Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see variable cloudiness with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:21 PM, for 14h 40m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1775, the Second Continental Congress creates a postal service:

Overthrowing the London-oriented imperial postal service in 1774–1775, printers enlisted merchants and the new political leadership, and created a new postal system.[13] The United States Post Office (USPO) was created on July 26, 1775, by decree of the Second Continental Congress.[1] Benjamin Franklin headed it briefly.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Tory Newmyer writes Trump declares premature victory with European Union deal:

President Trump’s announcement on trade with the European Union completes a cycle now familiar in his presidency. The commander in chief flogs an issue repeatedly as a crisis-level threat while pursuing a fix that often creates more harm than it solves — then beats a partial retreat that he frames as a victory.

….

But Trump’s commitment to that cease-fire remains provisional. “He did not take that option entirely off the table,” The Washington Post’s Damian Paletta and Jeanne Whalen write, “preserving leverage in case the talks falter.” Indeed, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in Wednesday night interview on Fox Business Network, affirmed that “the investigation on autos will continue. It’s just we won’t impose any auto tariffs, as long as the negotiations are progressing properly.”

The other details of what he hashed out with Juncker are similarly sketchy.

The president made no specific commitment to lift the steel and aluminum tariffs he imposed back in June, nor did Juncker pledge to withdraw the retaliatory measures from the E.U. targeting American motorcycles, blue jeans and bourbon, among other products. Rather, both sides agreed to keep talking, though with no timetable.

(Emphasis in original.)

Rick Barrett reports Farmers say Trump’s $12 billion in farm aid won’t cover their losses from trade war:

Farmers urged Trump to settle the trade disputes with China, Mexico, Canada and the European Union and get the commerce flowing again.

“Whatever short-term relief farmers might feel, the aid does nothing to repair damage the trade war is doing to long-standing relationships with our global trading partnerships,” Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative, based in Green Bay, said in a statement.

….

Brody Stapel, a dairy farmer from Cedar Grove, and board president of Edge Dairy Farmer Cooperative, says $12 billion wouldn’t go far when stretched over millions of acres of U.S. crops and other commodities.

“Our concern is the longer this trade war lasts, the more it will hurt long term,” Stapel said.

  CREW [the Committee for Responsibility and Ethics in Washinghton] issued a Statement on an Emoluments Decision:

Washington— Following a federal judge’s decision to allow the Emoluments case to proceed, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics Washington (CREW) Executive Director Noah Bookbinder released the following statement:“This is a historic day for the Constitution. We are honored and proud to represent the state of Maryland and the District of Columbia alongside Attorneys General Brian Frosh and Karl Racine as a federal court considers evidence of presidential violations of the Emoluments Clauses for the first time.

Americans need to know that their president is acting in their interest and not in the interest of his private businesses. President Trump has refused again and again to separate himself from his business empire to avoid pervasive conflicts of interest and constitutional violations. A court has now decided that the Emoluments Clauses, put in place by the framers of the Constitution to protect against corruption, are broad and can be enforced in court. We look forward to working with Maryland and the District of Columbia to prove their case and stop these insidious violations.”

Read the decision here.

  Kimberley Richards writes Trump’s latest speech compared to ‘1984’: ‘What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening’:

The US president addressed supporters at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City on 24 July, requesting them to not listen to what they read or saw in the news.

“Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news,” Mr Trump said as the crowd erupted in boos. He later added: “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening…”

ThinkProgress made comparisons between Mr Trump’s speech in Kansas and a line from the late Mr Orwell’s novel that read: “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

NASA ScienceCasts describes An Intersection of Art and Science on the International Space Station:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:22 PM, for 14h 42m 33s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1999, the first Brewer is inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame:

On this date Robin Yount became the first player inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame in a Brewer’s jersey. Yount entered the major leagues at the age of 18 and spent his entire career with the Milwaukee Brewers as number 19 at short stop and center field. His awards are numerous, including being selected as an all-star three times as well as American league MVP twice.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Rick Barrett reports Trump’s trade war sweeps across Wisconsin, raising prices and putting jobs at risk:

President Donald Trump’s trade war is sweeping across Wisconsin — with manufacturers, farmers and soon the rest of us bracing for the impact.

Dairy products, cars, motorcycles, appliances, electronics and sporting goods are just a few things subject to new tariffs, or threats of tariffs, in trade disputes that have engulfed the U.S., Canada, Mexico, China and the European Union.

More: Harley-Davidson profit falls as company warns of damage from Trump’s trade war

In Milwaukee, Mike Darrow, president of the Russ Darrow Group of automotive dealerships, says sales of cars and trucks could hit a wall if Trump follows through on a threat to impose a 25 percent tariff on imported vehicles and parts.

It would raise the price of a typical new car sold in the U.S. by $4,400, according to the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich.

  Jeff Daniels reports China could bring more pain to US soybean farmers if Trump escalates the trade war:

If China were to add another round of duties on soybeans, it could add pressure on the Trump administration due to the economic importance of soy exports to China. However, the White House may have helped prepare for more pain in the American agriculture sector by rolling out a $12 billion emergency plan for U.S. farmers on Tuesday.

“Nobody is going to win in this trade war,” said Bret Davis, an Ohio soybean farmer and a member of the American Soybean Association’s governing committee. “We just hope instead of a tariff that we come to an agreement and make it better for our side and their side.”

Still, there is precedent for China slapping “double whammy” tariffs months apart on the same U.S. agricultural products. For example, China imposed two rounds of tariffs on pork, nuts and fresh fruit. In the case of pork, after the additional tariff went into effect July 6, “the other white meat” is now subject to an import tax that exceeds 70 percent.

  John Fritze and Deirdre Shesgreen report Trump offers help to farmers hit by escalating China trade war:

WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump embarks on a multistate tour through parts of the country hit heavily by trade battles, his administration said Tuesday it will direct $12 billion to farmers whose harvests have been hurt by tariffs.

But the idea faced immediate criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Responding to farm groups and the Republican discontent, administration officials said they have been working since April on a short-term plan to shore up slipping prices for soybeans, pork and other crops hit with retaliatory tariffs from China.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue described the programs as “a firm statement that other nations cannot bully our agricultural producers to force the United States to cave in.”

But the idea drew sharp and immediate criticism from some Republicans on Capitol Hill, who described it as “welfare” for one sector of the economy affected by the tit-for-tat raising of trade barriers that has been ushered in by Trump.

“This trade war is cutting the legs out from under farmers,” said Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. “The best relief for the president’s trade war would be ending the trade war.”

(Tariffs are taxes, and now on top of more de facto taxes from his trade war, Trump wants more spending that will require higher taxes to pay for the spending outright or as interest on additional deficit spending.)

 Rich Kremer reports Wisconsin Ag Groups Mixed On $12B Trump Aid For Farmers Caught In Tariff Battles (“Industry Leaders, Members Of Congress Criticize Move As Government Handouts”):

But in Wisconsin, farm and agricultural trade groups wondered how long it will take for that new trade policy to be hammered out and whether $12 billion would be enough to help every impacted farmer.

Wisconsin Soybean Marketing Board Executive Director Robert Karls said it’s a frustrating situation for farmers who would rather see a fair and level playing field rather than a situation where they’re dependent on a government aid program. He said soybeans have already lost more than $2 a bushel in value over the last 45 days, which will eventually impact everyone.

These sanctioned tariffs, these retaliation tariffs are truly, truly damaging and everybody is going to feel it“These sanctioned tariffs, these retaliation tariffs are truly, truly damaging and everybody is going to feel it,” said Karls. “People, locally, are going to feel it when they buy their groceries. It’s going to impact their households. There’s just no doubt.”

(Even the agricultural industries Trump aims to support know that his support is a bad idea.)

Watch as a Huge Whale Breaches Inches From Kayaker:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 48m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1911, American explorer Hiram Bingham discovers Machu Picchu:

Most archaeologists believe that Machu Picchu was constructed as an estate for the Inca emperor Pachacuti (1438–1472). Often mistakenly referred to as the “Lost City of the Incas” (a title more accurately applied to Vilcabamba), it is the most familiar icon of Inca civilization. The Incas built the estate around 1450 but abandoned it a century later at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Although known locally, it was not known to the Spanish during the colonial period and remained unknown to the outside world until American historian Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.

Machu Picchu was built in the classical Inca style, with polished dry-stone walls. Its three primary structures are the Intihuatana, the Temple of the Sun, and the Room of the Three Windows. Most of the outlying buildings have been reconstructed in order to give tourists a better idea of how they originally appeared.[14] By 1976, thirty percent of Machu Picchu had been restored[14] and restoration continues.[15]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Salvador Rizzo, Glenn Kessler, and Meg Kelly write Over four days, false claims dominated Trump’s Twitter feed:

President Trump tweeted a series of false or misleading claims over four days, ranging from the Russia investigation to NATO funding to North Korea to the price of soybeans.

From July 20 to July 23, accurate statements on the president’s Twitter feed were swamped by faulty claims. We rounded up 14 tweets worth fact-checking. Let’s dive in.

“Congratulations to @JudicialWatch and @TomFitton on being successful in getting the Carter Page FISA documents. As usual they are ridiculously heavily redacted but confirm with little doubt that the Department of ‘Justice’ and FBI misled the courts. Witch Hunt Rigged, a Scam!” (July 22)

Trump posted a series of misleading tweets about the FBI’s court application requesting wiretap surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, often citing statements made by supporters that were factually wrong or politically biased.

(Trump uses his Twitter feed, in part, to tell his hardcore followers what they want to hear, knowing that they’ll not care about the truth of his claims.)

  Greg Sargent reports As Trump’s latest lies implode, one party tries to smuggle out the truth:

This morning, the New York Times’s Charlie Savage has a great piece on the White House’s decision over the weekend to release documents revealing the FBI’s application to a FISA court to run secret surveillance on former Trump campaign official Carter Page. The bottom line: The documents lay waste to much of the narrative about the FBI investigation pushed by Trump — and GOP Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the House Intelligence Committee chairman who enshrined that story line in his much-discussed memo — while largely confirming that Democratic efforts to correct that narrative have been offered accurately and in good faith.

The Trump/Nunes narrative rests heavily on the idea that the FBI probe into the Trump campaign was illegitimate, because it was triggered by the “Steele Dossier.” The Nunes memo in January charged that to spy on the Trump campaign, the FBI failed to disclose that former British spy Christopher Steele’s research had originally been funded for political purposes (which Trump and his allies maintain shows the probe had tainted origins). In his rebuttal memo at the time, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California — Nunes’s counterpart — disputed this, noting that the FBI’s application for the warrant did, in fact, disclose that Steele was hired by “politically motivated persons” to “discredit” the Trump campaign.

The newly released documents — in particular, the FBI’s FISA applications — show that Nunes was engaged in disingenuous parsing designed to deceive and that Schiff was telling the truth. The application contained a whole page detailing the FBI’s conclusion that Steele had been hired to do “research” to “discredit” the Trump campaign, and that the FBI deemed Steele credible anyway, having relied on his information in the past. As Savage puts it, the new release offers a “page-length explanation” that confirms what Democrats contended “at the time” about the research’s “politically motivated origins.”

(Sergeant’s right that Trump’s and Nunes’s lies here are soundly refuted; those two are, however, playing to a diehard audience that doesn’t care if they lie.)

  Matthew Yglesias observes Donald Trump is actually a very unpopular president (“Yes, his base likes him, but his overall numbers are terrible”):

A useful corrective to these niche polls [showing Trump doing well with Republicans] showing Trump’s appeal to select segments of the electorate is to use FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker to compare his overall popularity to that of other presidents.

As you can see, at this point in their presidencies, every president going back 60 years — Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, and Dwight Eisenhower —was more popular than Trump is.

….

And it seems plausible to attribute those numbers to the all-base, all-the-time refusal to do anything on either a symbolic or a policy level to try to reassure people who aren’t in his base that their worst fears about him are mistaken. Trump’s strength with his base, meanwhile, isn’t a mitigating factor — it’s part of the overall problem. In a divided country, he makes no effort to serve as a unifying figure.

(Republicans who talk to each other, watch Fox, and assume that their neighborhoods reflect the national mood have made the same mistake that liberals did in, let’s say, 1984: they have shielded themselves from the weaknesses of their own candidate.)

Krishnadev Calamur writes The French President Had a More American Response to Putin Than Trump Did:

Compare Trump’s remarks on Monday with similar news conferences Putin held with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, both Western peers of Trump. Those countries have deeply entrenched economic relations with Russia—and are reliant on Moscow for their energy needs. Their news conferences were held in May in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran, an agreement to which Russia, France, and Germany are also party (along with China, the U.K., and the EU). The French and German leaders sharply criticized Moscow when policies diverged—as they do on several fronts.

“I am well aware of Russia’s indispensable role in solving some international issues, but I believe that Russia, for its part, should also respect our interests, the interests of our sovereignty as well as the interests of our partners,” Macron said on May 24. Standing beside Putin, he cited “deep differences” between the two countries on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons (Syria and Russia deny that such weapons were used, in the face of evidence to the contrary) but added: “I believe that we should coordinate our efforts to create a mechanism for determining responsibility in the event of fresh cases of chemical weapons being used by this or that side.”

….

Macron also spoke about Russia’s alleged cyberattacks across Europe.“This is a real problem today,” he said. “It is fueling some of the issues on human rights that exist in our society because cyberattacks have their economic and security aspects.” It wasn’t the first time Macron had called out Putin this way. In a news conference with Putin soon after his election, Macron singled out Sputnik and RT, the state-funded Russian media organizations, as “being agencies of influence and propaganda, lying propaganda—no more, no less.”

Here’s How Movie Theaters Are Ruining Your Movie Experience:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:24 PM, for 14h 48m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board will meet at Central Office at 7 PM.

On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sells its first car, a Ford Model A.  (Ford later used that same model name in 1927 to designate to a significantly more advanced vehicle.)

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Charlie Savage explains How a Trump Decision Revealed a G.O.P. Memo’s Shaky Foundation:

WASHINGTON — When President Trump declassified a memo by House Republicans in February that portrayed the surveillance of a former campaign adviser as scandalous, his motivation was clear: to give congressional allies and conservative commentators another avenue to paint the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian election interference as tainted from the start.

But this past weekend, Mr. Trump’s unprecedented decision, which he made over the objections of law enforcement and intelligence officials, had a consequence that revealed his gambit’s shaky foundation. The government released the court documents in which the F.B.I. made its case for conducting the surveillance — records that plainly demonstrated that key elements of Republicans’ claims about the bureau’s actions were misleading or false.

….

Mr. Trump’s portrayal, which came as the administration is trying to repair the damage from his widely criticized meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, revived the claims put forward in February by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee. But in respect after respect, the newly disclosed documents instead corroborated rebuttals by Democrats on the panel who had seen the top-secret materials and accused Republicans of mischaracterizing them to protect the president.

  Rosalind S. Helderman reports Russian billionaire with U.S. investments backed alleged agent Maria Butina, according to a person familiar with her Senate testimony:

Maria Butina, the Russian woman charged in federal court last week with acting as an unregistered agent of her government, received financial support from Konstantin Nikolaev, a Russian billionaire with investments in U.S. energy and technology companies, according to a person familiar with testimony she gave Senate investigators.

Butina told the Senate Intelligence Committee in April that Nikolaev provided funding for a gun rights group she represented, according to the person. A spokesman for Nikolaev confirmed that he was in contact with her as she was launching the gun rights group in Russia between 2012 and 2014. He declined to confirm whether Nikolaev gave her financial support.

Nikolaev’s fortune has been built largely through port and railroad investments in Russia. He also sits on the board of American Ethane, a Houston ethane company that was showcased by President Trump at an event in China last year, and is an investor in a Silicon Valley start-up.

  Conservative Michael Gerson writes Trump is smashing the hopes of oppressed people everywhere:

So let us take an account of what is being smashed by Donald Trump. In viewing our European allies as a “foe” intent on exploitation, Trump is smashing an alliance that has encouraged peaceful relations within Europe and jointly resisted terrorism and Russian aggression. By questioning NATO’s Article 5 and the principle of collective security, he is smashing a system that has turned a continent prone to war and genocide into a flawed but functioning community of free nations. By ignoring and denying the moral power of American ideals and expressing a deeply un-American dictator envy, Trump is smashing our sense of national mission along with the hopes of oppressed people everywhere.

And for what? For a form of extreme nationalism that serves someone else’s nation? For a definition of strength that trades away the tremendous advantage of our defining ideals? This is a work of demolition without the inconvenience of new architecture. Yet among his Republican supporters, none dare call it idiocy.

Vladimir Kara-Murza explains What’s really behind Putin’s obsession with the Magnitsky Act:

It was then that Browder turned from investment to full-time advocacy, traveling the world to persuade one Western parliament after another to pass a measure that was as groundbreaking as it would appear obvious: a law, commemoratively named the Magnitsky Act, that bars individuals (from Russia and elsewhere) who are complicit in human rights abuses and corruption from traveling to the West, owning assets in the West and using the financial system of the West. Boris Nemtsov, then Russia’s opposition leader (who played a key role in convincing Congress to pass the law in 2012), called the Magnitsky Act “the most pro-Russian law in the history of any foreign Parliament.”

It was the smartest approach to sanctions. It avoided the mistake of targeting Russian citizens at large for the actions of a small corrupt clique in the Kremlin and placed responsibility directly where it is due. It was also the most effective approach. The people who are in charge of Russia today like to pose as patriots, but in reality, they care little about the country. They view it merely as a looting ground, where they can amass personal fortunes at the expense of Russian taxpayers and then transfer those fortunes to the West. In one of his anti-corruption reports, Nemtsov detailed the unexplained riches attained by Putin’s personal friends such as Gennady Timchenko, Yuri Kovalchuk and the Rotenberg brothers, noting that they are likely “no more that the nominal owners … and the real ultimate beneficiary is Putin himself.” Similar suspicions were voiced after the publication of the 2016 Panama Papers, which showed a $2 billion offshore trail leading to another close Putin friend, cellist Sergei Roldugin. Some of the funds in his accounts were linked with money from the tax fraud scheme uncovered by Magnitsky.

Volumes of research, hours of expert testimony and countless policy recommendations have been dedicated to finding effective Western approaches to Putin’s regime. The clearest and the most convincing answer was provided, time and again, by the Putin regime itself. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin tasked his foreign ministry with trying to stop; it was the Magnitsky Act that was openly tied to the ban on child adoptions; it was the Magnitsky Act that was the subject of the 2016 Trump Tower meeting attended by a Kremlin-linked lawyer; it is advocating for the Magnitsky Act that may soon land any Russian citizen in prison. It was the Magnitsky Act that Putin named as the biggest threat to his regime as he stood by Trump’s side in Helsinki.

….

Vladimir Putin has left no doubt: The biggest threat to his regime is the Magnitsky Act, which stops its beneficiaries from doing what has long become their raison d’être — stealing in Russia and spending in the West. It is time for more Western nations to adopt this law — and for the six countries that already have it to implement it with vigor and resolve.

Simon Whistler describes The North’s Air Force During the American Civil War:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with an occasional shower, and a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:25 PM, for 14h 48m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, the Battle of Atlanta continues:

The Atlanta Campaign had begun two months earlier, in May, but a decisive battle was fought on July 22. Union forces met 37,000 Confederate troops in a battle that some historians consider one of the most desperate and bloody of the war. Although 20 percent of Confederate forces were killed, wounded, or missing at the end of the day, the South still controlled the city. The 1st, 12th, 16th, 17th, 22nd, 25th, 26th, 31st Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 5th Wisconsin Light Artillery were engaged in the Battle of Atlanta.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Scott Clement and Dan Balz report Americans give Trump negative marks for Helsinki performance, poll finds:

By wide margins, Americans give President Trump negative marks for his conduct during a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week and for his casting doubt on U.S. intelligence conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.

….

The Post-ABC poll conducted Wednesday through Friday finds that overall, 33 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of his meeting with Putin while 50 percent disapprove. A sizable 18 percent say they have no opinion. A slightly larger 56 percent disapprove of Trump expressing doubts about U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia tried to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. On both questions, those who say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s performance outnumber those who say they “strongly approve” by better than 2 to 1.

  Julian Sanchez writes Trump could get his intel from the government. Instead, he gets it from Fox News:

Invited by a reporter at Monday’s news conference to denounce Russian electoral interference, Trump’s first response was a rhetorical question based on a false premise: “You have groups that are wondering why the FBI never took the server. Why haven’t they taken the server?”

To those not steeped in Trump-friendly blogs and cable programs, it might have seemed like a bizarre non sequitur. But regular viewers of Fox News would have understood “where is the server?” as shorthand for a fanciful theory that it was not Russian hackers but an insider at the Democratic National Committee who made off with DNC emails that were published by WikiLeaks. According to this narrative, DNC officials have denied law enforcement access to their computer systems to conceal an “inside job,” and the attribution of the theft to Russian intelligence was made without this obviously crucial piece of evidence. Trump has raised questions about the supposedly “missing” server again and again on Twitter.

Yet the answer to those questions is embarrassingly simple: The FBI did get all the relevant information from the DNC’s network. The incident-response firm hired by the DNC, CrowdStrike, had exact digital copies of the systems that U.S. authorities say were targeted by a Russian military operation in 2016, as well as logs showing the intruders’ actions in the system as they occurred. As CrowdStrike, the DNC and senior FBI officials have all repeatedly made clear , all the data captured by CrowdStrike — which would be far more useful for forensic purposes than having access to the physical machines after the fact — was promptly handed over to the FBI. That the government had this information, along with a mountain of other evidence, is also obvious from the indictment that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office made public this month. That document includes a meticulously detailed account of the DNC hack, including how the initial intrusion was achieved, the specific hacking tools and malware that were installed, and the types of data that were ultimately exfiltrated. “Why haven’t they taken the server?” Well, in the only sense that matters for forensic analysis, they have.

  James Risen writes The Butina Indictment Isn’t About the Sex Life of an Accused Spy. It’s About Following Russian Money in U.S. Politics.

Butina is just a minor figure in what appears to be a broader ongoing inquiry into the relationships between Russia, conservative American organizations like the National Rifle Association, and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. For months, federal investigators have been looking into whether the NRA or other conservative organizations were used by the Russian government or Russian oligarchs to funnel money to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Investigators working with special counsel Robert Mueller have repeatedly questioned Russian oligarchs traveling to the United States about whether they made cash donations directly or indirectly to Trump’s campaign or his inauguration, CNN reported earlier this year. In at least one case, they stopped a Russian oligarch when his private plane landed in New York.

Butina has attracted the attention of federal investigators mainly because of her connections to this shadowy intersection of powerful Russians and right-wing Americans. In fact, it was Butina’s work for Alexander Torshin, a close political ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that made her a target of federal investigators. Torshin — not Butina — is the Russian figure whose involvement with the NRA and American conservatives brings the Trump-Russia case closer to Russian organized crime and Putin.

Mark Follman reports The NRA Has Deep Ties to Accused Russian Spy Maria Butina (“Here is the years’ worth of evidence”):

For decades, the National Rifle Association has promoted its hardline politics with appeals to patriotism, freedom, and the staunch defense of the Second Amendment. But now, the controversial gun lobbying group finds itself deeply caught up in a wide-ranging effort to sabotage American democracy by an enemy foreign power.

Federal prosecutors unsealed charges this week against 29-year-old Russian national Maria Butina, a self-styled gun activist with long-running ties to the NRA who worked for Alexander Torshin, a high-level Russian government and banking official from President Vladimir Putin’s party. Butina, who was a graduate student at American University until this spring, began traveling to the United States in 2014 and operated as a “covert Russian agent,” according to an FBI affidavit. She acted as an unregistered foreign agent and participated in a multiyear conspiracy to infiltrate conservative political groups including the NRA, federal prosecutors say, in order to “advance the interests of the Russian Federation.”

Butina and Torshin worked together in attempts to cultivate Republican politicians and eventually Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Under Torshin’s direction, “the covert influence campaign involved substantial planning, international coordination, and preparation,” according to court documents, which detail some of the evidence gathered by the FBI on Butina’s connections to a Russian intelligence agency and Russian oligarchs. Torshin, who for years also traveled to America for NRA events and was among Russian officials sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April, is referred to only as a “Russian official” in the court documents. But his identity has since been confirmed in multiple news reports, and he appears with Butina in both the United States and Russia throughout several years’ worth of social-media posts previously documented by Mother Jones.

Some Californians are Helping the Homeless Through Farm-to-Table Training:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be variably cloudy, with a couple of showers, and a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:26 PM, for 14h 50m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, the First Battle of Bull Run takes place in northern Virginia:

The First Battle of Bull Run (the name used by Union forces), also known as the First Battle of Manassas[1] (the name used by Confederate forces), was fought on July 21, 1861 in Prince William County, Virginia, just north of the city of Manassas and about 25 miles west-southwest of Washington, D.C. It was the first major battle of the American Civil War. The Union’s forces were slow in positioning themselves, allowing Confederate reinforcements time to arrive by rail. Each side had about 18,000 poorly trained and poorly led troops in their first battle. It was a Confederate victory, followed by a disorganized retreat of the Union forces.

….

Both armies were sobered by the fierce fighting and many casualties, and realized that the war was going to be much longer and bloodier than either had anticipated. The Battle of First Bull Run highlighted many of the problems and deficiencies that were typical of the first year of the war. Units were committed piecemeal, attacks were frontal, infantry failed to protect exposed artillery, tactical intelligence was nil, and neither commander was able to employ his whole force effectively. McDowell, with 35,000 men, was only able to commit about 18,000, and the combined Confederate forces, with about 32,000 men, committed only 18,000.[12]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Blake Hounsell writes Why I’m No Longer a Russiagate Skeptic (“Facts are piling up, and it’s getting harder to deny what’s staring us in the face”):

Politically speaking, Trump’s devotion to his pro-Putin line doesn’t make sense. Yes, the GOP base is impressionable, and perhaps Republican voters would accept it if Trump came out and said, “You bet, Russia helped get me elected, and wasn’t that a good thing? We couldn’t let Crooked Hillary win!” But nobody would say his odd solicitousness toward the Kremlin leader is a political winner, and it certainly causes an unnecessary amount of friction with Republicans in Congress. He’s kept it up at great political cost to himself, and that suggests either that he is possessed by an anomalous level of conviction on this one issue, despite his extraordinary malleability on everything else—or that he’s beholden to Putin in some way.

You don’t have to buy Jonathan Chait’s sleeper agent theory of Trump to believe that something is deeply weird about all this. Nor do you need to be convinced that Putin is hanging onto a recording of something untoward that may have taken place in a certain Moscow hotel room. You don’t even have to buy the theory that Trump’s business is overly dependent on illicit flows of Russia money, giving Putin leverage. As Julia Ioffe posits, the kompromat could well be the mere fact of the Russian election meddling itself.

As for my argument that Trump’s collection of misfit toys was too incompetent, and too riven by infighting, to collaborate with Russia, this one might still be true. There were certainly sporadic, repeated attempts by some on or around the campaign to collaborate, but we don’t know if, or how, those flirtations were consummated. But certainly, the intent was there, as Donald Trump, Jr. has said publicly. They were all too happy to accept Russian help, even if they weren’t sure they would be enough to win in the end.

  Anne Applebaum asks Did Putin share stolen election data with Trump?:

Now we need to ask a new question: Was data also at the heart of the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia? Nearly a year ago, I speculated that the Trump campaign might have shared data with the Russian Internet Research Agency, the team that created fake personas and put up fake Facebook pages with the goal of spreading false stories about Hillary Clinton. The Russians certainly seemed to know what they were doing. On the one hand, the Russian team targeted people who they thought might be moved to support Trump by anti-immigration slogans and messages; on the other hand, they targeted black voters with messages designed to discourage them from voting at all.

The latest indictment produced by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation, together with President Trump’s strange performance in Helsinki, suggests a different hypothesis: that Russia shared data with the Trump campaign, and not vice versa. The indictment explains that the Russian hackers who broke into the servers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee not only stole the now- infamous emails but also stole data. “The Conspirators,” reads the indictment, “searched for and identified computers within the DCCC and DNC networks that stored information related to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” They then “gathered data by creating backups, or ‘snapshots,’ of the DNC’s cloud-based systems” and “moved the snapshots to cloud-based accounts they had registered with the same service thereby stealing the data from the DNC.”

….

Did they share this information with the Trump campaign? If so, the timing is interesting. In October, a few weeks after the hackers broke into the DNC servers, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman observeda major shift in the way the Trump campaign was spending its advertising budget. Access to Democratic Party data would, of course, have been useful in redirecting that spending. At about the same time, Trump also began using a curious set of conspiratorial slogans and messages, all lifted directly from Russian state television and websites. From Barack Obama “founded ISIS” to Hillary Clinton will start “World War III,” Trump repeated them at his rallies and on his Twitter feed. It was as if he had some reason to believe they would work.

  Paul Waldman contends The entire Republican Party is becoming a Russian asset:

• In 2016, the campaign of the Republican nominee for president was approached multiple times by representatives of the Russian government offering to help them win the election. These offers were welcomed with enthusiasm. The campaign was also led for a time by a political consultant with deep financial and personal ties to a Russian oligarch and a Kremlin puppet in Ukraine.
• Multiple members of the Trump team had contacts with the Russian government that they later lied to conceal.
• As part of its attack on the American electoral system, Russian intelligence hacked into Democratic Party systems. Some of the information it found there was released publicly and promoted gleefully by Republicans at all levels in order to help the Trump campaign; information relating to down-ballot campaigns was passed to Republicans, who used it in order to maintain their hold on the House of Representatives.
• Amid the insistence from the intelligence community that in 2018 Russia will likely attempt to once again penetrate the computer systems of state election agencies, Republicans this week killed an effortto provide funding to states to bolster the security of their election systems.
• As part of a lengthy effort to infiltrate the National Rifle Association, an important Republican interest group, an alleged Russian spy began a romance with a Republican activist, met multiple Republican leaders and fostered a relationship between American gun advocates and Russians. On the night of Trump’s victory, she messaged “I am ready for further orders” to her handler, a Russian banker named Alexander Torshin who is close to Putin.
• The NRA dramatically increased its spending on the 2016 presidential campaign from past years, pouring $30 million into their effort to elect Trump. The FBI is investigating whether that money may have illegally come from Russia, funneled to the organization by Torshin.
• The Trump administration has announced a change to IRS rules so that groups like the NRA will no longer have to identify their donors on their tax forms, making such money almost impossible to trace in the future.
• Over the last few years, the Christian right, another key part of the GOP coalition, has grown increasingly close to Putin, whom they see as an ally in a global clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.
• In Congress, Republicans have undertaken an aggressive campaign to discredit and, many of them plainly hope, shut down the probe into the Russian attack on America. Though they mounted seven separate investigations of Benghazi, they are nearly united in their position that no further investigation into a hostile foreign power’s attempt to manipulate the American electoral system is necessary.
• Fox News, which functions as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, has aired relentless attacks on the Russia investigation and calls for it to be shut down.
• Despite the mountain of unambiguous evidence of the Russian attack in 2016, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters continue to say no such attack occurred.
• Hard-core Trump supporters are beginning to argue that even if Russia did attack the American electoral system, it was actually a good thing because it helped Donald Trump get elected.

  Natan Sharansky remembers The Essay That Helped Bring Down the Soviet Union (“It championed an idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones”):

Fifty years ago this Sunday, this paper devoted three broadsheet pages to an essay that had been circulating secretly in the Soviet Union for weeks. The manifesto, written by Andrei Sakharov, championed an essential idea at grave risk today: that those of us lucky enough to live in open societies should fight for the freedom of those born into closed ones. This radical argument changed the course of history.

Sakharov’s essay carried a mild title — “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” — but it was explosive. “Freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of mankind by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorships,” he wrote. Suddenly the Soviet Union’s most decorated physicist became its most prominent dissident.

For this work and other “thought crimes” the Soviet authorities stripped Sakharov of his honors, imprisoned many of his associates and, eventually, exiled him to Gorky.

In 1968, when this work was published, I was a 20-year-old mathematician studying at the Moscow equivalent of M.I.T. Although we dared not discuss it, my peers and I lived a life of double-think: toeing the Communist Party line in public, thinking independently in private. Like so many others, I read Sakharov’s essay in samizdat — a typewritten copy duplicated secretly, spread informally and read hungrily.

Its message was unsettling and liberating: You cannot be a good scientist or a free person while living a double life. Knowing the truth while collaborating in the regime’s lies only produces bad science and broken souls.

This Man Plays Piano For Blind Elephants: