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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

America, Babbittry, Blogging, Freedom of Speech, Law, Liberty, Newspapers, That Which Paved the Way, Trump

Print’s Continuing Decline (and the Message for Digital)

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One can be a critic of newspapers (for their low quality and high boosterism), and yet feel a sadness at their decline. There’s a notice in the Janesville Gazette about downsizing of the daily print edition. See Objective: Preserve local journalism in the face of rising costs.

Editor Sid Schwartz tells readers that the Gazette will reduce page width, eliminate some features, reduce the size of other features, and shift how advertising is distributed throughout the paper.

A few remarks:

Cost of newsprint. Schwartz notes that a tariff on newsprint has forced some of these changes. That’s only partly right: newspapers have been struggling for years. Suggesting that recent tariffs made this happen is like saying someone diagnosed as mortally ill passed away because he was hit by a bus on the way home from the hospital: it would be true that the accident killed him, but he was in critical condition beforehand.

Tariffs. The Gazette‘s publisher has backed the WISGOP for years, and any number of interventions into the marketplace to back favored businesses. In the end, all the Gazette got for that long, strange sham-capitalism trip was a lousy tariff on newsprint from a Trump-induced trade spat with Canada.

Live by encouraging government meddling in the marketplace, perish by government meddling in the marketplace.

Digital’s Not Working for Small Newspapers. If digital were making significant money for these print publishers (indeed, any money), they’d either not need to shrink print so much, or could securely shift to a predominately digital model.

It’s not working for these local papers, and they’ve no solution. They have, instead, a ride along a downward spiral.

Digital’s Not Simply Print Placed Online. In 2006, before the Great Recession, these gentlemen, and the local notables they consistently boosted, seemed on top of the world. Publishers, reporters, politicians, connected businessmen: all those the Gazette once called ‘movers and shakers.’

Digital’s failed for them because all these men did was take their insular print model and post it online. Same boosterism, pushing of bad policies from good friends, that was slowly causing print readers to drift away. See Shirky’s ‘Shock of Inclusion.’

In a small town like Whitewater, not one of the prominent political leaders from 2006 – for city, school district, or university positions – is still in office. All that newsprint on behalf of those leaders – all those website accolades – made not a difference.

There was nothing visionary about taking fawning newspaper content and transforming it into fawning digital content.

That’s the message for digital: you can’t imitate declining print to become thriving digital.

 Print Circulation.  I know of no daily print newspaper in the state – not one – that has seen an increase in print circulation from 2006 to 2018.  There may be one, but if so, it’s not a Whitewater-area newspaper. If any print publication’s advertising manager is telling prospective customers otherwise, they’d best ask for a detailed circulation audit.

Journalism. I’m not a journalist, reporter, or J-school guy. I’m a blogger. Not more, but not less. Pamphleteers helped shape political, artistic, and religious thought in America’s earliest days, and the web has revived that tradition (and revived it even more powerfully).

Growing up, however, we all knew how to read, and were surrounded by books, newspapers, magazines, journals, etc. There were all sorts of good newspapers around, and in their pages one found solid reporting.  Little that one sees today would, from the perspective of that earlier time, pass for journalism.

That strong, more competitive era is over.  Publishers pushed low quality over high standards, and saved money by contending to readers (duping them, really) that anybody who could open a laptop was a reporter.

There are some courageous newspapers left in America, but there are not any nearby.

If many of those entrusted with professional journalism hadn’t so throughly failed this society, perhaps there wouldn’t have been as great a need for alternatives, blogging being only one among them.  They have failed, however, and through their boosterism of all things powerful and connected have been part of that which paved the way to our present political crisis.

So many millions of us who would never have imagined our own small roles, who hoped only that the strength of newspapers in our youth should endure forever, will do the best we can, each in his or her way, day by day.

For additional posts on newspapers, see a newspaper category link on that topic.

City, Film

Film: Tuesday, June 12th, 12:30 PM @ Seniors in the Park, Wonder

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This Tuesday, June 12th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Wonder @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.

Stephen Chbosky directs the one-hour, fifty-three minute film based on a New York Times bestseller, telling the inspiring and heartwarming story of August Pullman, a boy with facial differences who enters 5th grade, attending a mainstream elementary school for the first time.

The cast features Jacob Tremblay, Owen Wilson, Julia Roberts, and Izabela Vidovic.

One can find more information about Wonder at the Internet Movie Database.

Enjoy.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.11.18

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater be mostly cloudy, and a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-seventh day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

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

On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress appoints a committee of five to draft a resolution on independence from Great Britain.

Recommended for reading in full —

Rick Barrett and Craig Gilbert write Wisconsin reeling from tariffs coming from Mexico, Canada, Europe:

Since June 1, companies that buy steel and aluminum from Canada, Mexico and the European Union have felt the sting of a 25 percent tariff on steel and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum. The tariffs also have triggered countermeasures from U.S. trading partners on a plethora of Wisconsin goods, including Harley-Davidson motorcycles, cheese, yogurt, pork, cranberries, sweetcorn, ginseng, wood, boats, paper and shoes.

The objective of the steel and aluminum tariffs, according to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, was to reduce the trade deficit and shore up American metal producers. The tariffs, essentially a tax on imported goods, also could be a bargaining chip in renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement.

All of Regal Ware’s aluminum comes from Canada.

“We can’t even buy it in the United States,” Reigle [of Regal Ware, a company with 200 employees in West Bend that makes cookware and small kitchen appliances] said. “Our competitors, which come from all over the world, aren’t subject to these tariffs. … So I’m now at a 25 percent disadvantage immediately on all those products.”

Every time the U.S. has imposed tariffs, it’s never worked out the way it was intended, according to Reigle.

 Neil Irwin offers a quick primer entitled What Is the Trade Deficit?:

What is the trade deficit?

Imagine a world with only two countries, and only two products. One country makes cars; the other grows bananas.

People in CarNation want bananas, so they buy $1 million worth from people in BananaLand. Residents of BananaLand want cars, so they buy $2 million of them from CarNation.

That difference is the trade deficit: BananaLand has a $1 million trade deficit; CarNation has a $1 million trade surplus.

But this does not mean that BananaLand is “losing” to CarNation. Cars are really useful, and BananaLanders got a lot of them in exchange for their money.

Similarly, it’s true that the United States has a large trade deficit with Mexico, for example. But it’s not as if Americans were just flinging money across the Rio Grande out of charity. Americans get a lot of good stuff for that: avocados, for example, and Cancún vacations.

If you want to think of it in terms of winners and losers, you could justifiably reverse Mr. Trump’s preferred framing: “Those losers in Mexico gave us $69 billion more stuff than we gave them last year. Ha, ha, ha. We’re winners.”

(Irwin’s full article offers further examples, but they all point to this: Trump’s not just an ignorant man – he’s a powerful, and powerfully ignorant, man.)

 Nico Hines reports How a Journalist Kept Russia’s Secret Links to Brexit Under Wraps (“A pro-Brexit journalist held back evidence of links between Russia and the Brexit campaign while playing down so-called conspiracy theories on TV”):

Isabel Oakeshott, a former Sunday Times journalist who ghost-wrote Banks’ book, The Bad Boys of Brexit, was granted access to his emails in the summer of 2016 in order to help draft the diaries. The book mentions one meeting at the Russian embassy which has been the focus of great interest ever since, especially amid questions about where Banks’ sourced the multi-million pound funding of Brexit. He has denied the money came from Russia.

Oakeshott says she did not discover the stunning extent of Banks’ true dealings with Russia until last year. Even then, she decided not to publish saying she wanted to wait until the publication of her next book White Flag? in August. It is unclear whether the Electoral Commission’s investigations into Banks’ financing of the Brexit campaign would have been completed by August.

Oakeshott was keen to keep her treasure trove of Brexit/Russia revelations for her book launch, but she has not merely kept out of the debate about the legitimacy of the Brexit campaign. Describing herself as “a long-standing Brexit supporter,” who is close to Farage and Banks, Oakeshott has become a regular TV pundit shooting down “conspiracy theories” about the validity of the Brexit vote amid claims of Russian influence or reports about Cambridge Analytica’s disputed involvement.

(Putin seeks every opportunity to divide democracies – Brexit achieved that aim, and so does Trump.)

Nick Bilton asks Is Elizabeth Holmes a Sociopath?:

Ahh, the story of Holmes, the dedicated Stanford dropout who was set to save the world, one pinprick of blood at a time, by inventing, at 19 years old, a blood-testing start-up which was once valued at almost $10 billion. For years, Holmes was on top of the tech world, gracing the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine,Forbes,Fortune,and Inc.,always wearing a black turtleneck and often sitting next to the title: “The Next Steve Jobs.” She was written about in Glamourand The New Yorker.She spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2014, and appeared on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List in 2015. But as The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou details in his new book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, almost every word coming out of Holmes’s mouth as she built and ran her company was either grossly embellished or, in most instances, outright deceptive.

As Carreyrou writes, the company she built was just a pile of one deceit atop another. When Holmes courted Walgreens, she created completely false test results from their blood tests. When the company’s chief financial officer found out, Holmes fired him on the spot. Holmes told other investors that Theranos was going to make $100 million in revenue in 2014, but in reality the company was only on track to make $100,000 that year. She told the press that her blood-testing machine was capable of making over 1,000 tests, when in reality, it could only do one single type of test. She lied about a contract Theranos had with the Department of Defense, when she said her technology was being used in the battlefield, even though it was not. She repeatedly made up complete stories to the press about everything from her schooling to profits to the number of people whose lives would be saved from her bogus technology. And she did it all, day in and day out, while ensuring that no one inside or outside her company could publicly challenge the truthfulness of her claims.

While people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk,and other titans might stretch the truth and create reality-distortion fields, at the end of the day, they’re doing so to catapult their business—and to protect it. But when it came to Holmes, it seems there was no business to begin with. The entire house of cards was just that, a figment, nothing real. So what was she trying to get out of all these stories? On this week’s Inside the Hivepodcast, I sat down with Carreyrou to try to understand how Holmes acted with such deceit, knowing full well that the technology she was selling, technology that was used to perform more than 8 million blood tests, according to Carreyrou, was putting people’s lives in danger. The obvious question to seeing someone act that way, with such utter disregard for how her actions would destroy other people’s lives, is to ask: is she a sociopath?

What Should You Listen to When You Want to Focus?:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.10.18

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see occasional showers and thundershowers, and a high of sixty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 14% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-sixth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

On this day in 1837, state capitol workers arrive in Madison: “workmen arrived in Madison to begin construction of the first state capitol building. A ceremony to lay the building’s cornerstone was to be held three weeks later, on July 4, 1837. [Source: Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles]”

Recommended for reading in full —

  David Frum observes Trump Goes to War Against the Democracies:

Ominously too: Once Trump started tweeting out abuse, the snakepit of hissing, warring aides around the president suddenly competed to amplify and deepen the quarrel. At 6:56 pm, National-Security Adviser John Bolton tweeted out his own version of the offending image of Merkel topping Trump—only with a caption reinterpreting the scene as proof of Trump’s strength and defiance. “Just another #G7 where other countries expect America will always be their bank. The President made it clear today. No more.” On pro-Trump Twitter—and then on pro-Trump TV and radio—that would almost instantly consolidate the new message line. The allies had tried to muscle the strong-willed president. But he had held firm.

Of course, all this blatantly contradicts yesterday’s message line. Remember, Trump holds authority to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum because—and only because—of a Kennedy-era special exemption to normal trade law for national-security purposes. Trump has signed documents attesting that he imposed tariffs to protect vital defense interests of the United States. Now he has changed his story. The tariffs on steel and aluminum from Germany, the U.K., Mexico, and all the others were not a national-security measure, but a retaliation for Canada’s restrictions on dairy imports. Whatever you think of Canada’s milk protectionism (and few Canadians who don’t directly profit from it will defend it), it is not a threat to U.S. national security.

But does Trump notice or care that he has given himself the lie? Surely not. Trump is recovering from two weeks of criticism that he went soft on the Chinese tech giant ZTE. A bipartisan group of 27 U.S. senators signed a letter criticizing him, and even Fox News chimed in. The president’s opponents suggested that his decision had been swayed by a state-owned Chinese company’s $500 million investment in an Indonesian project that had licensed Trump’s name.

Vexed by the criticism, Trump struck back at the readiest targets: America’s closest friends and allies. Rule-of-law democracies cannot deliver the emoluments Trump collects from more authoritarian regimes. They cannot expedite Ivanka Trump’s trademarks to gain favor. They don’t book their national-day celebrations in Washington’s Trump International Hotel.

(Trump is an enemy of America’s friends, and a freind of America’s enemies.)

  Jed Willard explains What Europe Can Teach America About Russian Disinformation:

Academic research around disinformation isn’t new, but our empirical understanding of how to cope with the tactic remains limited. Northeastern University’s Briony Swire-Thompson researches the cognitive psychology behind disinformation effectiveness. “It is important to let the public know as soon as possible where the information comes from,” she explained. “This is because when deciding on whether information is true or false, people place a great deal of weight on the source of information.”

This was a common refrain in all of my conversations. Andris Mellakauls, the head of Latvia’s Information Space Integration Division, cited the government’s “permanent” campaign to promote media literacy as its proudest achievement. The campaign includes training for teachers, librarians, and municipal youth specialists; providing educational tools; and forging international partnerships to share best practices among journalists, researchers, civil servants, and NGOs. “Democracy can only function properly if citizens are able to make informed decisions,” Mellakauls said. “They must be aware of the sources of information they base their decisions on.”

Elina Lange-Ionatamishvili, an official at NATO’s Strategic Communication Center of Excellence in Latvia, agreed that education is essential, but argued this long-term approach should be matched with efforts to educate current voters, such as “social-advertising campaigns helping citizens to recognize fake news, disinformation, and also propaganda.” The EU’s East StratCom Task Force’s Disinformation Review is one example of such a campaign. “Governments have a great responsibility in setting the right policy priorities and allocating resources to enable the citizens to defend [themselves] from foreign disinformation campaigns,” Lange-Ionatamishvili said. “But at the end of the day each citizen is on their own when faced with the 21st-century information ‘deluge.’”

 Kenneth P. Vogel, Sharon LaFraniere, and Jason Horowitz report With Mueller Closing In, Manafort’s Allies Abandon Him:

WASHINGTON — The special counsel’s accusation this week that Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, tried to tamper with potential witnesses originated with two veteran journalists who turned on Mr. Manafort after working closely with him to prop up the former Russia-aligned president of Ukraine, interviews and documents show.

The two journalists, who helped lead a project to which prosecutors say Mr. Manafort funneled more than $2 million from overseas accounts, are the latest in a series of onetime Manafort business partners who have provided damaging evidence to Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Their cooperation with the government has increasingly isolated Mr. Manafort as he awaits trial on charges of violating financial, tax and federal lobbying disclosure laws.

Mr. Manafort’s associates say he feels betrayed by the former business partners, to whom he collectively steered millions of dollars over the years for consulting, lobbying and legal work intended to bolster the reputation of Viktor F. Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine. Mr. Manafort has told associates that he believes Mr. Mueller’s team is using the business partners to pressure him to flip on Mr. Trump in a manner similar to the one used to prosecute the energy giant Enron in the early 2000s by a Justice Department task force that included some lawyers now serving on Mr. Mueller’s team.

(No honor among thieves.)

 The New York Times sees The Cult of Trump:

Forget policy. Forget ideology. Forget hating Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi. From Indiana to Arizona to Ohio, the name of the game for Republican candidates this primary cycle has been to flaunt their Trump love. And woe unto anyone deemed insufficiently smitten.

This week’s primary elections underscored the striking degree to which President Trump has transformed the Republican Party from a political organization into a cult of personality. By contrast, Democrats show signs of taking a more pluralistic approach, fielding candidates who are willing and even eager to break with their national leaders — the House minority leader, Ms. Pelosi, in particular.

How One Man Crossed the Iron Curtain by Zip Line:

In 1986, Daniel Pohl was stuck in communist Czechoslovakia, looking for a way to escape life under totalitarian rule. His exit strategy was unusual, to say the least. After realizing that he could not rely on traditional forms of transport, Daniel chose to zip line his way to freedom. After teaming up with a physicist, the two devised a plan using a series of DIY pulleys. Thankfully, his journey proved to be mission possible as he successfully crossed the Iron Curtain, making a safe escape into Austria.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.9.18

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with an occasional thundershower, and a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 23% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-fifth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

On this day in 1944, a German Waffen-SS company massacres 642 people in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne in Nazi-occupied France.  (“A new village was built nearby after the war, but French president Charles de Gaulle ordered the original maintained as a permanent memorial and museum.”)

Recommended for reading in full —

John Schmid reports Marquette trying to form massive coalition in effort to treat community’s trauma:

It’s no secret that Milwaukee’s social agencies, nonprofits and activists historically have operated in disjointed silos without an overarching strategy, and only in recent years have started to join forces, albeit in small steps.

And so it’s no small feat that Marquette University this week filled an auditorium for the fourth time this year with organizations that otherwise don’t coordinate — and then got them to agree in principle to join a collaborative new effort to address the city’s epidemic of trauma.

Public health researchers argue that neurological trauma on a widespread scale is the root cause for much of the city’s unemployment, mental illness, addiction, alcoholism and even suicide and homelessness.

Led by university president Mike Lovell and his wife, Amy, a mental health activist, the latest Marquette gathering won consensus on a pithy mission statement: “To inspire a dynamic collaboration that heals trauma and creates a resilient community.”

 Philip Bump observes Mueller’s ‘witch hunt’ snags another witch:

On Friday afternoon, the 24th and 25th shoes dropped on Paul Manafort.

Earlier this week, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III filed court documents alleging that Manafort and an unnamed individual had tried to tamper with a potential witness in the case. Then, a superseding indictment: Manafort and a longtime aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, were each indicted on one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice and one count of obstruction of justice.

That brings the investigation by Mueller — derided regularly by President Trump as an unwarranted and unfair “witch hunt” — to a total of 20 individuals and three businesses that have either been indicted or admitted guilt and a total of 75 charges filed by the year-old probe.

  Garry Kasparov summarizes the perversity of Trump’s deference, if not love, for Putin:

Michael Tomasky Why Trump’s Ignorance Matters:

But what’s happened in this country over the last, oh, 40 years or so is that in our political discourse, it has become far, far worse to make fun of someone for not knowing some basic historical fact than it is to not know the fact. And that is absurd.

I’m sorry. By which I mean, I’m not remotely sorry: It is worse—plainly and unambiguously worse—to be ignorant of basic history than it is to know that history and be a little insufferable about knowing it. A civilization that has concluded that the latter is worse is a civilization that is valuing attitude and posture over fact, and that is precisely the corkscrewed value system gave us a cretin like Trump in the first place.

Tyler Hulett records Stunning Time-Lapse Footage of Hawaii’s Kilauea Eruption:

A volcanic eruption is often not the explosive, flash-flood-of-lava affair that persists in the popular imagination, largely thanks to the notorious event at Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Rather, volcanic eruptions can be disasters in slow motion. This is currently the case in Hawaii, where Kilauea, a shield volcano, is releasing a ponderous lava flow that is wreaking havoc on local communities and causing mass evacuations. But Kilauea’s prominence in the recent news cycle is deceiving; in reality, the volcano has been insidiously erupting for 35 years.

Kilauea’s slow-motion flow makes it the perfect candidate for time-lapse photography. Last year, Ph.D. student-turned-filmmaker Tyler Hulett ventured across Kilauea to film Dawn of Fire, a short compilation of photographs that, when edited together and sped up, depicts the flow of a lava river. It was a dangerous project, the extent of which Hulett wouldn’t become aware until nearly a year later. Hulett and his friend, Hawaiian resident Lance Page, hiked six miles into Kilauea’s lava field, where the surface layer of fresh lava is very delicate—“more the consistency of snow than rock,” Hulett told The Atlantic. “It was hard to get around because the ground was folded, twisted, and kept shattering.”

Although it was important to avoid the fresh lava, the real danger lay in what wasn’t visible. “There were numerous lava tubes that were invisible beneath us,” Hulett said. “One of our biggest fears out there was falling into these empty lava tubes if the ground collapsed. This new eruption has made it quite clear to me that, yes, we were walking over lots of invisible lava tubes.”

Bad Ideas, Economy, Employment, Foxconn, Government Spending, State Capitalism, Technology, Trump

Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious

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If there’s ever been an economic con, it’s Foxconn in Wisconsin. The Financial Times describes two key aspects of Foxconn’s character, in a story, Foxconn shifts focus to ‘smart manufacturing.’

Automation, Not Jobs. The new reporting tells us that Foxconn’s working for “automating other manufacturers’ processes.”  Of course they are: they’ve a whole business producing robots – coined Foxbots – to replace workers.  See iPhone manufacturer Foxconn plans to replace almost every human worker with robots.  The Wisconsin Foxconn plant, by the way, is likely to be scaled back to a less advanced product (more like its phone factories, and other manufacturers’ factories, Foxconn aims to automate elesewhere.)  See Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All.

Appeasing the Politically Ambitious.  The Financial Times report also reveals the gamesmanship of Foxconn’s politically-motivated CEO: “Terry Gou enjoys excellent relations with senior members of the Chinese government. He has invested heavily in several provinces whose party secretaries ascended to the politburo.”  Gou’s simply appeasing Wisconsin politicos the way he’s habitually catered to Chinese autocrats.  That’s not good economic policy – it’s a bogus capitalism funded by taxpayers.

Wisconsin wasn’t the perfect spot for this, it was – at the moment – a politically useful spot.  By Trump’s own account – one that Gov. Walker has not publicly contradicted – it is by Trump’s influence that this taxpayer-subsidized project wound up in Wisconsin.  See The Man Behind the Foxconn Project (“Everybody wanted Foxconn,’ Trump said. “Frankly, they weren’t going to come to this country. I hate to say it, if I didn’t get elected, they wouldn’t be in this country. They would not have done this in this country. I think you know that very well.”)

This is a project that brings to America a foreign businessman’s habit of appeasing a one-party state’s connected officials.

That’s not the way up to a greater Whitewater – it’s the way down to a lesser America.

Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, and The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, and Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, and Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.8.18

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 38s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 32.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-fourth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

On this day in 1867, Frank Lloyd Wright is born:

On this date Frank Lincoln Wright (he changed his middle name after his parents divorced) was born in Richland Center. An architect, author, and social critic, Wright’s artistic genius demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to create architectural space and vocabulary that drew inspiration from both nature and technology.

The son of William Cary Wright, a lawyer and music teacher, and Anna Lloyd Jones, a school teacher, Frank Lloyd Wright’s family moved to Madison in 1877 to be near Anna’s family in Spring Green.

Wright briefly studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, after which he moved to Chicago to pursue a career in architecture. Wright started his own firm in 1893 and between 1893 and 1901, 49 buildings designed by Wright were built.

Some notable Frank Lloyd Wright structures in Wisconsin include S.C. Johnson and Son, Inc. Administration Building in Racine, the A.D. German Warehouse in Richland Center, and Taliesin and Hillside in Spring Green. The Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center in Madison was also based on Wright’s design. Frank Lloyd Wright died on April 9, 1959, in Phoenix, Arizona. [Source: American National Biography, Vol. 24, 1999, p.15]

Recommended for reading in full —

Emmanuel Macron observes the truth of national and internal relations:

Michael D. Shear reports Anger Flares as G-7 Heads to Quebec:

President Trump will skip most of the second day of a summit meeting with allies this weekend, the White House said late Thursday, as he engaged in a contentious war of words over trade on the eve of a gathering that will underscore his isolation from the leaders of the world’s largest economies.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, announced that Mr. Trump will leave Canada at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, well before scheduled sessions on climate change, clean energy and oceans. He will attend an early-morning session on “women’s empowerment,” but he will be gone before any joint statement is issued by the other leaders.

Earlier Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada lashed out at Mr. Trump for imposing tariffs on their steel and aluminum industries. They called it an illegal economic assault on their countries that is unanimously opposed by the other leaders of the Group of 7 who will gather Friday in a sleepy village in Quebec for their annual summit meeting.

“The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement if need be,” Mr. Macron said Thursday in an especially acerbic tweet. “Because these 6 countries represent values, they represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force.”

(Trump routinely torments America’s democratic allies and comforts America’s dictorial adversaries. He’s better suited to the role of Russian foreign minister than American president.)

  Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Brady Dennis report Pruitt enlisted security detail in picking up dry cleaning, moisturizing lotion:

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt asked members of his 24/7 security detail to run errands for him on occasion, including picking up his dry cleaning and taking him in search of a favorite moisturizing lotion, according to two individuals familiar with those trips who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly.

Pruitt, who also has enlisted agency staffers in tasks including apartment hunting and securing a mattress for his personal use, faces congressional scrutiny over an expanding number of spending and management decisions. Federal rules bar public officials from receiving gifts from subordinates, including unpaid services, and from using their office for private gain.

…

While EPA security agents are required to protect Pruitt at all times — while he is working and during his off hours — the two individuals said the administrator had asked members of the detail to perform tasks that go beyond their primary function. In one instance, they said, he directed agents to drive him to multiple locations in search of a particular lotion on offer at Ritz-Carlton hotels.

(The EPA Administrator is on the hunt for “a particular  lotion on offer at Ritz-Carlton hotels”?  YMBFKM.)

Greg Price reports Trump’s Biggest Complaint is that He Can’t Watch Porn At White House, Mika Brzezinski Claims:

President Donald Trump’s “biggest complaint” about living in the White House is that he cannot watch pornography, one of his fiercest cable news critics claimed Thursday.

Mika Brzezinski, who has had public battles with the president over Twitter, returned to MSNBC following her regular spot on Morning Joe to appear with host Stephanie Ruhle. She also spoke with the attorney for Stormy Daniels, Michael Avenatti, to discuss disparaging comments made by one of Trump’s personal lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, about Daniels and her line of work.

“The hypocrisy is astounding,” Brzezinski said. “Because I know someone who spoke to Donald Trump recently about life in the White House, and Donald Trump’s biggest complaint was that he’s not allowed to watch porn in the White House. So there you go, there’s a little bit of news for you. He’s upset that he can’t watch porn in the White House.”

Ken Bensinger explains How Russian Meddling Gave Us This Year’s World Cup:

Over the next few months, Mr. Steele collected a growing pile of intelligence suggesting that Russian government officials and oligarchs close to Mr. Putin had been enlisted to push the effort, cutting shadowy gas deals with other countries in exchange for votes, offering expensive gifts of art to FIFA voters and even dispatching Roman Abramovich, the billionaire who owns the London-based Chelsea Football Club, to South Africa to pressure Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president. (A spokesman for Mr. Abramovich told The Sunday Times that there was nothing “untoward” in his involvement in the Russian bid.)

The retired spy handed his findings to his clients supporting the English bid, who had been swaggering through the campaign with blithe optimism and self-confidence. But in July 2010, five months before FIFA would hold its vote on where to host the 2018 World Cup, Mr. Steele also passed the information on to another party he thought might be interested in learning what Russia was up to: an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The F.B.I. didn’t much care whether England got the tournament, of course, but the agent, who supervised the F.B.I.’s Eurasian Organized Crime squad, had been looking for opportunities to chase down conspiracies emanating from Russia. After breaking the back of the Russian mob in New York, the squad had set its sights on border-crossing financial crimes involving oligarchs and mafia kingpins. Mr. Steele’s intelligence about Russian attempts to corrupt FIFA seemed to check all the boxes.

Cleve R. Wootson Jr. reports People at Yellowstone keep getting close to cute elk calves — and getting attacked by their mothers:

If the elk of Yellowstone National Park had a spokeswoman, she would be working overtime trying to set the record straight about elk-human interactions: Despite the headlines, the average elk has a lot more to fear from the average human.

…

But days at Yellowstone National Park have begun to resemble an episode of “When Animals Attack!”

Twice in three days, cow elk — females of the elk species — have attacked people at the popular national park, using strong legs and sharp hoofs to send unsuspecting humans to the hospital.

The reason for the sudden aggression: babies.  

It is calving season at Yellowstone, and elk mothers are fiercely protective of their newborns, as two women learned too late.

Here’s a video from the National Park Service showing elk ramming cars in 2012:

America, Federal Government, Law, Liberty, Local Government, Politics, State Government, Trump

National Means Local, Too

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Mike Allen, now of Axios, writes about how Trumpism has nationalized politics:

Trump is even the story in local races

A dilemma for news organizations in this epic era is that President Trump isn’t just the biggest story in politics. On many days, he’s the biggest story in business, the biggest story in media, the biggest story in tech, the biggest global story.

The same phenomenon is infusing campaigns. Boston Globe State House reporter Matt Stout found that from statewide races to local contests, the politics and the debate can often be all about Trump:

  • Sentence du jour: “If all politics was local in the era of Tip O’Neill, the reverse may be true under Trump.”
  • “For local and statewide campaigns normally walled off from Washington, Trump has loomed large across the ballot in Massachusetts this year, permeating the dialogue and campaign messaging in races that are usually dominated by local, not federal, issues.”
  • “Trump has never campaigned in Hatfield. The president is not calling for cuts to school funding in Southampton or denying new liquor licenses in Northampton. But in the race for the First Hampshire District’s state representative seat, where the East-West railway and dairy farming are campaign fodder, so is Trump.”
  • A great example: “[A]n array of candidates have pointed to his election as a catalyst for them launching their first political campaign.”

Of course that’s true. Trumpism is a national topic that reaches all America. That’s why this website counts the days since Trump’s election, and cites each morning a sample of his many errors and offenses.

While fundamentally one should focus on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders, one also finds Trumpism Down to the Local Level, and precursors representing that which paved the way.

(Press releases flacking Trumpism deserve a response.  See On the Whitewater CDA’s Press Release (A Picture Reply Is Worth a Thousand Words), About that Trump Tax Plan, and A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.  Officials expecting a warm reception to their Trump-touting will never find it here.  If anything, they’ve received only a gentle reply.)

Paine was right in his day, and his words are as true in ours:

There are cases which cannot be overdone by language, and this is one. There are persons, too, who see not the full extent of the evil which threatens them; they solace themselves with hopes that the enemy, if he succeed, will be merciful. It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf, and we ought to guard equally against both.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.7.18

by  • 

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 14m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 41.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-third day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.

On this day in 1776, Richard Henry Lee (of Virgina) introduces a resolution to the Continental Congress:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

That it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign Alliances.

That a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective Colonies for their consideration and approbation.

Recommended for reading in full —

  David J. Lynch report This Ohio factory thought it could bring U.S. jobs back from China. Then Trump got involved:

CLEVELAND — Bill Adler was invited last year to bid on a contract to make commercial sausage stuffers for a company that wanted to replace its Chinese supplier. The customer had just one non­negotiable demand: Match China’s price.

Adler, owner of metal-parts maker Stripmatic Products, thought he could. But even as he readied his proposal, talk of President Trump’s steel tariffs sent the price of Stripmatic’s main raw material soaring.

In April, with prices up nearly 50 percent from October and the first wave of tariffs in place, Adler’s bid failed. His costs were too high.

Today, instead of taking business from China, Adler worries about hanging onto the work he has. He hopes that the president’s tariffs are just a negotiating tactic.

“It’s got to be short-term, or I’ve got to find another way to make a living,” Adler said, only half joking. “It’s going to be an ugly scenario if it doesn’t end quickly.”

(Trump’s trade policy flies in the face of centuries – literally – of economic understanding across the political spectrum.  It’s as though a man living in the fourteenth century, and knowing nothing of economy theory then or after, began to meddle with the trade structure of the most successful commercial republic in human history.)

Matt Apuzzo reports Trump Team Pushed False Story Line About Meeting With Kremlin-Tied Lawyer, Memo Shows:

For nearly a year, the denials from President Trump’s lawyers and spokeswoman were unequivocal. No, the president did not dictate a misleading statement released in his son’s name.

“He certainly didn’t dictate,” said the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“The president was not involved in the drafting of that statement,” his lawyer Jay Sekulow told NBC News.

“That was written by Donald Trump Jr., and I’m sure in consultation with his lawyer,” Mr. Sekulow told CNN.

“The president didn’t sign off on anything,” he told ABC.

But in a confidential, hand-delivered memo to the special counsel, Mr. Trump’s lawyers acknowledged that, yes, Mr. Trump had dictated the statement, which attempted to deflect questions about a meeting with a Kremlin-tied lawyer at Trump Tower. Prosecutors are asking whether the statement was part of an effort by the president to obstruct a federal investigation.

(A year of lies.)

  Denise Clifton reports A Murder Plot, a Twitter Mob, and the Strange Unmasking of a Pro-Kremlin Troll:

For several days in March, British Prime Minister Theresa May was the focus of an all-out assault on Twitter after she blamed the Kremlin for the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil. One account in the melee stood out, racking up hundreds of retweets and claiming May was lying about the nerve-agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal:

“The #Skripal Case: It Looks Like Theresa May Has Some Explaining to Do!” declared one of many broadsides from @ian56789, who called the attempted murder a “#falseflag” operation.

To expert disinformation researchers, the troll appeared to be working on behalf of Vladimir Putin’s regime, part of a longer-term pro-Kremlin campaign. The British government reported that the “Ian” account—whose avatar featured the chiseled face of British male model David Gandy—sent 100 posts a day during a 12-day period in April, reaching 23 million users. Atlantic Council analyst Ben Nimmo examined tens of thousands of tweets around #Skripal and concluded Ian was likely part of a Kremlin troll operation, based on multiple characteristics seen across Ian’s posts going back six years. The account vigorously backed Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, and pushed Moscow spin regarding chemical weapon attacks in Syria and the shooting down of Malaysian flight MH-17 over Ukraine. The most important clue, according to Nimmo, was Ian’s extensive posting about the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in the 24 hours after the Russian opposition leader was murdered in Moscow on February 27, 2015. Ian let loose those tweets—including the suggestion that the CIA was involved—as a social media campaign about Nemtsov was launched by the Internet Research Agency, the infamous Kremlin troll farm in St. Petersburg that targeted the 2016 US elections.

But it turned out the Ian account was not necessarily what it seemed. In April, British media reports, citing UK government sources, misidentified Ian as a Russian “bot,” and the account was temporarily suspended by Twitter. Then, a retired British IT project manager named Ian Shilling came forward as its owner, defiantly stating he had no connection to the Russian government.

(Trolls and bots are different, but as bots become more sophisticated it’s hard to distinguish them from people who are trolling.)

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Putin Says He and POTUS Speak Regularly:

Russian President Vladimir Putin told Austrian television channel ORF Monday night that he and President Trump “regularly talk over the phone.”

CNN:

Putin said that in a recent phone call, “Donald said he was worried about the possibility of a new arms race.”

“I fully agree with him — however, to prevent a possible arms [race], we should think about it, we should do something about it, give corresponding instructions to our Foreign Ministry and the US State Department,” Putin added.

When asked by journalist Armin Wolf why there had been no US-Russia bilateral summit since Trump became president, Putin said he had met Trump more than once at international events but signaled that there were no immediate plans for a formal meeting.

“I think that the possibility of these meetings depends to a large extent on the internal political situation in the United States,” Putin said. “The congressional election campaign is getting under way and then there will be the next presidential election, and the President of the United States is coming under attack over various matters. I think this is the main reason.”

(…)

Trump and Putin have spoken by phone eight times, according to readouts distributed by the White House. They have met in person twice — once at a formal bilateral meeting in Germany and once on the sidelines of a leaders’ summit in Vietnam.

(There are Russian dissidents, and many ordinary Russians, who are great friends of America. Putin, however, has made himself an enemy of the United States and of a civilized internal order.  Americans sympathetic to Putin are fellow travelers, and those few actively working on behalf of his interests are fifth columnists. Either way, such people are rightly held as detestable.)

 Merrit Kennedy reports Great White Sharks Have A Secret ‘Cafe,’ And They Led Scientists Right To It:

Great white sharks have a “hidden life” that is becoming a lot less hidden thanks to a scientific expedition that has been years in the making.

Scientists used to think the apex predators moved up and down the western coast of North America, snacking in waters with lots of food close to shore. Almost 20 years ago, Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block started putting tags on the sharks that could track their movements.

…

A layer of nutrient-rich plant life exists deeper under the ocean than satellites could detect. Tiny creatures feed on it, and larger creatures feed on them. And up and up. It represents “a complete food chain, a ladder of consumption, that made us believe that there was an adequate food supply out here for big animals like tunas and the sharks,” Robison said.

…

The fact that scientists didn’t even know this area existed until sharks led them there speaks to how much we still don’t know about the ocean. In fact, according to NOAA’s National Ocean Service, humans have explored just 5 percent of it.

(Word has it that the sharks always get the café’s best seating.)

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.6.18

by  • 

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of sunshine and clouds, with a high of seventy-five.  Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 13m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-second day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

On this day in 1944, the Normandy landings, and so the liberation of millions from Nazi tyranny, begin:

The Normandy landings were the largest seaborne invasion in history, with nearly 5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participating.[188] Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on D-Day,[30] with 875,000 men disembarking by the end of June.[189] Allied casualties on the first day were at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead.[190] The Germans lost 1,000 men.[191] The Allied invasion plans had called for the capture of Carentan, St. Lô, Caen, and Bayeux on the first day, with all the beaches (other than Utah) linked with a front line 10 to 16 kilometres (6 to 10 mi) from the beaches; none of these objectives were achieved.[33] The five bridgeheads were not connected until 12 June, by which time the Allies held a front around 97 kilometres (60 mi) long and 24 kilometres (15 mi) deep.[192] Caen, a major objective, was still in German hands at the end of D-Day and would not be completely captured until 21 July.[193] The Germans had ordered French civilians other than those deemed essential to the war effort to leave potential combat zones in Normandy.[194] Civilian casualties on D-Day and D+1 are estimated at 3,000 people.[195]

Recommended for reading in full —

  Michael LaForgia and Gabriel J.X. Dance report Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence:

Facebook has data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies, including a manufacturing giant that has a close relationship with China’s government, the social media company said on Tuesday.

The agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, Oppo and TCL.

The four partnerships remain in effect, but Facebook officials said in an interview that the company would wind down the Huawei deal by the end of the week.

  The New York Times editorial board observes that Grifters Gonna Grift:

On Monday, Paul Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, splashed back into the news when members of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s team accused him in court papers of witness tampering. Swamp-watchers will recall that Mr. Manafort is facing a smorgasbord of charges related to tax, lobbying and money-laundering violations. Prosecutors now say that he has been using his free time while awaiting trial to try to contact some former European business associates in order to coach them into lying about his work on behalf of pro-Russia political interests in Ukraine. Mr. Manafort’s secret lobbying scheme is alleged to have been impressively elaborate — as, also, efforts to cover it up. But the straightforward phrase that leaps out from this latest court filing comes from a witness telling the F.B.I. that Mr. Manafort had tried to “suborn perjury.” Such an effort would qualify as a definite legal no-no.

Meanwhile, Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has once again burnished his reputation as the Trump administration’s biggest grifter. On Monday, Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked the committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, to subpoena the E.P.A. for documents relating to Mr. Pruitt’s “multiple abuses of authority in using agency staff for his own personal purposes.”

Specifically, Democrats want to know more about Mr. Pruitt’s reportedly asking his agency scheduler, Millan Hupp, to handle various tasks for him, including finding him a new place to live last summer — a monthslong, labor-intensive process — and trying to help him buy a used mattress from the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The mattress caper was, at least, more exotic than Mr. Pruitt’s usual shopping misadventures — the nearly $10,000 to decorate his office, the dozen customized fountain pens for $1,560, the $43,000 soundproof phone booth. It even could be seen as a positive sign that he has abandoned his spendthrift ways. No matter: By Tuesday, Mr. Pruitt’s furnishing needs became old news when it was revealed that he had also asked an aide to help his wife, Marlyn, procure a Chick-fil-A franchise. Calls were arranged and the application process begun, but Mrs. Pruitt never did open a restaurant.

(Pruitt: Hard to grasp, really, an agency head searching Washington for a deal on a used Trump mattress.)

Bob Egelko reports Judge Aaron Persky, who ruled in sex assault case, recalled in Santa Clara County:

Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Aaron Persky was recalled from office by the voters Tuesday, two years after he set off national outrage by sentencing a Stanford athlete to six months in jail for sexually assaulting and attempting to rape an unconscious woman.

With 43 percent of precincts reporting, 59 percent of the county’s voters favored recalling Persky while 41 percent opposed the recall. On the same ballot, Assistant District Attorney Cindy Hendrickson led civil rights lawyer Angela Storey, 70 to 30 percent, in the election to serve the last four years of Persky’s term.

Takeaway: Persky, a judge for 15 years, is the first California jurist to be recalled since 1932.

(Those who decide unjustly are unworthy of deciding.)

Bruce Jones contends Despite summit diplomacy, Korea war risks have risen:

No one likes to speak out against diplomacy and the pursuit of peace, especially when a real threat of military confrontation looms; but the long history of diplomacy and war tells us that ill-prepared summits readily break down, and when they do, those failures help pave the way to war.

Those risks grew on May 25 when Trump sent a letter to Kim. It was an astonishing text, unique in the annals of contemporary international politics; a letter-length tweet in the tone of voice of a petulant teenager who has been spurned by a girl, calling off their planned date but holding open hope of a new one: “please do not hesitate to call.”

The first phase of Trump’s efforts on North Korea were unusual for his presidency: They took place largely in private, involved in-depth briefings and a lot of listening, and largely avoided Tweets. Ever since his U.N. General Assembly speech last September, however, Trump’s mercurial personality has been more front and center in the drive to diplomacy. That led to an escalation of rhetoric, and of risks.

(We’ve enough risks, and it’s self-destructive to create yet more. It asks too much, both morally and practically, to expect even the most formidable military in all the world to execute an effectual policy of perpetual war.)

 Maddie for Science describes Matchmaking for Maned Wolves ?:

City, Local Government, Religion

Humility in Discerning God’s Will

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One hopes – sometimes in fulfillment, sometimes in vain – that the simple circumstances of a small town might encourage humility in discernment.  In the course of listening to politics, one may encounter a local politics that is grandiose where it should be plain.  Indeed, local claims of this kind may arrogate to people and mere human institutions an authority properly belonging to the eternal.

Better, much better, to rely instead on counsel both serious & enduring.

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, delivered when the war was nearly won, is a haunting reflection on human events and God’s will. A lesser man might have been tempted to grasp at triumphalism, or descend to platitudes.

Lincoln, great and profound, never departs from the wiser course of caution in discerning God’s will in the actions of men and nations.  Part of that address from 3.4.1865 is especially instructive to us:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

The Founders understood that the defense of individual rights required that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

They described the instrumental and human character of government.

Neither statehouses nor city halls make good churches; churches make good churches.  Neither governors nor mayors make good priests; priests make good priests.

For it all, the Almighty has His own purposes – Lincoln rightly saw the difficulty of a particular discernment of God’s will, refrained from implying for government a call that can emanate from God alone, and mentioned not at all imposition of  seemingly unpayable debts that, traditionally understood, God, himself, forgives (in expectation that we might do likewise).

For those of us who believe in God’s providence (as I do), we see the wisdom in the Founders’ recognition of the limits of human institutions, and in Lincoln’s humility in discerning the divine hand in human events.

There need be no yielding to a contrary view, however passionately advanced.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 6.5.18

by  • 

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:29 PM, for 15h 12m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the five hundred seventy-first day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1884, war hero Gen. William T. Sherman declines a run for the presidency: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”

 

Recommended for reading in full —

Spencer S. Hsu, Rosalind S. Helderman, Matt Zapotosky and Devlin Barrett report Mueller accuses Paul Manafort of witness tampering:

In court documents, prosecutors with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III allege that Manafort and his associate — referred to only as Person A — tried to contact the two witnesses by phone and through encrypted messaging apps. The description of Person A matches his longtime business colleague in Ukraine, Konstantin Kilimnik.

Manafort, 69, has been on home confinement pending trial.

FBI agent Brock W. Domin said that one of the public relations firm’s executives identified as Person D1 told the government he “understood Manafort’s outreach to be an effort to ‘suborn perjury’?” by encouraging others to lie to federal investigators by concealing the firm’s work in the United States.

Spokesmen for Manafort and the special counsel’s office, who are under a court gag order in the case, declined to comment.

Charlie Savage reports Trump and His Lawyers Embrace a Vision of Vast Executive Power:

WASHINGTON — President Trump, ramping up his assertions of extraordinary powers, declared in a tweet on Monday that he had “the absolute right” to pardon himself for any crime.

While no president has ever purported to pardon himself, and it is not clear whether Mr. Trump could legitimately take such a step, the president’s claim was the latest in an aggressive series of moves to assert his control over federal law enforcement.

Last month, Mr. Trump crossed a traditional line by ordering an investigation into the Russia investigators. And late last year he boasted he has “an absolute right to do what I want to with the Justice Department.”

The president has had help in shaping his expansive view of his authority: For at least a year, his lawyers in the investigation into whether he tried to obstruct the Russia inquiry have been advising the president that he wields sweeping constitutional powers to impede investigations no matter his motive — and despite obstruction-of-justice laws that everyone else must obey.

Mark Osler observes With his pardons, Trump is turning tool of mercy into sword of retribution:

There is a deeper tragedy, too. While Trump grants pardons to people like D’Souza without going through the office of the Pardon Attorney, thousands of others wait for a decision after they followed the rules. Many of them are well-deserving of consideration, having been over-sentenced for relatively minor narcotics crimes.

Here’s an idea: If President Trump really wants to make a point about the failings of his opponents, he should go big and grant commutations to the thousands of deserving petitioners who were denied or not ruled upon during the Obama administration.

Even better, he can get around to fixing an outdated and bureaucratic clemency process that Obama never repaired — a tortuous and unnecessarily redundant system where seven levels of review occur sequentially. It’s time to take that process out of the Department of Justice, too. It is President Trump’s right to make clemency decisions himself and ignore the existing process, but to do that fairly, he has to scrap what supposedly exists and create something better.

(Osler knows, of course, how unlikely a through review from Trump would be.)

Michael Kruse reports ‘He Pretty Much Gave In to Whatever They Asked For’ (“Trump says he’s a master negotiator. Those who’ve actually dealt with him beg to differ”):

But these past 16 months of Trump’s presidency have shown that whatever skills Trump thinks he acquired over the course of his business career haven’t necessarily translated to his work in the White House. The failed repeal-and-replace health care negotiations, bungled efforts to get funding from Mexico for his promised border wall, the pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Iran nuclear deal—Trump has proven to be more adept at breaking deals than making deals. And the sudden and bizarre scuttling of his meeting with murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that had been scheduled for June 12 in Singapore—and now might be back on again—is only the latest data point that suggests he’s either not as good at negotiating as he promised he was, or that negotiating with disparate factions of Congress or in geopolitically fraught international arenas is harder than he thought it would be and harder than anything he’s ever done. The truth, according to negotiation experts who have studied Trump’s track record, people who have negotiated for him and against him, associates, biographers and former employees, is that it’s all of that.

Trump was, and still is, they say, a confident, competitive, aggressive, impulsive, zero-sum, win-at-all-costs, transactional, unpredictable, often underinformed and ill-prepared, gut-following, ego-driven, want-it-and-want-it-now negotiator. His self-burnished image as a tip-top deal-maker long has obscured an actual record that is far more mixed, pocked with moves and acquisitions that scratched a passing itch but created massive financial problems later. His best work, too, was his earliest work. Trump was at his most patient, his most diligent, his most attentive and his most creative—his most effective—some 35 to 45 years ago, when he was intent on pile-driving into the cultural bedrock powerful storylines on which he would build his career as a celebrity business tycoon.At no point, though, in the past nearly half a century—from the shrewd, well-timed talks that led to the Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan to the agreements behind The Art of the Deal and “The Apprentice”—did Trump’s negotiations in real estate and entertainment circles prepare him fully for the degree of nuance and complexity he now faces as president. And his abrupt cancellation last week of the North Korea summit, in the estimation of the negotiating experts I talked to, was a scramble to reclaim a modicum of the leverage he gave up when he too eagerly consented to the meeting in the first place. But Trump’s decision to leave open the possibility of rescheduling (“… please do not hesitate to call me or write”) as well as the ongoing back-and-forth between his administration and its North Korean counterparts signal that he still wants to meet because he still needs a negotiating win heading into November’s midterms.

This Conveyor Belt Can Move Packages In Any Direction: