Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 31m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1812, French dictator Napoleon enters Moscow, only to find the city abandoned:

On September 14, 1812, Napoleon moved into Moscow. However, he was surprised to have received no delegation from the city. At the approach of a victorious general, the civil authorities customarily presented themselves at the gates of the city with the keys to the city in an attempt to safeguard the population and their property. As nobody received Napoleon he sent his aides into the city, seeking out officials with whom the arrangements for the occupation could be made. When none could be found, it became clear that the Russians had left the city unconditionally.^[85] In a normal surrender, the city officials would be forced to find billets and make arrangements for the feeding of the soldiers, but the situation caused a free-for-all in which every man was forced to find lodgings and sustenance for himself. Napoleon was secretly disappointed by the lack of custom as he felt it robbed him of a traditional victory over the Russians, especially in taking such a historically significant city.^[85] To make matters worse, Moscow had been stripped of all supplies by its governor, Feodor Rostopchin, who had also ordered the prisons to be opened.

Before the order was received to evacuate Moscow, the city had a population of approximately 270,000 people. As much of the population pulled out, the remainder were burning or robbing the remaining stores of food, depriving the French of their use. As Napoleon entered the Kremlin, there still remained one-third of the original population, mainly consisting of foreign traders, servants and people who were unable or unwilling to flee. These, including the several hundred strong French colony, attempted to avoid the troops.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Patrick Marley reports Legal woes at teen prison have cost Wisconsin $20.6 million and counting:

Lawsuits over the problems at Wisconsin’s juvenile prison complex have cost the state $20.6 million so far and those costs will continue to rise — possibly by large sums if some cases aren’t resolved in the state’s favor.

The facility for more than three years has been under criminal investigation for prisoner abuse and child neglect. If charges are issued, that could open the state to more legal exposure from lawsuits.

“It’s the cost of getting it wrong,” state Rep. Evan Goyke (D-Milwaukee) said of the state’s legal tab.

RELATED: Wisconsin will pay nearly $19 million to former teen inmate injured in suicide attempt

The legal fees and settlements come on top of an $80 million plan by Gov. Scott Walker and lawmakers to close Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls by 2021 and replace them with regional facilities for teen inmates.

Glenn Kessler writes Anatomy of a Trump rally: 68 percent of claims are false, misleading or lacking evidence:

More than two-thirds of every factual claim made by President Trump at two of his rallies turns out to be false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.

In July, The Fact Checker examined every factual claim made by the president at a rally in Montana. He returned to Montana on Sept. 6, and we decided once again to put every statement of material fact to the truth test to see whether the July rally was an outlier.

In July, 76 percent of his 98 statements were false, misleading or unsupported by the evidence. Last week the tally, out of 88 statements, was 68 percent. The average percentage for the two rallies was 72 percent.

Trump may have done slightly better, fact-wise, at the more recent rally because he spoke more about bills he had signed and actions he had taken. But he veered off course with his tendency to unnecessarily hype good economic data with assertions that it was the best in U.S. history.

John Wagner and David Fahrenthold report Trump asked to have Braille removed from elevators in early 1980s, executive says:

Barbara Res, a former vice president in charge of construction, made the allegation in an op-ed published Wednesday by the New York Daily News and in a subsequent interview with The Washington Post, in which she said the incident happened in 1980 or 1981 as Trump Tower was being designed.

According to Res’s account, an architect came to Trump’s office to show him designs for the interiors of residential elevator cabs in Trump Tower, which also hosts businesses. He noticed dots next to the buttons and asked what they were, she said.

“Braille,” the architect replied, according to Res.

Trump then told the architect to “get rid of it,” and the architect resisted, saying doing so would be against the law, she said.

“Get rid of the (expletive) Braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower. Just do it,” Trump told the architect, according to Res’s account.

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Following the Money that Followed the Meeting:

According to BuzzFeed News, federal law enforcement officials are investigating two waves of curious financial transfers involving Aras and Emin Agalarov that took place at two key points in time that could be relevant to the Russia investigation.

The first set came just 11 days after the June 9 meeting, when an offshore company controlled by [Aras] Agalarov wired more than $19.5 million to his account at a bank in New York.

The second flurry began shortly after Trump was elected. The Agalarov family started sending what would amount to $1.2 million from their bank in Russia to an account in New Jersey controlled by the billionaire’s son, pop singer Emin Agalarov, and two of his friends. The account had been virtually dormant since the summer of 2015, according to records reviewed by BuzzFeed News, and bankers found it strange that activity in Emin Agalarov’s checking account surged after Trump’s victory.

After the election, that New Jersey account sent money to a company controlled by Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime business associate of the Agalarovs and their representative at the Trump Tower meeting. Kaveladze’s company, meanwhile, had long funded a music business set up by the person who first proposed the meeting to the Trump camp, Emin Agalarov’s brash British publicist, Rob Goldstone.

(…)

The transactions came to light after law enforcement officials instructed financial institutions in mid-2017 to go back through their records to look for suspicious behavior by people connected to the broader Trump-Russia investigation. The bankers filed “suspicious activity reports” to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which in turn shared them with the FBI, the IRS, congressional committees investigating Russian interference, and members of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

Suspicious activity reports are not evidence of wrongdoing, but they can provide clues to investigators looking into possible money laundering, tax evasion, or other misconduct. In the case of the Agalarovs and their associates, bankers raised red flags about the transactions but were unable to definitively say how the funds were used.

(…)

Over the past nine months, BuzzFeed News has reported on the financial behavior of Manafort, former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, accused foreign agent Maria Butina, GOP operative Peter W. Smith, and others.

In the case of the Agalarovs and their associates, the documents show funds moving quickly between accounts across the globe, often, bankers said, with no clear reason and with no clear purpose for how the money was supposed to be used.

BuzzFeed details exactly why the money transfers raised red flags. The timeline starts with the Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze, and others, set up for the Agalarovs through Goldstone, which took place on June 9, 2016.

Eleven days later — on June 20, the day Trump fired campaign chief Corey Lewandowski and put Manafort in charge — Aras Agalarov used a company called Silver Valley Consulting to move millions that bankers flagged as suspicious.

Silver Valley’s only address is a post office box in the capital of the British Virgin Islands, a country seen as a haven for money laundering and tax evasion. On June 20, Silver Valley sent through its Zurich-based account at Societe Generale Suisse a wire transfer for a little more than $19.5 million to Agalarov’s account at Morgan Stanley in the US.

That same day, another entity controlled by Agalarov — ZAO Crocus International, an arm of his business empire — sent a wire transfer through Societe Generale Suisse for about $43,000 to the same Morgan Stanley account.

(…)

Swiss employees of the bank told their American colleagues that the account was closed in May 2017, but that “due to Swiss confidentiality laws the requested information cannot be provided.”

(…)

Between 2006 and 2016, Silver Valley made nearly 200 transactions for $190 million. Bankers believed that most were legitimate and were part of Agalarov’s global construction business. But some of the transactions raised red flags.

Bank officials said they found high, round-dollar amounts sent to or received from shell companies. Round-dollar wire transfers often trigger alarm bells because most transactions are not that clean. Bankers also noted that some of the transactions passed through multiple companies, a process that can indicate “layering,” a way to hide the original source of funds.

US bank examiners also found that Silver Valley received nearly $900,000 in 2012 from a Russian investigated in the past for tax evasion and embezzlement.

(…)

The following year, Silver Valley received two payments from an aviation firm that were flagged by bankers because they learned that a shareholder was involved with a suspected Russian money laundering scheme.

(I’ve linked here to the Committee to Investigate Russia as a friendly reminder that it’s a good collection – from national and international sources – of information on Russian interference in American democracy.)

The Curious Case of Shizo Kanakuri’s 1912 Olympic Marathon Run:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of seventy-eight.  Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 34m 02s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1759, Britain defeats France at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham:

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, also known as the Battle of Quebec (Bataille des Plaines d’Abraham, or Première bataille de Québec in French), was a pivotal battle in the Seven Years’ War (referred to as the French and Indian War to describe the North American theatre). The battle, which began on 13 September 1759, was fought by the British Army and Navy against the French Army on a plateau just outside the walls of Quebec City, on land that was originally owned by a farmer named Abraham Martin, hence the name of the battle. The battle involved fewer than 10,000 troops between both sides, but proved to be a deciding moment in the conflict between France and Britain over the fate of New France, influencing the later creation of Canada.[4]

The culmination of a three-month siege by the British, the battle lasted about an hour. British troops commanded by General James Wolfe successfully resisted the column advance of French troops and Canadien militia under General Louis-Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, employing new tactics that proved extremely effective against standard military formations used in most large European conflicts. Both generals were mortally wounded during the battle; Wolfe received three gunshot wounds that ended his life within minutes of the beginning of the engagement and Montcalm died the next morning after receiving a musket ball wound just below his ribs. In the wake of the battle, the French evacuated the city; their remaining military force in Canada and the rest of North America came under increasing pressure from British forces.

France ceded most of its possessions in eastern North America to Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris.

Recommended for reading in full — 

John Wagner reports Trump questions number of deaths attributed to Hurricane Maria, falsely says Democrats created a higher count to make him look bad:

President Trump took issue Thursday with the number of deaths attributable to Hurricane Maria, falsely saying a much higher count had been generated by Democrats to “make me look as bad as possible.”

A sweeping report from George Washington University released last month estimated there were 2,975 “excess deaths” in the six months after the storm made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017.

Trump said on Twitter that “they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths” when he visited the island about two weeks after the storm.

….

Trump’s tweets — which came as a highly dangerous Hurricane Florence churned toward the Carolinas — brought an immediate rebuke from Democrats in Congress, as well as some Republicans.

Rep. Ileana Ros Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said she believes the figure of nearly 3,000 is sound.

“What kind of mind twists that statistic into ‘Oh, fake news is trying to hurt my image,’” she said. “How can you be so self-centered and try to distort the truth so much? It’s mind boggling.”

In a tweet, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said only Trump “could see the tragedy in Puerto Rico and conclude that he is the victim. May God bless the souls of the nearly 3,000 Americans that died in Puerto Rico and may he take pity on your soul, Mr. President.”

(There may never have been a more excuse-making, irresponsible chief executive than Donald J. Trump.)

Seam Illing writes Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades (“Journalist Craig Unger talks Russia, Trump, and “one of the greatest intelligence operations in history”):

A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Sean Illing

I’ll ask you straightforwardly: Do you believe the Russian government successfully targeted and compromised Trump?

Craig Unger

Yes, absolutely. But let’s go back in time, because I think all of this began as a money-laundering operation with the Russian mafia. It’s well known that Trump likes doing business with gangsters, in part because they pay top dollar and loan money when traditional banks won’t, so it was a win-win for both sides.

The key point I want to get across in the book is that the Russian mafia is different than the American mafia, and I think a lot of Americans don’t understand this. In Russia, the mafia is essentially a state actor. When I interviewed Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who is a former head of counterintelligence in the KGB and had been Vladimir Putin’s boss at one point, I asked him about the mafia. He said, “Oh, it’s part of the KGB. It’s part of the Russian government.”

And that’s essential to the whole premise of the book. Trump was working with the Russian mafia for more than 30 years. He was profiting from them. They rescued him. They bailed him out. They took him from being $4 billion in debt to becoming a multibillionaire again, and they fueled his political ambitions, starting more than 30 years ago. This means Trump was in bed with the Kremlin as well, whether he knew it or not.

Sean Illing

Let’s dig into this a bit. You claimed just now, as you do in the book, that the Russian mafia has been using Trump-branded real estate to launder money for over three decades. What evidence do you have to back this up?

Craig Unger

You really have to go back 20 or 30 years to understand who the key Russians were, what role they played in the Russian mafia, and how they related to Trump.

The very first episode that’s been documented, to my knowledge, was in 1984 when David Bogatin — who is a Russian mobster, convicted gasoline bootlegger, and close ally of Semion Mogilevich, a major Russian mob boss — met with Trump in Trump Tower right after it opened. Bogatin came to that meeting prepared to spend $6 million, which is equivalent to about $15 million today.

Bogatin bought five condos from Trump at that meeting. Those condos were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob. [Full interview continues @ Vox.com.]

The Committee to Investigate Russia asks Is Russian Money Behind Graham’s Growing Defense of Trump?:

The Intellectualist, a left-leaning news aggregator, points out that Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has received at least $800,000 in campaign donations from a man with ties to Putin-allied oligarchs, which could explain why the Senator has been increasingly supportive of President Trump lately.

Ruth May, in a piece for the Dallas Morning News, details the donations from Len Blavatnik, “one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle.”

Data from the Federal Election Commission show that Blavatnik’s campaign contributions dating back to 2009-10 were fairly balanced across party lines and relatively modest for a billionaire. During that season he contributed $53,400. His contributions increased to $135,552 in 2011-12 and to $273,600 in 2013-14, still bipartisan.

In 2015-16, everything changed. Blavatnik’s political contributions soared and made a hard right turn as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Sens. Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham.

In 2017, donations continued, with $41,000 going to both Republican and Democrat candidates, along with $1 million to McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund.

An infographic accompanying May’s article notes the following:

Blavatnik contributed $800,000 to the Security is Strength PAC, associated with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., via Access Industries.

Blavatnik and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg met attending university in Russia years ago, and together they now own a 20.5% stake in Rusal, oligarch Oleg Deripaska‘s aluminum company.

Further, nearly 4 percent of Deripaska’s stake in Rusal is owned by Putin’s state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin.

Earlier this year, The Associated Press reported that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin’s interests with Western governments. Deripaska’s name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller’s team by Manafort’s attorneys …

(…)

Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle. They are among several Americans who also merit Mueller’s scrutiny.

The first is his cousin Andrew Intrater, and the second is Alexander Shustorovich.

(See also How Putin’s oligarchs funneled millions into GOP campaigns and GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia, both stories reported from the Dallas Morning News.)

Anne Applebaum writes A Warning From Europe: The Worst Is Yet to Come (“Polarization. Conspiracy theories. Attacks on the free press. An obsession with loyalty. Recent events in the United States follow a pattern Europeans know all too well”):

onarchy, tyranny, oligarchy, democracy—these were all familiar to Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. But the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political-science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization. It is the model that many of the world’s budding autocrats use today.

Unlike Marxism, the Leninist one-party state is not a philosophy. It is a mechanism for holding power. It works because it clearly defines who gets to be the elite—the political elite, the cultural elite, the financial elite. In monarchies such as prerevolutionary France and Russia, the right to rule was granted to the aristocracy, which defined itself by rigid codes of breeding and etiquette. In modern Western democracies, the right to rule is granted, at least in theory, by different forms of competition: campaigning and voting, meritocratic tests that determine access to higher education and the civil service, free markets. Old-fashioned social hierarchies are usually part of the mix, but in modern Britain, America, Germany, France, and until recently Poland, we have assumed that competition is the most just and efficient way to distribute power. The best-run businesses should make the most money. The most appealing and competent politicians should rule. The contests between them should take place on an even playing field, to ensure a fair outcome.

Lenin’s one-party state was based on different values. It overthrew the aristocratic order. But it did not put a competitive model in place. The Bolshevik one-party state was not merely undemocratic; it was also anticompetitive and antimeritocratic. Places in universities, civil-service jobs, and roles in government and industry did not go to the most industrious or the most capable. Instead, they went to the most loyal. People advanced because they were willing to conform to the rules of party membership. Though those rules were different at different times, they were consistent in certain ways. They usually excluded the former ruling elite and their children, as well as suspicious ethnic groups. They favored the children of the working class. Above all, they favored people who loudly professed belief in the creed, who attended party meetings, who participated in public displays of enthusiasm. Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: True believers can advance. As Hannah Arendt wrote back in the 1940s, the worst kind of one-party state “invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

Lenin’s one-party system also reflected his disdain for the idea of a neutral state, of apolitical civil servants and an objective media. He wrote that freedom of the press “is a deception.”

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 36m 54s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement Commission meets at 5 PM.

On this day in 1940, teenager Marcel Ravida discovers the Lascaux Cave and the astonishing paintings on the walls within:

Lascaux….is the setting of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of the cave. The paintings represent primarily large animals, typical local and contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic time. The drawings are the combined effort of many generations, and with continued debate, the age of the paintings is estimated at around 17,000 years (early Magdalenian).[3][4][5] Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, as element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.[6]

On September 12, 1940, the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat. Ravidat (died in 1995) returned to the scene with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas, and entered the cave via a long shaft. The teenagers discovered that the cave walls were covered with depictions of animals.[7][8] Galleries that suggest continuity, context or simply represent a cavern were given names. Those include the Hall of the Bulls, the Passageway, the Shaft, the Nave, the Apse, and the Chamber of Felines. The cave complex was opened to the public on July 14, 1948.[9] By 1955, carbon dioxide, heat, humidity, and other contaminants produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. As air condition deteriorated fungi and lichen increasingly infested the walls. Consequently, the cave was closed to the public in 1963, the paintings were restored to their original state and a monitoring system on a daily basis was introduced.

Lascaux II, an exact copy of the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery opened in 1983 in the cave’s vicinity, a compromise and attempt to present an impression of the paintings’ scale and composition for the public without harming the originals.[8] A full range of Lascaux’s parietal art is presented a few kilometres from the site at the Centre of Prehistoric Art, Le Parc du Thot, where there are also live animals representing ice-age fauna.[10]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Steven Elbow reports Madison-area manufacturers starting to feel the bite from tariffs:

The owner of Qual Line Fence in Waunakee, a company [Ray] Statz founded in 1956, said he and about 16 employees put in about 500 fences a year made with steel, aluminum and cedar, all products that have seen steep cost increases stemming from U.S. tariffs.

“Wood, steel and aluminum,” he said. “They’re all hit.”

He estimates that since the beginning of the year, he has seen the cost of the materials he uses climb between 25 and 30 percent. That’s not enough to cause any layoffs, he said, but the trade dispute adds uncertainty to the market.

“It makes me lose some sleep at night,” Statz said. “It makes it difficult. We’re supposed to take a gamble and wonder what the future’s going to be by next spring. It’s not the good old days.”

President Donald Trump announced the tariffs in March — 25 percent on foreign steel and 10 percent on aluminum — and by the time they took effect on June 1, prices were already spiking. A year earlier the administration slapped tariffs on Canadian lumber, which combined with other factors pushed the price to record highs.

Patty Murray reports DNR Reports Manure Spill On Oneida Reservation (“300K Gallons Of Contaminated Water Spilled Into Creek In Northeastern Wisconsin”):

Three-hundred-thousand gallons of manure-contaminated water spilled into a creek in northeastern Wisconsin.

The spill is believed to have happened late Sunday after a week of heavy rains, combined with a faulty valve at the Phil Roberts farm, which is home to 220 head of cattle. According to the state Department of Natural Resources, a containment pit overflowed into Silver Creek — a tributary of the larger Duck Creek.

The manure went down a grassy slope into Silver Creek near the Outagamie and Brown county line, within the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin’s boundaries.

James Snitgen, water resources supervisor for the tribe, said, “because of the recent heavy rains there was way more water makeup in that, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘manure,’ I’d call it a manure-water mixture going down.”

Stephanie Ruhle writes of federal deficits and political ignorance:

This matters
This should matter
This definitely used to matter to Republicans
Except the party is now being led by the self-proclaimed KING OF DEBT
Therefore
It is to be expected
This no longer matters https://t.co/2Rb1PA0g9G

— Stephanie Ruhle (@SRuhle) September 12, 2018

Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson contends Christians are suffering from complete spiritual blindness:

Since the Council of Nicaea, Christians have been prone to issue joint statements designed to draw the boundaries of orthodoxy — and cast their rivals beyond them. Another one, not quite in the same league, was recently issued by a group including John MacArthur, a prominent (and very conservative) evangelical pastor and Bible teacher.

“The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” claims that social justice is not, in fact, a definitional component of the gospel, and that it is heresy to elevate “non-essentials to the status of essentials.” As you might expect, the document affirms traditional beliefs on same-sex relationships and “God-ordained” gender roles. But it seems particularly focused on rejecting collective blame in racial matters. “We deny that .?.?. any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin,” the statement argues. “We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.”

….

The purpose of “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” is clear enough. It is, as one prominent evangelical leader put it to me, “to stop any kind of real repentance for past social injustice, to make space for those who are indeed ethnonationalists, and to give excuse for those who feel Christians need only ‘preach the gospel’ to save souls and not love their neighbors sacrificially whether they believe as we do or not.”

The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.

It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the continuing social effects of hundreds of years of state-sponsored oppression, cruelty and stolen wages. It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the current damage of mass incarceration and failed educational institutions on minority groups. Prejudice and institutional evil are ongoing — deeply ingrained in social practice and ratified by indifference. Repentance is in order — along with a passion for social justice that is inseparable from the Christian gospel.

(Trumpism threatens more even than the political order; it perverts Christian theology to a political end that is both dangerous and, fundamentally, heretical.)

Rachel Becker and William Poor report that These domesticated foxes were 60 years in the making:

Scientists are uncovering new clues to the origins of domestication in an unlikely creature: foxes. After nearly 60 years of selective breeding in Siberia, there are a few rare foxes that are pretty unafraid of people. So, of course, we wanted to meet them.

The story goes back to 1959, when geneticist Dmitri Belyaev set out to try domestication from the very beginning. He had this idea that was radical for its time: domesticated animals like dogs are friendly because of genes that govern their behavior. Meaning, the process that turned wolves into dogs thousands and thousands of years ago was essentially evolution.

So Belyaev began selectively breeding foxes: the ones that weren’t as aggressive or afraid of people were allowed to have offspring. After Belyaev’s death in 1985, geneticist Lyudmila Trut — co-author of How to tame a fox (and build a dog) — took over. Over time, the foxes became more dog-like: they’re not skittish around people, though they might not climb into your lap for a cuddle, either.

(Domesticated is a flexible description: it seems unlikely that these foxes are domesticated sufficiently to make safe, reliable pets.  Beautiful, of course, but beauty is not gentleness. In any event, cats make great pets…)

Good morning.

 Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 39m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 2001, Al Qaeda stages deadly coordinated attacks against America, killing thousands of innocent civilians. This morning, when flying from Newark, airline passenger Peter Lattman photographed the new One World Trade Center:

Just took off from Newark, and there’s One World Trade Center standing tall above the clouds. pic.twitter.com/SaQv5yD9s5

— Peter Lattman (@peterlattman) September 11, 2018

(Americans are a strong, resilient people.)

Recommended for reading in full — 

Brittany Schmidt reports Where’s the money? Target 2 Investigates $46m taken from local road budgets:

Millions of dollars in federal funds are being withheld from local municipalities by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Target 2 Investigates has learned.

Both Appleton and Green Bay are losing out on more than $3 million in funds. These municipalities don’t know where that money has been diverted.

“Where is the money going? We have no idea,” says Steve Grenier,
Green Bay Public Works Director.

Local officials were recently informed about a change in federal funding when it comes to Surface Transportation Block Grants. That’s money that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) request to complete transportation projects.

Steve Grenier serves as the Vice President of Brown County’s MPO Policy Board.

“That’s federal money that comes down from Federal Highway Administration, filters through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and then comes to local programs,” Grenier says.

A five-year funding program has been reduced to a four-year program.

MPOs across the state are missing one year of federal funding. It was money they were depending on for upcoming projects.

Hope Kirwan reports Wisconsin Farmers Feel Impact of Tariffs, Worry About Future Trade:

Many goods produced by Wisconsin farmers, from milk to livestock, are sold to local buyers. But farmers, like Bob Pronschinske from North Creek, know the prices they receive are directly related to the world market.

“We have to have foreign trade, anybody can figure that out,” said Pronschinske, who owns a dairy farm with his son.

Pronschinske said he’s worried about the future of exports.

Since President Donald Trump placed new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, trading partners like China and Mexico have placed their own taxes on United States agricultural products. Despite the retaliation, Trump has said the tariff strategy will make trade more fair for United States producers.

Pronschinske said Wisconsin farmers who voted for the president are watching the situation closely.

“If this tariff works, yes, he’s going to be a great, great president. If this foreign trade all works out for us, yeah, we’ll have prices where they need to be. But the big question is if it’s going to work,” Pronschinske said.

Josh Lederman, Courtney Kube, Abigail Williams, and Ken Dilanian report U.S. officials suspect Russia in mystery ‘attacks’ on diplomats in Cuba, China (“The strong suspicion that Russia was behind the alleged attacks is backed by signals intelligence, meaning intercepted communications, say U.S. officials”):

Intelligence agencies investigating mysterious “attacks” that led to brain injuries in U.S. personnel in Cuba and China consider Russia to be the main suspect, three U.S. officials and two others briefed on the investigation tell NBC News.

The suspicion that Russia is likely behind the alleged attacks is backed up by evidence from communications intercepts, known in the spy world as signals intelligence, amassed during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence.

The evidence is not yet conclusive enough, however, for the U.S. to formally assign blame to Moscow for incidents that started in late 2016 and have continued in 2018, causing a major rupture in U.S.-Cuba relations.

Since last year, the U.S. military has been working to reverse-engineer the weapon or weapons used to harm the diplomats, according to Trump administration officials, congressional aides and others briefed on the investigation, including by testing various devices on animals. As part of that effort, the U.S. has turned to the Air Force and its directed energy research program at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, where the military has giant lasers and advanced laboratories to test high-power electromagnetic weapons, including microwaves.

Coral Davenport reports Trump Administration Wants to Make It Easier to Release Methane Into Air:

The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere.

Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.

The Environmental Protection Agency, perhaps as soon as this week, plans to make public a proposal to weaken an Obama-era requirement that companies monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In a related move, the Interior Department is also expected in coming days to release its final version of a draft rule, proposed in February, that essentially repeals a restriction on the intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning, of methane from drilling operations.

The new rules follow two regulatory rollbacks this year that, taken together, represent the foundation of the United States’ effort to rein in global warming. In July, the E.P.A. proposed weakening a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. And in August, the agency proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants with a weaker one that would allow far more global-warming emissions to flow unchecked from the nation’s smokestacks.

This Gecko Is Clinging for Survival:

Good morning.

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

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

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

Recommended for reading in full — 

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good morning.

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

Recommended for reading in full — 

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

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

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

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

….

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

….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Sheriff Ana Franklin, Morgan county, Alabama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold a Superpod of Common Dolphins in Monterey Bay:

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

Good morning.

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

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

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

Recommended for reading in full — 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it really, really likes Russia.

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

….

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

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

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