explosion.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Ben Judah contends Washington Is Turning Into Moscow:

So I wasn’t surprised when my computer was hacked in a custom-made attack launched from a Russian-speaking country. Nor was I shocked when Microsoft revealed that, once I had finished my research into how kleptocrats move around their money, my project had been targeted by hackers run by Russian intelligence who cloned a website in order to phish the accounts of anyone interested in our work.

But this time I didn’t stop to think Why me? It was now perfectly clear. What upsets the current regime in Moscow is not what used to infuriate the old Soviet authorities—research into its military strength—but anything exploring its illicit finances. Something similar might now be said of the current White House.

Looking back on it, I realize that every story I ever filed from Russia was not just a politics story, or a crime story, or a spy story—but almost always, on some level, also a corruption story.

That’s one final, spooky way that Washington now feels just like Moscow.

Bob Bauer writes Trump’s Contempt for the Law Will Be His Downfall:

Michael Cohen’s guilty plea this week [8.21], on charges including campaign-finance violations, brought the investigations directly to the president. It has also, however, supplied Trump and his allies with new material with which to cry “witch hunt.” Having argued all along that the investigations are political in character, they point now to strained legal claims focused on Trump’s sexual history. Distasteful, yes, they say; but it has “nothing to do with Russia,” and the charge’s evident purpose is to sully the president and to find some basis on which to bring him down.

In the days ahead, that message will surely also include references to the jurorwho voted to convict Paul Manafort, but told Fox News that she believed that the prosecutors aim was to flip Manafort for “dirt” on Trump. In this way, Trump will attempt to situate himself squarely in the tradition of other subjects of public corruption prosecutions who, facing legal and political ruin, blame high political intrigue and low motive.

This defense only succeeds to the extent that it breaks into smaller pieces the larger story of the president’s legal troubles, systematically distorting and misrepresenting each element to make the whole seem less than the sum of its parts. So Trump maintained that former National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who pled guilty for lying to the FBI, had to go only because he lied to the vice president, and otherwise was blameless for the dealings with the Russians about which he lied. He dismissed his former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who lied to investigators about his contacts with Russians, as a “low-level volunteer.” His answer to the Cohen plea is that his former lawyer and friend is a liar, not to be trusted. He has depicted Paul Manafort as “brave,”a distinguished member of the Republican consulting community who only landed in the sights of prosecutors because of his late and brief ties to Trump and his refusal to “break” under the threat of jail time.

Max Boot writes Trump is an illegitimate president whose election is tainted by fraud:

It tells you all you need to know about the moral standing of Trump’s defenders that Terrible Tuesday also included the indictment of one of his earliest congressional supporters, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), and his wife, on charges of misusing campaign funds to pay personal expenses. This comes shortly after another of Trump’s early endorsers, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), decided not to seek reelection after being indicted on insider-trading charges.

But the far more serious crimes of Trump’s congressional supporters do not involve personal peculation. They involve violating their oaths of office by failing to hold the president accountable for misusing his office. Some, such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), have gone much further by actively attempting to impede the Justice Department investigation into Trump’s alleged misconduct. They have become, in a moral if not legal sense, accessories to obstruction of justice.

And they have gotten away with it because the congressional leadership has allowed them to do so. Judging by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s (R-Wis.) cowardly and cautious statement on Tuesday — “We are aware of Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea to these serious charges. We will need more information than is currently available at this point” — there is no sign that the Republicans in Congress will ever provide any serious oversight of the Republican in the White House.

Conor Sen writes After a Trump Impeachment, Expect the Market to Bounce (“His party probably won’t turn against him until an economic downturn is near its trough. That’s what happened to Nixon”):

President Donald Trump’s comment Thursday morning that the stock market would crash if he’s impeached has the causality backward: Without a stock market crash, it’s unlikely he’ll ever be successfully impeached. Only after or in the middle of a crash would the political environment change enough to get Republicans to abandon him and impeach him.

But if this scenario were to unfold, an actual impeachment would probably end up being a bullish development, not a bearish one. For evidence look to the slow end of the Nixon administration.

In January 1973, the month of the beginning of President Richard Nixon’s second term, the S&P 500 was at a record high and Nixon’s net approval rating was near its highest level as well. This was seven months after the Watergate break-in. Unfortunately for the president, core inflation was about to surge, which ultimately led to the unraveling of his presidency.

How the Five Day Work Week Became Popular:

Good morning.

 Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:14 AM and sunset 7:38 PM, for 13h 24m 38s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1939, the first Major League Baseball game is televised:

August 26 of the same year [1939], the first ever Major League Baseball game was televised (once again on W2XBS). With Red Barber announcing, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Cincinnati Reds played a doubleheader at Ebbets Field. The Reds won the first, 5–2 while the Dodgers won the second, 6–1. Barber called the game without the benefit of a monitor and with only two cameras capturing the game. One camera was placed behind home plate, in the second tier of seating, while another was positioned near the visitors’ dugout, on the third-base side.[2]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Russell Feingold writes John McCain Was a Committed Leader. He Was Also Really Fun:

Being with John McCain, who died Saturday afternoon, could be a lot of work but was almost always fun. There were many often heroic chapters in this exciting man’s life to which others can better speak. But he and I spent well over a decade working closely together across the aisle as legislators: all over this country when it came to campaign finance reform, and around the world when it came to foreign policy.

When we traveled from Little Rock to Annapolis to San Francisco and beyond to hold “townhall meetings” in the home districts of recalcitrant senators and congressmen, John delighted in introducing me to the crowds saying: “People in Wisconsin think Senator Feingold’s first name is McCain,” reflecting the popular name of our campaign finance reform bill and also how long it was taking to pass it. In a place like New Orleans, after a long day of meetings and rallies and long after I had gone to bed, John was still playing the tables at Harrah’s though he was 16 years my senior.

When I would see John on the Senate floor way over on the “other” — Republican — side, he would invariably come running over to me and say something like, “C’mon boy, we have to get one more Democrat co-sponsor.” Or, “We’re going to New York next week for a news conference at Teddy Roosevelt’s birthplace.” The conversations were brief, to the point and about getting the job done: He was a determined man, always in motion. All of us, including his terrific staff led by Mark Salter, were always trying to keep up with him, to which John would typically say, “March or die. March or die.”

Paul Waldman contends In his feud with Jeff Sessions, Trump has painted himself into a corner:

So here’s how the president would almost certainly like things to proceed. First, he fires Sessions. Then he finds someone to replace him who has the one quality Sessions lacks: unswerving loyalty to Trump. And not just a general kind of loyalty, but a very specific kind: the willingness to fire Mueller as soon as Trump orders him to, perhaps on his very first day at the Justice Department. This nominee will be confirmed by Trump’s Republican allies in the Senate, he will assume office, he will fire Mueller and shut down the Russia investigation, and Trump will at last be free.

We don’t have to wonder whether that would be the plan, because Trump has made it clear that Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation is the primary complaint he has about his performance. There would be no point in replacing Sessions with someone else unless Trump was sure that person would protect him by shutting down the investigation.

But there’s a problem with this plan. Because Trump has made it so clear that he despises Sessions because Sessions isn’t in a position to fire Mueller for him, if and when he does fire Sessions, everyone knows that the only important criterion that he will use in choosing a new attorney general is whether that person will be willing to fire Mueller at Trump’s direction. From the moment of the firing, everyone will be asking, “Is this another Saturday Night Massacre?” The nominee will be asked by every senator and a hundred times in their confirmation hearings whether they discussed the matter with Trump, what they promised and what they intend to do. And don’t forget that Republicans control the Senate by only a 51-49 margin. Just two GOP defections would be enough to doom the nomination.

Patty Murray reports DNR Investigating Manure Runoff In Northeastern Wisconsin:

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is investigating manure runoff in Fond Du Lac County that contaminated waterways and killed fish in the Sheboygan River.

The contamination was reported Wednesday but is thought to have happened Monday during a heavy rainstorm.

Redtail Ridge Dairy, LLC is believed to be the source of the manure, which might have been washed off its fields into creeks that run into the Sheboygan River. The farm milks 1,400 cows and houses younger cows as well, and spreads manure on several parcels amounting to roughly 2,000 acres.

Ben Uvaas is a wastewater specialist for the DNR who self-described himself as a “manure cop.”

He said the manure has depleted oxygen levels in miles of local creeks.

Samantha West reports UW System Board of Regents approves name changes for 2-year campuses:

As the University of Wisconsin system completes the restructuring process that merges several two-year with four-year campuses, the Board of Regents approved official name changes Friday.

As of July 1, many former two-year UW Colleges campuses began operating as branch campuses of regional comprehensive campuses.

The new names announced at the meeting:

• University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Manitowoc Campus

• University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Marinette Campus

• University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, Sheboygan Campus

• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Washington County

• University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha

• University of Wisconsin-Platteville Baraboo Sauk County

• University of Wisconsin-Platteville Richland

• University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point at Wausau

• University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point at Marshfield

• University of Wisconsin-Whitewater at Rock County

Meet The Tiny Fox Making A Bold Comeback:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 6:12 AM and sunset 7:40 PM, for 13h 27m 23s of daytime.  The moon is nearly full with 99.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1835, The Sun, a New York Newspaper, publishes what we now know as the Great Moon Hoax:

The “Great Moon Hoax” refers to a series of six articles that were published in The Sun, a New York newspaper, beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of that time.

….

The articles described fantastic animals on the Moon, including bison, goats, unicorns, bipedal tail-less beavers and bat-like winged humanoids (“Vespertilio-homo”) who built temples. There were trees, oceans and beaches. These discoveries were supposedly made with “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

The author of the narrative was ostensibly Dr. Andrew Grant, the travelling companion and amanuensis of Sir John Herschel, but Grant was fictitious.

Eventually, the authors announced that the observations had been terminated by the destruction of the telescope, by means of the Sun causing the lens to act as a “burning glass,” setting fire to the observatory.[2]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Natasha Bertrand contends New York Prosecutors May Pose a Bigger Threat to Trump Than Mueller (“The offer of immunity to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer is reminiscent of moves law enforcement used as they were taking down the Mafia”):

The man who knows “where all the financial bodies are buried” in President Donald Trump’s namesake organization may now lead prosecutors in the Southern District of New York directly to them.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer who also serves as the treasurer of the Trump Foundation, has been granted immunity by prosecutors in their ongoing investigation of Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen. The significance of his flip, paired with Cohen’s recent plea deal, cannot be overstated: It took slightly more than a year for two of the president’s longest-serving employees, considered by many to be the last who would ever turn on him, to cooperate with federal investigators—and, in Cohen’s case, directly implicate Trump in a crime. But the news also marked a turning point in the legal assault on Trumpworld: SDNY prosecutors may now pose a more immediate threat to the president than Special Counsel Robert Mueller does.

….

“This is a classic move in investigations of a criminal organization,” said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor who was part of the team that convicted the Gambino family boss John Gotti. “They’re moving up the ladder. Peripheral characters are given immunity, witnesses testify, but they’re ultimately keeping their eye on the prize.”

Mimi Rocah and Elie Honig write Cohen, Pecker, Weisselberg: The Men With Trump’s Secrets Work for the Feds Now (“Prosecutors immunized the president’s accountant and tabloid confidant. His former fixer implicated him in court. This is far from over”):

We now know from the charging document (called an Information) to which Cohen pleaded guilty, that several other people, identified but not named, were involved in that scheme. The Information identifies a “Chairman of a Media Company,” and Executive-1 and Executive-2 of what is clearly the Trump Organization, as participating in this scheme. Based on reporting and the facts in the Information, it’s clear that the media chairman is David Pecker of American Media, Inc. (the National Enquirer), a longtime ally of Trump, and that Executive-1 is Allen Weisselberg, chief financial officer of the Trump Organization.

And we now know, based on further reporting, that both of those men received some kind of immunity deal in exchange for their cooperation. Usually, immunity entails giving essentially a pass on prosecution to someone who has some criminal exposure but is less culpable than people about whom they can testify.

James Fallows offers The Greatest Disappointment of the Trump Presidency (“The institutional fabric of the United States has proven more tenacious and resilient in responding than many feared. The Republican Congress has not”):

Still: The struggle for the country’s values and future continues, as a struggle, rather than as a settled and tragic result. The complex institutional fabric of the country has proven more tenacious and resilient than many people might have guessed or feared. A generation from now, the verdict on our era could be: irrecoverable tragedy. But that verdict is not yet determined.

Is there a surprise, a disappointment, and a settled tragedy so far? There is. It is the same one I described last year, in the first summer of the Trump age:

The major weakness these six months have revealed in our governing system is almost too obvious to mention, but I’ll name it anyway. It is the refusal, so far, by any significant Republican figure in Congress to apply to Donald Trump the standards its members know the country depends on for long-term survival of its government. A system of checks and balances relies on each of its component branches resisting overreach by the others. The judiciary has done its part; Paul Ryan’s House and Mitch McConnell’s Senate have not. We’re seeing the difference that can make.

Eliot Cohen speculates How This Will End (“Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers”):

But to really get the feel for the Trump administration’s end, we must turn to the finest political psychologist of them all, William Shakespeare. The text is in the final act of what superstitious actors only refer to as the “Scottish play.” One of the nobles who has turned on their murderous usurper king describes Macbeth’s predicament:

Those he commands move only in command,

Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

And so it will be for Trump. To be clear, these are very different people. Macbeth is an utterly absorbing, troubling, tragic, and compelling figure. Unlike America’s germaphobic president, who copped five draft deferments and has yet to visit the thousands of American soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan or Iraq, he is physically brave. In fact, the first thing we hear about him is that in the heat of battle with a rebel against King Duncan (whom he later murders) Macbeth “unseamed him from the nave to th’ chops.” He is apparently faithful to his wife, has a conscience (that he overcomes), knows guilt and remorse, and has self-knowledge. He also has a pretty good command of the English language. In all these respects he is as unlike Trump as one can be.

But in the moment of losing power, the two will be alike. A tyrant is unloved, and although the laws and institutions of the United States have proven a brake on Trump, his spirit remains tyrannical—that is, utterly self-absorbed and self-concerned, indifferent to the suffering of others, knowing no moral restraint. He expects fealty and gives none. Such people can exert power for a long time, by playing on the fear and cupidity, the gullibility and the hatreds of those around them. Ideological fervor can substitute for personal affection and attachment for a time, and so too can blind terror and sheer stupidity, but in the end, these fall away as well.

JPL, GO!:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 30m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in AD 79, Mount Vesuvius erupts:

Mount Vesuvius, a stratovolcano in modern-day Italy, erupted in 79 AD in one of the most catastrophic volcanic eruptions in European history. Historians have learned about the eruption from the eyewitness account of Pliny the Younger, a Roman administrator and poet.[1] The event is the namesake for the Vesuvian type of volcanic eruptions.

Mount Vesuvius violently spewed forth a deadly cloud of super-heated tephra and gases to a height of 33 km (21 mi), ejecting molten rock, pulverized pumice and hot ash at a massive rate of 1.5 million tons per second, ultimately releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings.[2] Several Roman settlements were obliterated and buried underneath massive pyroclastic surges and ashfall deposits, the best known being Pompeii and Herculaneum.[1][2]

The total inhabitants of both cities were 16,000–20,000; the remains of over 1,500 people have been found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, but the overall death toll is still unclear.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Andrew Cohen offers A Reader’s Guide to Our Constitutional Crisis:

It’s not easy to write in real time about the legal and political fate of a president who rages in tweets, “NO COLLUSION — RIGGED WITCH HUNT!” at one o’clock in the morning. In part this is because of the gulf that exists between the reality that animates the mind of Donald Trump and the reality in which the rest of us live. In part it’s because so much of what happened this week, in and out of courts in Washington, New York, and Virginia, is unprecedented in the nation’s history. In some ways we’ve already gone past the point at which the Watergate story ended.

The conviction of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on tax fraud and bank fraud charges in Virginia tells us that jurors aren’t going to buy into the administration’s “witch hunt” theme when there is compelling evidence of criminal conduct. A juror emerged on Wednesday to say that a lone holdout prevented prosecutors from sweeping all 18 of the charges against Manafort, a defendant the president later called “brave.” That’s bad news for Trump and bad news for Manafort, too, who now faces a second federal trial, in Washington, before a less sympathetic judge and perhaps less sympathetic jurors, too.

The guilty pleas entered by former Trump lawyer and “fixer” Michael Cohen, for their part, tell us that federal prosecutors believe the president himself may have committed crimes. More bad news for the president. As Benjamin Wittes pointed out, “the significance of the Cohen plea is not merely that Cohen alleges that Trump had him arrange to pay hush money to a porn star and a model in a specific effort to influence the election with illegal corporate contributions. It’s that the Justice Department believes this allegation to be true and is willing to proceed criminally against Cohen on that basis.” And don’t forget it was federal prosecutors in New York, and not special counsel Robert Mueller’s team in Washington, who handled the Cohen deal.

Conservative Michael Gerson describes A cancer on the presidency:

Every time we gain a peek into the inner workings of Trump world, we see a leader with the ethics of an Atlantic City casino owner who surrounds himself with people chosen for their willingness to lie and cheat at his bidding. A world in which Paul Manafort is “a very good person.” A world in which payoffs and election tampering are all in a day’s work.

Left to his investigation, Mueller will expose this world to the light. And the choice for Congress is likely to be clear: Impeach, or tolerate massive corruption.

Jeffrey Goldberg describes Donald Trump’s Mafia Mind-Set:

I have not seen [Gambino family underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull”] Gravano in a very long time—he has spent most of the past two decades in prison, after having failed to hide his drug-distribution business from his federal monitors—but my thoughts turned to him yesterday, when I read President Donald Trump’s tweet on the subject of loyalty and respect. The president, who is obviously perturbed by the felony conviction of his former campaign chair Paul Manafort and the plea deal taken by his former attorney Michael Cohen, wrote the following: “I feel very badly for Paul Manafort and his wonderful family. ‘Justice’”—a cutting reference to the Justice Department, which he oversees as the leader of the executive branch—“took a 12 year old tax case, among other things, applied tremendous pressure on him and, unlike Michael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’ – make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’ Such respect for a brave man!”

What we see in this astonishing tweet is an implicit endorsement by the president of the United States of omertà, the Mafia code of silence, which has been honored, especially over the past 30 years or so, more in theory than in practice.

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In these statements, Trump displays contempt for the rule of law, and honors criminals who refuse to cooperate with law enforcement. He’s doing nothing less than elevating gangster ideology to the status of high principle. He’s also evincing a gauzy and archaic understanding of the nature of gangsterism. I heard, in his statements, echoes of many conversations I had while trying to understand the culture of organized crime.

Rich Kremer reports DNR Wastewater Permit Backlog Persists More Than Year After Critical Audit:

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is still behind on reviewing a backlog of wastewater discharge permits more than a year after an audit found the agency wasn’t following its own policies aimed at preventing water pollution, the agency reports.

A report requested by state Sen. Robert Cowles, R-Green Bay, shows the DNR fell short of its goals for reviewing municipal, industrial and concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) wastewater permits between July 2017 and July of this year. The DNR did not respond to a request for comment on the data.

DNR policy suggests an acceptable permit backlog of no more than 10 percent for municipal and industrial sources and 15 percent for CAFOs. The latest data show backlogs of 13.6 percent for municipal and industrial permittees and 21.8 percent for CAFOs.

A Curious Polar Bear Gets Up-Close To Photographer: