Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-three.  Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 6:14 PM, for 11h 07m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress establishes an American navy: “On this day, Congress authorized the purchase of two vessels to be armed for a cruise against British merchant ships; these ships became Andrew Doria and Cabot.[1] The first ship in commission was the USS Alfred which was purchased on November 4 and commissioned on December 3 by Captain Dudley Saltonstall.[6] On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for two battalions of Marines to be raised for service with the fleet.[7]”

Recommended for reading in full — Trump asks black voters to honor him while he praises Robert E. Lee, meet the researchers unmasking Russian assassins, myths of the 2018 midterms, for a young Jesuit grad at the synod justice for migrants is personal, and video of a really big Peruvian tarantula — 

Gabriel Pogrund reports Trump calls on blacks to ‘honor’ him with votes, then praises Confederate general Robert E. Lee:

LEBANON, Ohio — President Trump praised the Confederate general Robert E. Lee while asking African American voters to “honor us” by voting for him at an Ohio rally that featured an unexpected and provocative monologue on America’s Civil War history.

Addressing an open-air rally of around 4,000 supporters, Trump appeared buoyant as he declared that Lee was a “true great fighter” and “great general.” He also said Abraham Lincoln once had a “phobia” of the Southern leader, whose support of slavery has made his legacy a heavily contested and divisive issue.

The comments came during an anecdote about Ohio-born President Ulysses S. Grant’s alleged drinking problems, which historians deem exaggerated.

….

Minutes earlier, Trump had hailed African American unemployment numbers and asked black voters to “honor us” by voting Republican in November. “Get away from the Democrats,” he told them. “Think of it: We have the best numbers in history. … I think we’re going to get the African American vote, and it’s true.” He also celebrated hip-hop artist Kanye West’s visit to the Oval Office on Thursday, adding: “What he did was pretty amazing.”

Geoff Brumfiel writes Meet The Internet Researchers Unmasking Russian Assassins: 

Aric Toler isn’t exactly sure what to call himself

“Digital researcher, digital investigator, digital something probably works,” Toler says.

Toler, 30, is part of an Internet research organization known as Bellingcat. Formed in 2014, the group first got attention for its meticulous documentation of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Toler used posts to Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, VK, to track Russian soldiers as they slipped in and out of eastern Ukraine — where they covertly aided local rebels.

Since then, Toler and his colleagues have been up to a whole lot more. They’ve used commercial satellite images to track Chinese air bases; watched security operations unfold on social media in Venezuela; and pinpointed the locations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria.

Now Toler and the nine other full-time members of Bellingcat’s small, international staff are increasingly being drawn into some of the biggest news stories in the world. This week they unmasked one of two Russian agents believed to be behind a spate of poisonings in the U.K. (they exposed the other one last month). And they’re collaborating with news outlets to help identify suspects in the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It’s a rapid rise for what was, just a few years ago, a group of amateurs. Bellingcat was founded by Eliot Higgins, a British native whose previous jobs included helping the settlement of refugees in the U.K. and administrator in a women’s lingerie factory.

John Hudak and Fred Dews discuss Myths about the 2018 midterm elections:

2018 midterms: Myths about the upcoming elections https://t.co/Mxsv0Y8nvr

— John Adams (@DailyAdams) October 13, 2018

The Brookings Cafeteria podcast will release new episodes on the issues shaping the 2018 midterms every Tuesday and Friday leading up to Election Day. You can follow the series where we list all episodes of the Cafeteria podcast, and visit our 2018 Midterms page for more research and analysis on the upcoming elections.

In the first episode of a special series on the 2018 midterm elections, Senior Fellow John Hudak describes some of the issues shaping the upcoming midterm elections and which common narratives around the elections are not supported by data.

Also in this episode, David Wessel explains the Federal Reserve’s recent decision to raise interest rates and the inherent difficulties in forecasting the economy.

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on Apple Podcasts, send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

Luke Hansen, S.J. writes Young Jesuit grad at the synod: justice for migrants is personal:

The church must go out and encounter young people “in detention centers, at the borders” and “in all places where their safety and family unity are threatened,” Yadira Vieyra said to the Synod of Bishops on Oct. 11. Speaking as a young immigrant living in the United States, Ms. Vieyra was sharply critical of the “hateful rhetoric and policies” she has witnessed, and she described the “sustained distress” experienced by migrants, which affects the way “they pray and remain hopeful.”

To show that the church values the lives of young people, she said the church needs to develop “innovative ways to minister to this vulnerable community” while helping people to know that Jesus Christ “stands with the oppressed and challenges the oppressor.”

Pope Francis appointed Ms. Vieyra, 29, as an auditor to the synod that is meeting from Oct. 3 to 28 in Rome to discuss “young people, faith and vocational discernment.” The synod includes 267 voting members who are mostly cardinals and bishops, 50 auditors (half men, half women) and other delegates and collaborators.

 Behold a Massive Tarantula Caught Emerging From Burrow In Peru:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 6:16 PM, for 11h 10m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1782, Henry Dodge is born:

On this date Territorial Governor Henry Dodge was born in Vincennes, Indiana. The son of Israel Dodge and Nancy Hunter, Henry Dodge was the first Territorial Governor of Wisconsin. Prior to this position, he served as Marshall and Brigadier General of the Missouri Territory, Chief Justice of the Iowa County (Wisconsin) Court. During the Black Hawk War of 1832 he led the Wisconsin militia who ultimately brought the conflict to its tragic end. He served as Territorial Governor from July 3, 1836 to October 5, 1841 and again from May 13, 1845 to June 7, 1848. He also served as U.S. Territorial Senator from 1841 to 1846. When Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as a State, dodge was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate; he was reelected in 1851 and served from June 8, 1848, to March 3, 1857. He was also twice nominated for President and once for Vice President, all of which he declined. Henry Dodge died on June 19, 1867 in Burlington, Iowa.

Recommended for reading in full —  A five-year-old was persuaded to sign away her rights at the U.S. border, homegrown disinformation, Georgia Republican keeps thousands of voter registrations on hold, Ukrainian Christians break from Moscow’s political control, and a video about the Apollo space program’s origins —

Sarah Stillman reports The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights:

Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from Honduras. This summer, when a social worker asked her to identify her strengths, Helen shared her pride in “her ability to learn fast and express her feelings and concerns.” She also recounted her favorite activities (“playing with her dolls”), her usual bedtime (“8 p.m.”), and her professional aspirations (“to be a veterinarian”).

….

According to a long-standing legal precedent known as the Flores settlement, which established guidelines for keeping children in immigration detention, Helen had a right to a bond hearing before a judge; that hearing would have likely hastened her release from government custody and her return to her family. At the time of her apprehension, in fact, Helen checked a box on a line that read, “I do request an immigration judge,” asserting her legal right to have her custody reviewed. But, in early August, an unknown official handed Helen a legal document, a “Request for a Flores Bond Hearing,” which described a set of legal proceedings and rights that would have been difficult for Helen to comprehend. (“In a Flores bond hearing, an immigration judge reviews your case to determine whether you pose a danger to the community,” the document began.) On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters.

Sheera Frankel reports Made and Distributed in the U.S.A.: Online Disinformation:

When Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress last month about Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault, a website called Right Wing News sprang into action on Facebook.

The conservative site, run by the blogger John Hawkins, had created a series of Facebook pages and accounts over the last year under many names, according to Facebook.

After Dr. Blasey testified, Right Wing News posted several false stories about her — including the suggestion that her lawyers were being bribed by Democrats — and then used the network of Facebook pages and accounts to share the pieces so that they proliferated online quickly, social media researchers said.

The result was a real-time spreading of disinformation started by Americans, for Americans.

What Right Wing News did was part of a shift in the flow of online disinformation, falsehoods meant to mislead and inflame. In 2016, before the presidential election, state-backed Russian operatives exploited Facebook and Twitter to sway voters in the United States with divisive messages. Now, weeks before the midterm elections on Nov. 6, such influence campaigns are increasingly a domestic phenomenon fomented by Americans on the left and the right.

Stavros Agorakis reports Georgia’s 53,000 pending votes:

• Georgia has put more than 53,000 voter registrations on hold, with the state’s residents fearing that voter purges and delayed registrations will affect the outcome of the upcoming elections. [AP / Ben Nadler]

• Nearly 70 percent of the flagged applications are from black voters, yet black people make up about one-third of Georgia’s population. [Vox / P.R. Lockhart]

• Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state and the Republican nominee for the open governor’s seat, is in charge of the pending list. His Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial race is Stacey Abrams, the first black female governor candidate from a major party in the US. [NYT / Astead W. Herndon]

• Voting rights advocates and civil rights groups have protested Kemp’s decision to stay in office until the election, saying it’s inappropriate that he controls voting systems. Abrams’s campaign has demanded his resignation. [CNN / Gregory Krieg]

• Kemp has waged a years-long battle against voting rights groups and minority voter registration efforts, using an “exact match” program to approve voter IDs. [Talking Points Memo / Cameron Joseph]

• Voters whose registrations are on hold will be notified via text to verify their information. Tuesday is the last day Georgians can register to vote. [Atlanta Journal-Constitution / Mark Niesse]

• Voter ID rulings across the US could help decide which party controls the Senate come 2019. Courts issued rulings against restrictions in Missouri but in favor of them in North Dakota; both states have competitive Senate races. [Vox / German Lopez]

Gabby Deutch reports Ukraine’s Spiritual Split From Russia Could Trigger a Global Schism (“For Moscow, the crisis is geopolitical as well as religious”):

“This is a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.” That’s how Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described the announcement Thursday that the Orthodox Church’s Istanbul-based leader, Patriarch Bartholomew, will grant Ukraine’s Church independence from Russia.

In televised remarks, Ukraine’s president dubbed this a “historic event,” which it undoubtedly is: For more than three centuries, Ukraine and Russia have been religiously united within the Russian Orthodox Church. It was a union Poroshenko characterized this summer as a “direct threat to the national security of Ukraine,” given his view that the Russian Orthodox Church fully supports Kremlin policy; he said then that it was “absolutely necessary to cut off all the tentacles with which the aggressor country operates inside the body of our state.”

This Is How the Apollo Program Began:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 6:18 PM, for 11h 13m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet again today at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1942, the United States engages Japanese naval forces at the Battle of Cape Esperance:

Shortly before midnight on 11 October, a U.S. force of four cruisers and five destroyers—under the command of Rear Admiral Norman Scott—intercepted [Rear Admiral Aritomo] Goto’s force as it approached Savo Island near Guadalcanal. Taking the Japanese by surprise, Scott’s warships sank one of Goto’s cruisers and one of his destroyers, heavily damaged another cruiser, mortally wounded Goto, and forced the rest of Goto’s warships to abandon the bombardment mission and retreat. During the exchange of gunfire, one of Scott’s destroyers was sunk and one cruiser and another destroyer were heavily damaged. In the meantime, the Japanese supply convoy successfully completed unloading at Guadalcanal and began its return journey without being discovered by Scott’s force. Later on the morning of 12 October, four Japanese destroyers from the supply convoy turned back to assist Goto’s retreating, damaged warships. Air attacks by U.S. aircraft from Henderson Field sank two of these destroyers later that day.

Recommended for reading in full —  Nearly every line of Trump’s USA Today op-ed was false or misleading, Trump’s conflicts of interest with the Saudis, the Saudis don’t respect Trump, Republicans accept Trump’s corruption, and video on how to make a proper cup of tea (according to George Orwell) —

Glenn Kessler is Fact-checking President Trump’s USA Today op-ed on ‘Medicare-for-All’ (“Nearly every line of President Trump’s USA Today op-ed contained a false or misleading statement”):

President Trump wrote an opinion article for USA Today on Oct. 10 regarding proposals to expand Medicare to all Americans — known as Medicare-for-All — in which almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood.

Many of these are claims we have already debunked. Presumably, the president is aware of our fact checks — he even links to two — but chose to ignore the facts in service of a campaign-style op-ed. Medicare-for-All is a complex subject, and serious questions could be raised about the cost and how a transition from today’s health-care system would be financed. Trump correctly notes that studies have estimated that the program — under the version promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — would add $32.6 trillion in costs to the federal government over 10 years. (He doesn’t mention that costs in theory would go down for individuals, state governments and others, so overall national health expenditures may not increase and could even decrease.)

But this is not a serious effort to debate the issue. So as a reader service, we offer a guide through Trump’s rhetoric.

Russ Choma writes Donald Trump Has a Serious Saudi Arabian Conflict of Interest (“They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them?”):

The grisly details of an alleged Saudi government plot to murder dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi are roiling diplomatic and national security circles, but the Trump White House’s reaction has been strangely muted. Asked about the matter on Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump vaguely condemned the “bad situation,” while also praising King Salman, the Saudi monarch, as a “fine man.” He stressed that Saudi officials say it’s unclear what became of Khashoggi, who disappeared after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. Turkish officials say he was killed within hours of entering the consulate by a Saudi hit squad on the orders of senior Saudi royal family members.

….

Trump’s meek response to the diplomatic crisis highlights the ongoing conflicts of interest posed by his business empire.

At a 2015 campaign stop, Trump bragged to the crowd about his business dealings with the Saudis. “Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them,” Trump said. “They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”

In 2001, the Saudi government bought the 45th floor of the Trump World Plaza building in New York City as part of its mission to the United Nations. And shortly before entering the White House, Trump was aggressively pursuing deals with Saudi investors and attempting to build hotels in the Saudi Arabia. In August 2015, in the midst of his presidential run, Trump registered new corporations to manage a prospective hotel in Jeddah, the gateway city to the Muslim holy sites of Mecca and Medina. That project never came to fruition, but the Washington Post reported that at least two of Trump’s US hotel properties—both called the Trump International Hotel & Tower, in New York and Chicago—have benefitted hugely from Saudi business.

 Shadi Hamid writes Saudi Arabia Is Taunting Trump (“The disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of an American ally shows how little Saudi Arabia fears the repercussions of its actions”):

Even for those who care little about human rights in the Middle East, the disappearance of Khashoggi calls into question the reliability of an ally that has insisted on acting in such brazen fashion. If Trump’s foreign policy really is about “America first,” then allies who show blatant disregard for America, American values, and American interests should incur significant costs. What might those costs be? This is what the conversation over the future of U.S.-Saudi relationship must turn to. Trump is at least partly correct about Saudi dependence on the United States. As my colleague Bruce Riedel writes, the Saudi Air Force is “is entirely dependent on American and British support for its air fleet of F15 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and Tornado aircraft. If either Washington or London halts the flow of logistics, the [air force] will be grounded.”

Bad allies, particularly in the Middle East where they abound, have been a recurring problem for successive U.S. administrations. U.S. policymakers need—or think they need—them, even when those allies go out of their way to undermine their relationships with the United States. Those allies believe—mostly correctly—that the United States will express concern and complain, but ultimately do little. The worst offenses will be forgotten in the name of national-security interests, as they have been so many times before. It is time to call Saudi Arabia’s bluff.

Greg Sargent writes Republicans keep stating openly that they’re totally fine with Trump’s corruption:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sat down for an extensive interview with Associated Press reporters, the full video of which you can watch here. One of the most telling moments was this one, in response to a question from the AP’s Dustin Weaver: (emphasis added):

Question: Democrats have made clear that if they do win back the House, they plan to launch many, many investigations into the president and the administration. They’ve made clear that one of their lines of inquiry is going to be the president’s tax returns, the president’s businesses, the president’s hotel contract. . . . Do you think that’s a legitimate line of inquiry for Democrats to be talking about?

McConnell: I think it’ll help the president get reelected. I remember the price we paid — actually, we did impeach Bill Clinton. I remember all the enthusiasm, lots of Republicans in the House and Senate — “boy, this is the ticket, this is gonna make us have a great year.” . . . It worked exactly the opposite. The public got mad at us. . . . This business of presidential harassment may or may not quite be the winner they think it is.

McConnell was asked directly whether President Trump’s tax returns and self-dealing constitute a legitimate topic for congressional oversight. He didn’t directly answer, but he did dismissively characterize such an inquiry as “presidential harassment.”

(Emphasis in original.)

How to Make a Proper Cup of Tea (According to famed Englishman George Orwell…):

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see scattered thunderstorms with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:19 PM, for 11h 16m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1973, Vice President Agnew resigns:

Under increasing pressure to resign, Agnew took the position that a sitting vice president could not be indicted and met with Speaker of the House Carl Albert on September 25, asking for an investigation. He cited as precedent an 1826 House investigation of Vice President John C. Calhoun, who was alleged to have taken improper payments while a cabinet member. Albert, second in line to the presidency under Agnew, responded that it would be improper for the House to act in a matter before the courts.^[171] Agnew also filed a motion to block any indictment on the grounds that he had been prejudiced by improper leaks from the Justice Department, and tried to rally public opinion, giving a speech before a friendly audience in Los Angeles asserting his innocence and attacking the prosecution.^[172] Nevertheless, Agnew entered into negotiations for a plea bargain, and wrote in his memoirs that he did so because he was worn out from the extended crisis, to protect his family, and because he feared he could not get a fair trial.^[173] He made his decision on October 5, and plea negotiations took place over the following days. On October 9, Agnew visited Nixon at the White House and informed the President of his impending resignation.^[174]

Recommended for reading in full —  An update on connections between a Russian bank and the Trump Organization, Putin’s popularity plummets, civility has its limits, Trump campaign official sought online manipulation plans from an Isreali firm, and video of a priest at Marquette who offers online music lessons in a folk instrument —

Readers may recall Franklin Foer’s October 31, 2016 story on possible connections between a Russian bank’s server and the Trump Organization (Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?). Now Dexter Filkins has a compelling update on computer scientists’ assessment of that electronic traffic in Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign? (“A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers”):

In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. “We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,” one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max [one of the computer researchers] told me.

As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. “We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Max told me. “We found something totally different—something unique.” In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.

Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization’s domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn’t seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, “We decided this was a covert communication channel.”

(Detailed assessment follows in the full story.)

Anna Nemtsova reports As Vladimir Putin Celebrates His Birthday, Bad News Pours In (“His popularity is plummeting, and the hits keep coming’):

Bad news has rained on Putin’s head lately. The leader of the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic, the capital of Putin’s “Russkiy Mir,” died in a bombing attack in a restaurant. The Netherlands accused Russia of a cyber attack and expelled four officers from GRU, the Russia’s military intelligence agency. Great Britain had earlier found evidence that the two Salisbury suspects were state assassins from this same agency. Even Russia’s old friend, Greece expelled two Russian diplomats and banned two more from entry for undermining state security. Somebody drilled a hole in the Russian module of the International Space Station Even Cossacks, Putin’s previously reliable allies in  United Russia have quit his party and condemned the Kremlin’s policy in a new video.

Russians are convinced that the “galley’s slave,” as Putin once described himself, is one of the world’s richest men and already has everything he needs. And yet, every year on his birthday the state television, news agencies and even independent media tell stories about Putin’s admirers giving him exotic or dull presents – puppets, swords, dachas or palaces.  Earlier this year, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, presented Putin with a harp made thousands of years ago and a wooden statue with Putin’s face. On Sunday, among the first to greet Putin with tokens of appreciation and congratulations were leaders of Belarus, Serbia, Azerbaijan, China and Republica Srpska, all still convinced Russia can serve as a reliable ally.

Meanwhile in Moscow, analysts said that Putin had more bad than good news on this day. “Putin has given himself two big presents this year: an unpopular pension reform, causing the loss of his popularity, and a complete failure in foreign policy,” a Moscow politician, Dmitry Gudkov, told The Daily Beast.

“This year the world witnessed a complete failure of Putin’s secret services, his secret agents shamed the nation in several countries, his lies became obvious during the investigation of MH-17 downing over Donbas – his own lies and actions are his worst birthday presents.”

Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman, David D. Kirkpatrick, and Maggie Haberman report Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign:

A top Trump campaign official requested proposals in 2016 from an Israeli company to create fake online identities, to use social media manipulation and to gather intelligence to help defeat Republican primary race opponents and Hillary Clinton, according to interviews and copies of the proposals.

The Trump campaign’s interest in the work began as Russians were escalating their effort to aid Donald J. Trump. Though the Israeli company’s pitches were narrower than Moscow’s interference campaign and appear unconnected, the documents show that a senior Trump aide saw the promise of a disruption effort to swing voters in Mr. Trump’s favor.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, sought one proposal to use bogus personas to target and sway 5,000 delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention by attacking Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Mr. Trump’s main opponent at the time. Another proposal describes opposition research and “complementary intelligence activities” about Mrs. Clinton and people close to her, according to copies of the proposals obtained by The New York Times and interviews with four people involved in creating the documents.

Peter Beinart observes Civility Has Its Limits (“The conflict over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination centered not on tribalism, but on a lack of justice”):

Describing Democrats and Republicans as warring tribes has become a political cliché, but it’s wrong. If tribal implies unthinking or inherited group loyalty, then Democrats and Republicans were actually more tribal in the mid-20th century. Back then, when being a Democrat or a Republican signified less about your view of the world, party identity was more a function of regional or ancestral ties. Whether or not they supported civil rights or higher taxes or the Korean War, Irish Catholics from Boston were mostly Democrats; Presbyterians from Kansas were mostly Republicans. Today, party identity is more a function of what you believe. The parties are so bitterly polarized not because they’ve become more tribal but because they’ve become more ideological.

But for [David] Brooks, depicting the supporters of Kavanaugh and Ford as tribes is useful because it doesn’t only suggest moral equivalence, it also implies an equivalence of power. The “tribalization” of American politics, Brooks argues, “leads to an epidemic of bigotry. Bigotry involves creating a stereotype about a disfavored group and then applying that stereotype to an individual you’ve never met. It was bigotry against Jews that got Alfred Dreyfus convicted in 1894. It was bigotry against young black males that got the Central Park Five convicted in 1990. It was bigotry against preppy lacrosse players that led to the bogus Duke lacrosse scandal.”

This is misleading. There is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by preppy lacrosse players and that faced by black males. There’s no equivalence, because preppy lacrosse players, in general, enjoy far more privilege and power and thus, the stereotypes people hold of them don’t generally land them in jail or dead. Similarly, there is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by men accused of sexual assault and the “bigotry” faced by women who suffer it. There’s no equivalence, because men wield far more power. If you don’t think that matters, try imagining Kavanaugh getting confirmed by a Senate composed of 79 women.

The Republican Party’s Trumpization is complete. It’s not a conservative party, or a small government party or an anti-authoritarian party (to the contrary!). It has become the caricature of the left from days gone by — all power, no principle, dismissive of courtesy and reasoned persuasion. Anger, not ideas, is its animating force. We have a nativist party that views America not as a creedal nation, but as a white Christian nation that is diminished by immigrants and is threatened by outsiders. If it possesses any coherent philosophy, it is one of victimhood — which in turn justifies any and all bad behavior.

Good morning.

 Tuesday in Whitewater will see scattered afternoon thunderstorms with a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:21 PM, for 11h 19m 18s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee is scheduled to meet at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1975, Andrei Sakharov is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:

The father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov, was awarded the Peace Prize in 1975 for his opposition to the abuse of power and his work for human rights. The leaders of the Soviet Union reacted with fury, and refused Sakharov permission to travel to Oslo to receive the Prize. His wife, Jelena Bonner, received it on his behalf. Sakharov was subsequently deprived of all his Soviet honorary titles, and the couple was for several years kept under strict surveillance in the town of Gorkij. Only when Gorbachev came to power in 1985 were they allowed to return to Moscow.

Sakharov revealed his talent for theoretical physics at an early age, and got a doctorate in 1945. From 1948 on, under the supervision of the Nobel Laureate Igor Tamm, he worked on the development of a Soviet hydrogen bomb. Sakharov was patriotic, and believed it was important to break the American monopoly on nuclear weapons. But from the late 1950s on, he issued warnings against the consequences of the arms race, and in the 1960s and 1970s he voiced sharp criticism of the system of Soviet society, which in his opinion departed from fundamental human rights.

Recommended for reading in full —  Trump drowns America in red ink, asking to whom Trump has a personal indebtedness, the darkness that’s overcome conservativism, a Plan B in response to Trumpism, and video of a New York rat so big even a cat clears out   —

Heather Long writes Trump’s economy means soaring deficits, too:

As most of America was glued to the final twists of the Brett M. Kavanaugh vote last Friday, the Congressional Budget Office dropped a whopper of a report. The United States federal government ran a deficit of $782 billion in fiscal 2018, the CBO said, the highest since 2012 and substantially higher than last year’s $666 billion. 

This isn’t supposed to happen. The U.S. economy is humming, and a hot economy is supposed to translate into higher tax revenue and very tiny deficits. In fact, the last time unemployment was around this level — in 2000 and 1969 — the U.S. government ran a surplus.

President Trump vowed to eliminate the debt in eight years while he was campaigning for president. Instead, he is presiding over ballooning deficits, an unprecedented situation during strong economic times. In fiscal 2018, which concluded at the end of September, spending jumped 129 percent while tax receipts rose 0.4 percent.

(Emphasis in original.)

David Frum asks What Does the President Owe, and to Whom Does He Owe It?:

Congress could still investigate itself or empower an independent investigation. This Congress won’t. The next Congress should.

Perhaps it should start on exactly the terrain put off limits to Mueller: The pre-2015 history of connections between Trump and Russia. Congress has power to subpoena the business records of the Trump Organization. It can trace the complex system of holding companies within which (according to Trump biographer Timothy O’Brien) Trump hides his enormous debts. It can order a forensic audit to clarify exactly what the Trump family has received from Russian sources over the years, and what it may still owe.

Very likely none of this is illegal. It is, however, burningly relevant.

This generation’s variant of “What did the president know, and when he know it?” Is “What does the president owe, and to whom does he owe it?”

Not: “Is the president a crook?” (We had available all the information needed to determine that on election day.)

But: “Is the president a risk to national security?”

Conservative Max Boot writes The dark side of American conservatism has taken over:

In 1964, the GOP ceased to be the party of Lincoln and became the party of Southern whites. As I now look back with the clarity of hindsight, I am convinced that coded racial appeals had at least as much, if not more, to do with the electoral success of the modern Republican Party than all of the domestic and foreign policy proposals crafted by well-intentioned analysts like me. This is what liberals have been saying for decades. I never believed them. Now I do, because Trump won by making the racist appeal, hitherto relatively subtle, obvious even to someone such as me who used to be in denial.

In fairness, many Republican voters and their leaders, from Wendell Willkie to Mitt Romney, have been a lot more moderate. Their very centrism stoked the fury of some on the right. The pattern was set early on, in 1964, with Phyllis Schlafly’s best-selling tract “A Choice Not an Echo.” Schlafly was baffled why Republicans candidates had lost presidential elections in 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948 and 1960. “It wasn’t any accident,” she wrote, ominously. “It was planned that way. In each of their losing presidential years, a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues.” These nefarious “kingmakers” were New York financiers who supposedly favored “a policy of aiding and abetting Red Russia and her satellites.” And how did these “kingmakers” manipulate the GOP? By promulgating “false slogans” such as “Politics should stop at the water’s edge.” In other words, for Schlafly the very idea of bipartisanship was evidence of incipient treason.

This was not the ranting of some marginal oddball. Schlafly was one of the leading lights of the right who in the 1970s would lead the successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment. Trump’s claim that he is going to “Make America Great Again” — after it has been betrayed by disloyal elites — is simply an echo, as it were, of Schlafly’s conspiratorial rants.

The history of the modern Republican Party is the story of moderates being driven out and conservatives taking over — and then of those conservatives in turn being ousted by those even further to the right. A telling moment came in 1996, when the Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole, visited an aged Barry Goldwater. Once upon a time, Dole and Goldwater had defined the Republican right, but by 1996, Dole joked, “Barry and I — we’ve sort of become the liberals.” “We’re the new liberals of the Republican Party,” Goldwater agreed. “Can you imagine that?”

Jennifer Rubin writes The corruption of the GOP is complete: So what’s Plan B?:

The Republican Party’s Trumpization is complete. It’s not a conservative party, or a small government party or an anti-authoritarian party (to the contrary!). It has become the caricature of the left from days gone by — all power, no principle, dismissive of courtesy and reasoned persuasion. Anger, not ideas, is its animating force. We have a nativist party that views America not as a creedal nation, but as a white Christian nation that is diminished by immigrants and is threatened by outsiders. If it possesses any coherent philosophy, it is one of victimhood — which in turn justifies any and all bad behavior.

Four weeks from this Wednesday (the day after the midterm elections), sorry, will commence the lead-up to the 2020 presidential race. Any Republicans thinking of challenging President Trump because they recoil from the party of Trump is, I hate to break it to them, out of luck. The party wants the mocking cruelty, the attacks on the press and on women, the protectionism and the white nationalism. These things define it.

Are we then destined to have only a choice in 2020 between President Trump (or a clone) and the Democratic Party nominee? Perhaps, and if so, we should pray Democrats pick a unifying figure, one who can restore our institutions and rebalance our politics. And what if the Democratic Party selects Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)? Well then, it’s time for Plan B.

Perhaps a potential ticket independent is waiting to be constructed from among the few Republicans who have refused to join the Trump cult. There are center/right governors — John Kasich (Ohio), Charlie Baker (Mass.), Brian Sandoval (Nev.) and former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. Democrats such as Gov. Steve Bullock (Mont.), Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), and Gov. John Hickenlooper (Colo.) would be solid additions on a ticket if you wanted to go the bipartisan route — perhaps with the promise of a one-term “reset” to rinse out the toxic remnants of the Trump era. Alternatively, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — a true independent voice — would be on any short list for vice president.

Watch as a New York Rat Bullies Cat out of the Way: