Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 10h 01m 33s of daytime.  The moon is new today.

There is scheduled a joint meeting of Whitewater’s Common Council, Community Development Authority, and Plan and Architectural Review Commission for 6 PM, and a Police & Fire Commission meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1863, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry fights in the Second Battle of Rappahannock Station, Virginia. The battle was a Union victory:

In all, 1,670 Confederates were killed, wounded, or captured in the brief struggle, more than eighty percent of those engaged. Union casualty figures, by contrast, were small: 419 in all.[3]

For the North the battle had been “a complete and glorious victory,” an engagement “as short as it was decisive,” reflecting “infinite credit upon all concerned.”[3] Maj. Gen. Horatio G. Wright noted that it was the first instance in which Union troops had carried a strongly entrenched Confederate position in the first assault. Brig. Gen. Harry Hays claimed to have been attacked by no less than 20,000 to 25,000 Union soldiers—a figure ten times the actual number.[3]

The battle had been as humiliating for the South as it had been glorious for the North. Two of the Confederacy’s finest brigades, sheltered behind entrenchments and well supported by artillery, had been routed and captured by an enemy force of equal size. Col. Walter H. Taylor of Lee’s staff called it, “the saddest chapter in the history of this army,” the result of “miserable, miserable management.” An enlisted soldier put it more plainly. “I don’t know much about it,” he said, “but it seems to be that our army was surprised.”[3]

Recommended for reading in full —  Evers wins, a record number of women in Congress, thinking about the national results, Russia’s continuing disinformation, and video on what it takes to become an astronaut  — 

 Patrick Marley and Molly Beck write Tony Evers denies Scott Walker a third term as Wisconsin’s governor:

MADISON – After upending Wisconsin politics and infuriating liberals across the country, Gov. Scott Walker narrowly lost his bid for a third term Tuesday to Tony Evers, the leader of the education establishment Walker blew up eight years ago.

The Associated Press called the race for Evers about 1:20 a.m. Wednesday based on unofficial returns.

The race was so close that Walker’s team said a detailed review of balloting and a recount were possible. But an unofficial tally had Evers winning by 1.1 percentage points — a margin that would be too large for a recount if it held.

“It’s time for a change, folks,” Evers, the state schools superintendent, told supporters in front of a large Wisconsin flag on the stage of Madison’s Orpheum Theater.

(A shorter, more apt, title would have been Evers Wins.)

Danielle Kurtzleben reports A Record Number Of Women Will Serve In Congress (With Potentially More To Come):

After Tuesday’s elections, a record number of women will serve in Congress come January 2019.

With results still coming in, 94 women have won or are projected to win their House races as of early Wednesday morning, up from the current 84. In addition, at least 13 women won win Senate seats. That’s in addition to the 10 female senators who were not up for re-election this year.

That means at least 117 women will serve in the 116th Congress, up from the current 107. And it will bring the share of Congress members who are women up from the current 20 percent to at least 22 percent.

These new records represent the culmination of a record-setting year for female candidates. In elections for Congress, governorships and state legislatures alike, the number of women who ran outstripped previous years, as did the number of women nominated.

Many first-time candidates this year were inspired to run for office at least in part by the 2016 presidential election — both the fact that the first female major-party nominee ever lost, and that Donald Trump, who is very unpopular among women (particularly Democratic women), won.

 The Washington Post editorial board sees A great day for democracy:

THE DEMOCRATS’ return to control over the House of Representatives is much more than a victory for one party. It is a sign of health for American democracy.

Distrustful of untrammeled majorities, the authors of the Constitution favored checks and balances, including, crucially, the check that the legislative branch might place upon the executive. Over the past two years, the Republican majorities in the House and Senate have failed to exercise reasonable oversight. Now the constitutional system has a fresh chance to work as intended.

The Democratic victory is also a sign of political health, to the extent it is a form of pushback against the excesses, rhetorical and in terms of policy, committed by the Trump administration and propounded by President Trump during this fall’s campaign. Turning against the dominant party in Washington even in a moment of economic prosperity, voters from Key West to Kansas refused to accept the continued degradation of their nation’s political culture. Republicans retained control of the Senate, where the map this year favored their defense. But voters nationwide refused Mr. Trump’s invitation to vote on the basis of fear of immigrants; they did not respond to his depiction of his opposition as dangerous enemies.

The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Russian Operatives Still Rampant:

Russian operatives continue to spread disinformation and divisive content online, but as social media platforms, tech companies, and intelligence experts become more aware of foreign interference efforts, Russian agents invent new ways to disguise their work.

….

Experts say foreign actors now are spending more time spreading homegrown divisive content and disinformation rather than creating it from scratch.

“We’ve done a lot research on fake news and people are getting better at figuring out what it is, so it’s become less effective as a tactic,” said Priscilla Moriuchi, a former National Security Agency official who is now a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future threat manager.

Instead, Russian accounts have been amplifying stories and internet “memes” that initially came from the U.S. far left or far right. Such postings seem more authentic, are harder to identify as foreign, and are easier to produce than made-up stories.

What It Takes To Become An Astronaut:

Good morning.

Election Day in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 10h 03m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1837, Burlington, Iowa becomes our temporary capital:

On this date Burlington, Iowa was chosen as a temporary capital of the Wisconsin Territory. A year earlier, legislators offered a bill making Madison the capital with a temporary capital in Dubuque until which time a permanent building could be constructed in Madison. Legislators also proposed the City of Belmont as a temporary capital. One month later, on December 12th, a fire destroyed the two-story temporary capital in Burlington. The new legislature moved its headquarters to the Webber and Remey’s store in Burlington where they conducted government affairs until June 1838.

Recommended for reading in full — fantasy at a Trump rally, consequences of Trump’s trade war, hacking attempts against election systems, Hannity as a Fox News Trump TV anchor,  and video about Apollo 8’s trip to the far side of the moon — 

Andrew Kragie reports Inside the Alternative Universe of the Trump Rallies:

He has a line that casts employment growth as beyond anyone’s expectations during the 2016 campaign: “If I would have told the kind of numbers that we’ve achieved, nobody would have believed it. They would not have let us get away with it,” he says in every city, pointing his index finger at the press pen directly opposite. A scattered round of boos breaks out. For anyone who doesn’t peruse economic data—most people—this allusion to a theoretical fact check from “the enemy of the people” makes his claim sound all the more impressive.

But federal data show fewer jobs were created in Trump’s first 21 months in office than during the last 21 months of the Obama administration—4.1 million after January 2017 versus 4.5 million up to then. (Trump prefers his election as the starting post, but the comparison stands: 4.5 million after November 2016 versus 5.0 million in the comparable period before.) While it’s notable that economic growth has continued so long since the Great Recession, Trump misleadingly creates the impression that gains have accelerated.

But supporters eat it up. “It was all doom and gloom under Obama. I lost a ton of money,” Charlotte Shiflett, the retired Tennessee bookkeeper, said of her 401(k)-retirement savings account. But the data show that while the stock market has been strong for two years, it was no weaker under Obama, whose tenure saw average annualized S&P 500 returns of 16.3 percent. It seems a symptom of the increasingly polarized views of the economy; for the last decade, the Pew Research Center has found that Americans increasingly assess the economy and even their own personal finances based on whether their party controls the presidency rather than on actual results.

Binyamin Appelbaum reports Their Soybeans Piling Up, Farmers Hope Trade War Ends Before Beans Rot:

President Trump sees tariffs as a tool to force changes in America’s economic relationships with China and other major trading partners. His tough approach, he says, will revive American industries like steel and auto manufacturing that have lost ground to foreign rivals. But that is coming at a steep cost for some industries, like farming, that have thrived in the era of globalization by exporting goods to foreign markets.

China and other trading partners hit with the tariffs, including the European Union, have sought to maximize the political impact of their reprisals. The European Union imposed tariffs on bourbon, produced in Kentucky, the home state of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, from Wisconsin, the home state of House Speaker Paul Ryan. China’s decision to impose tariffs on soybeans squeezes some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters across the Midwestern farm belt.

(Emphasis added.)

Jana Winter reports Hackers targeting election networks across country prior to midterms:

Hackers have ramped up their efforts to meddle with the country’s election infrastructure in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s midterms, sparking a raft of investigations into election interference, internal intelligence documents show.

The hackers have targeted voter registration databases, election officials, and networks across the country, from counties in the Southwest to a city government in the Midwest, according to Department of Homeland Security election threat reports reviewed by the Globe. The agency says publicly all the recent attempts have been prevented or mitigated, but internal documents show hackers have had “limited success.”

The recent incidents, ranging from injections of malicious computer code to a massive number of bogus requests for voter registration forms, have not been publicly disclosed until now.

Peter Baker reports Fox News Personalities Embrace Trump at His Final Rally Before the Election:

On Sunday, the Trump campaign organization announced that Mr. Hannity and Mr. Limbaugh would join the president at the Cape Girardeau rally as “special guests.”

By Monday afternoon, Mr. Hannity was disputing that. “In spite of reports, I will be doing a live show from Cape Girardeau and interviewing President Trump before the rally,” he wrote on Twitter. “To be clear, I will not be on stage campaigning with the President. I am covering final rally for my show. Something I have done in every election in the past.” The Trump campaign news release was deleted from the web.

Except then he was on stage campaigning with the president. “Sean Hannity, come on up,” beseeched Mr. Trump.

Mr. Hannity climbed onto the stage and took the microphone. Referring to the news media pen in the back of the arena, Mr. Hannity echoed one of the president’s favorite lines. “By the way,” he said, “all those people in the back are fake news.” The crowd booed.

Presumably, he did not mean all those people since they included a crew from none other than Fox News with the correspondent Kristin Fisher.

How Apollo 8 Survived the Risky Trip to the Far Side of the Moon:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 4:41 PM, for 10h 06m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Lincoln removes McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac.

Recommended for reading in full — Wisconsin & other rural states struggle with infected water, using troops as political props, Estonia knows how to battle Russian propaganda, Trump State Dept. leaves key jobs empty,  and video about the shapes of different cheeses — 

Jack Healy reports Rural America’s Own Private Flint: Polluted Water Too Dangerous to Drink:

ARMENIA, Wis. — The groundwater that once ran cool and clean from taps in this Midwestern farming town is now laced with contaminants and fear. People refuse to drink it. They won’t brush their teeth with it. They dread taking showers.

Rural communities call it their own, private Flint— a diffuse, creeping water crisis tied to industrial farms and slack regulations that for years has tainted thousands of residential wells across the Midwest and beyond.

Now, fears and frustration over water quality and contamination have become a potent election-year issue, burbling up in races from the fissured bedrock here in Wisconsin to chemical-tainted wells in New Hampshire to dwindling water reserves in Arizona. President Trump’s actions to loosen clean water rules have intensified a battle over regulations and environmental protections unfolding on the most intensely local level: in people’s own kitchen faucets.

In Wisconsin and other Midwestern states where Republicans run the government, environmental groups say that politicians have cut budgets for environmental enforcement and inspections and weakened pollution rules.

(Not so long ago, some members of Whitewater’s local government proposed – but failed to justify, no matter how obstinately they tried  – a plan that would have degraded Whitewater’s environment, all in the name of putting this community in the waste-receiving business. Bad then, bad now, bad ten years from now. This beautiful city has more than her share of challenges, but one would battle all the world so that she would not become a waste dump.)

John Wagner reports Former defense secretary Hagel says Trump is using troops as ‘pawns’ at border:

Former defense secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday night accused President Trump of using U.S. troops as “pawns” as he moves to bolster the military presence at the southern border in response to migrant caravans making their way through Mexico.

“It’s clear to me that he’s using our military and our troops in a very political way. It really casts a lot of questions about the competency of his leadership,” Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska who served as defense secretary in the Obama administration, said during an interview on CNN.

Trump said Wednesday that he would deploy as many as 15,000 military personnel to the border, doubling the figure Pentagon officials have announced would be operating there. It was one of several steps the president has announced in response to the caravans of Central American migrants as he tries to make immigration a salient issue in advance of next week’s midterm elections.

Amie Ferris-Rotman and Ellen Nakashima report Estonia knows a lot about battling Russian spies, and the West is paying attention:

TALLINN, Estonia —When it comes to Russian spies, this tiny Baltic country has a piece of advice for its Western partners: Name the agents, then shame them.

So when the United States and major European allies did exactly that a month ago, Estonians felt a bit of quiet satisfaction.

After all, this former Soviet republic for years has manned the front lines against covert spy operations and apparent infiltrations by Moscow.

Since 2008, Estonian officials say, they have arrested at least 17 people on suspicion of spying for Russian intelligence services — and, often, the names of the suspects are given to the media, along with video from the investigation or arrest.

Suspected agents from Moscow’s military intelligence agency — still widely known by its former Soviet-era abbreviation GRU — were linked to cyberhacking attempts during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. More recently, they were implicated in the poisoning in March of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter in Salisbury, England. The Kremlin denies any role.

Doyle McManus reports Almost Half the Top Jobs in Trump’s State Department are Still Empty (“In 18 countries, the White House has yet to designate a U.S. ambassador. That includes Australia, a close ally to America that is beginning to look to China instead”):

Australia is one of the United States’ closest allies anywhere. Its soldiers fought alongside Americans in World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It’s a member of the world’s most exclusive intelligence club, the “Five Eyes” (the other four are the United States, Canada, Britain and New Zealand). Its conservative prime minister says he wants to help the United States curb China’s growing domination of East Asia.

So why can’t Australia get more respect from the Trump Administration?

For more than two years, the United States has failed to send an ambassador to Canberra, and Australians who pay attention to foreign policy see the omission as a slight. “It’s starting to really grate, particularly for true believers in the alliance,” James Curran, a foreign policy scholar at the University of Sydney, told me. “They fear it is a signal from Washington that Australia might not be so valued a partner after all.”

“Australia, from President Trump’s perspective, is a second-class ally,” the former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said.

 So, Why Do Some Cheeses Come in Wheels and Others in Blocks? (Wisconsinites, we have this):

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 10h 08m 52s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 11.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1847, the first class at Beloit College assembles.

Recommended for reading in full —  Trump Admin lets wrongdoers off easy, myths about immigrants, U.S. Army assessment puts migrant caravan in a realistic perspective, Trump operative Roger Stone’s shifting story, and video on turning science fiction into reality —

Ben Protess, Robert Gebeloff, and Danielle Ivory report Trump Administration Spares Corporate Wrongdoers Billions in Penalties:

In the final months of the Obama administration, Walmart was under pressure from federal officials to pay nearly $1 billion and accept a guilty plea to resolve a foreign bribery investigation.

Barclays faced demands that it pay nearly $7 billion to settle civil claims that it had sold toxic mortgage investments that helped fuel the 2008 financial crisis, and the Royal Bank of Scotland was ensnared in a criminal investigation over its role in the crisis.

The three corporate giants complained that the Obama administration was being unreasonable and stood their ground, according to people briefed on the investigations. After President Trump took office, they looked to his administration for a more sympathetic ear — and got one.

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have yet to charge Walmart, and the Justice Department reached a much lower settlement agreement with Barclays in March, for $2 billion. R.B.S. paid a civil penalty, but escaped criminal charges altogether.

Across the corporate landscape, the Trump administration has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance, according to analyses of government data and interviews with more than 60 former and current federal officials. The approach mirrors the administration’s aggressive deregulatory agenda throughout the federal government.

Gretchen Frazee reports 4 myths about how immigrants affect the U.S. economy:

Myth #1: Immigrants take more from the U.S. government than they contribute
Fact: Immigrants contribute more in tax revenue than they take in government benefits

A 2017 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found immigration “has an overall positive impact on the long-run economic growth in the U.S.”
How that breaks down is important.

First-generation immigrants cost the government more than native-born Americans, according to the report — about $1,600 per person annually. But second generation immigrants are “among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.,” the report found. They contribute about $1,700 per person per year. All other native-born Americans, including third generation immigrants, contribute $1,300 per year on average.

….

Myth #2: Immigrants take American jobs
Fact: Immigrants workers often take jobs that boost other parts of the economy

Immigrants make up 17 percent of the U.S. labor force, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but few experts believe they’re taking jobs from Americans, as Trump claims.

“Most economists agree that in spite of being a very big part of the labor force, immigrants have not come at the cost either of American jobs, nor of American wages,” Peri, the UC Davis professor, said.

The reason is that immigrants often have jobs that Americans tend not to take. So instead of competing with Americans’ for work, immigrants tend to complement American workers.

Nick Miroff and Missy Ryan report Army assessment of migrant caravans undermines Trump’s rhetoric:

Military planners anticipate that only a small percentage of Central American migrants traveling in the caravans President Trump characterizes as “an invasion” will reach the U.S. border, even as a force of more than 7,000 active-duty troops mobilizes to prevent them from entering the United States.

According to military planning documents, about 20 percent of the roughly 7,000 migrants traveling through Mexico are likely to complete the journey. The unclassified report was obtained and published by Newsweek on Thursday. If the military’s assessment is accurate, it would mean the United States is positioning five soldiers on the border for every one caravan member expected to arrive there.

“Based on historic trends, it is assessed that only a small percentage of the migrants will likely reach the border,” the report says. It was prepared by U.S. Army North, a component of U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the mission dubbed Operation Faithful Patriot.

The assessment also indicates military planners are concerned about the presence of “unregulated armed militia” groups showing up at the border in areas where U.S. troops will operate.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:32 AM and sunset 5:44 PM, for 10h 11m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 19.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1804, a treaty at St. Louis leads to a significant land purchase for a paltry sum:

On this date Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occured in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]

Recommended for reading in full — Walker admin grants pedophiles professional licenses, common sense on the caravan, huge cost of Trump’s border deployments, the wrong approach in response to terror, video of what’s up for 2018   —

Daniel Bice reports Four pedophile ex-priests had their professional licenses granted under Gov. Scott Walker’s administration:

Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign has spent the past year accusing Democratic foe Tony Evers of putting children in danger by not stripping the licenses of teachers found guilty of improper and immoral acts.

But it turns out that the second-term Republican governor’s administration has its own serious lapse involving the professional licenses of individuals of highly questionable character.

Records show one of Walker’s agencies — the state Department of Safety and Professional Services — either gave licenses to or renewed the licenses of four ex-priests who were defrocked for sexually abusing children.

The four former pedophile priests from the Milwaukee Archdiocese were given state approval to practice such professions as social work, nursing, alcohol and drug counseling and funeral work. All four appear on the archdiocese’s list of former Milwaukee priests with a “substantiated case of sexual abuse of a minor.”

The New York Times editorial board offers Common Sense on the Caravan (“A group of desperate migrants walking toward the Texas border is not a threat. We have laws to protect us — and them”):

Most of Mr. Trump’s description of the migrants is untrue or unwarranted. But none of it is surprising. Demonizing immigrants is his go-to move, from his “big, beautiful wall” to his call to end birthright citizenship. Not to mention the race-baiting campaign ad he tweeted featuring a Mexican immigrant who was convicted of killing two police officers.

The United States has clear laws governing refugees and well-funded agencies to enforce those laws, and it’s an embarrassing waste of money to send troops to the border.

Paul Sonne reports Trump’s border deployments could cost $200 million by year-end:

The total price of President Trump’s military deployment to the border, including the cost of National Guard forces that have been there since April, could climb well above $200?million by the end of 2018 and grow significantly if the deployments continue into next year, according to analyst estimates and Pentagon figures.

The deployment of as many as 15,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border — potentially equal in size to the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan — occurs as the budgetary largesse the military has enjoyed since Trump took office looks set to come to an end.

Although the costs of the border deployments will be a tiny slice of a $716?billion annual defense budget, they arrive as the Trump administration is calling on the Pentagon to cut unnecessary expenditures. The White House recently ordered the Pentagon to slash next year’s budget for the military by about $33?billion in response to the largest increase in the federal deficit in six years.

(Hundreds of millions for Trump’s political stunt, with genuine defense needs elsewhere)

Vann R Newkirk writes An American President Bends to the Demands of Terror (“After the attack in Pittsburgh, Trump again expressed his inclination to meet violence with the machinery of a police state”):

On Saturday morning, during Shabbat services, a gunman walked into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh and opened fire. The investigation is ongoing, and early reports are often imprecise. But it appears that the suspect, a white male named Robert D. Bowers, killed and wounded multiple people and inflicted life-threatening injuries on police officers before being taken into custody. He reportedly shouted “All Jews must die” before shooting.

Later that morning, President Donald Trump responded. “Something has to be done,” he told reporters as he boarded Air Force One on his way to Indiana. The president denied that America’s gun laws had anything to do with this act of gun violence. He suggested that the victims would have averted disaster by arming themselves. “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better,” Trump said. With that, he expressed a position common in his responses to violence over the past two years: that the only way to combat terror is to yield to it.

Trump continues to argue that his casual bigotry and xenophobia, his exhortations of extralegal measures against political opponents, and his delegitimization of the media are inconsequential to the violence. Instead, Trumpism demands that violence be solved by local militarization: increased security at schools, the arming of teachers, and now, the adoption of guns in places intended quite literally to be sanctuaries from the scourges of the world. Taken altogether, what Trumpism seems to intend is the creation—or perhaps the expansion—of the machinery of a police state.

 Here’s What’s Up for November 2018:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 14m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 30.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1947, the legendary Hughes H-4 Hercules (‘Spruce Goose’) flies for the first – and only – time:

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the Spruce Goose; registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airlift flying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, it was nicknamed by critics the Spruce Goose, although it was made almost entirely of birch.[2][3] The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it has the largest wingspan of any aircraft that has ever flown.[4][N 1] The aircraft remains in good condition. After being displayed to the public for almost 11 years in Long Beach, California from 1980 to 1991, it is now displayed at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, United States.[5]

Recommended for reading in full —  Interior Secretary Zinke in trouble, defining violence accurately, an anti-Mueller smear falls apart in a crackpot press conference, the Saruman trap, and a trailer for the release of Orson Welles’s (never-before-released) last movie —

Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Lisa Rein report White House concerned Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke violated federal rules:

Trump told his aides that he is afraid Zinke has broken rules while serving as the interior secretary and is concerned about the Justice Department referral, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. But the president has not indicated whether he will fire the former Navy SEAL and congressman and has asked for more information, the officials said.

This week, Interior’s Office of Inspector General referred the inquiry — one of several probes into the secretary’s conduct — to the Justice Department to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. That referral concerns Zinke’s involvement in a Whitefish, Mont., land development deal backed by David J. Lesar, chairman of the oil services firm Halliburton.

(Trump’s worried about a cabinet member breaking rules? Oh, brother. Trump’s never met a rule he hasn’t broken; Zinke’s soon to be tossed overboard to keep the ship from listing yet farther.)

Jennifer Rubin observes These things are not the same:

Violence is defined “behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.”

Violence is sending bombs to President Trump’s political targets. Violence is body-slamming a reporter who dares to ask a question. Violence is driving a car into a crowd, killing a young woman. Violence is killing unarmed African American youths. Violence is wife beating, sexual assault and child molestation (not demanding that accused wife beaters and sexual predators be held accountable and at the very least disqualified from high office.) Violence is forcibly separating young children from their parents (not calling out such treatment as inhumane).

Violence is not refusing to serve a White House press secretary dinner at a farm-to-table restaurant. It is not yelling at people in restaurants. It is not making mean jokes at a charity event. It is not peacefully occupying a government building to protest.

One would think the distinction between violent acts and nonviolent acts should be easy for adults to grasp. And yet we are told “both sides” contribute to violence.

Will Sommer reports Mueller Smear Pushed by Pro-Trump Activists Falls Apart at Press Conference:

A press conference intended to publicize sexual assault claims against special counsel Robert Mueller collapsed in spectacular fashion on Thursday, after the pro-Trump operatives behind the event failed to demonstrate a grasp of even basic details about their accuser or explain why they had repeatedly lied about their project.

Mueller has asked the FBI to investigate the effort from publicity-hungry Washington lobbyist Jack Burkman and pro-Trump Twitter personality Jacob Wohl, which has been dogged by accusations that they offered women money to accuse Mueller of sexual misconduct.

But the prospect of an FBI investigation was the least of Wohl and Burkman’s problems on Thursday.

Throughout their 45-minute press conference, the two men repeatedly contradicted themselves and each other, giving cryptic non-answers that convinced approximately zero people in attendance that their allegations were anywhere close to the truth.

Eliot A. Cohen describes The Saruman Trap (“When power is corrupt, there is no way to escape its toxic influence”):

And that is where Tolkien comes in. His masterwork—the six books in three volumes, not the movies….addresses many themes relevant to our age, not least of which is that temptation.

At the beginning of Book II, elves, men, and dwarfs have gathered at Rivendell, home of Lord Elrond. There they debate what to do about the ring of the Dark Lord, Sauron, which has by a curious chance fallen into the possession of the hobbit Frodo. Toward the end of their deliberations they hear a report from Gandalf, the wizard who had befriended Frodo, and who had been taken prisoner by Saruman, the most senior wizard of his order, and escaped. Saruman had learned that the Ring had fallen into the possession of the hobbit, and he wanted Gandalf to help him get it. Gandalf reports Saruman’s pitch as follows.

“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”

The stakes are not nearly as high for conservative thinkers as they were for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, but the basic idea is worth pondering. Some of them wish to walk back their condemnation of Trump, the animosities that he magnifies and upon which he feeds, the prejudices upon which he plays and the norms he delightedly subverts. They do so not because their original judgments have been proved unjust—far from it—but because, weary of unyielding opposition, they would like to shape things, or at least to hold communion with those who are in the room where the deals are done. But as Gandalf and Galadriel could teach them, the height of wisdom is to fear their own drive for power, to fight the fight in a darkening world even if it looks likely to end in failure, and, above all, to choose to remain their better selves.

 Chris Foran reports One of this month’s most anticipated movies comes from a Kenosha director who’s been dead for 33 years:

One of November’s more anticipated new movies is by a filmmaker from Kenosha who has been dead for 33 years.

On Friday, Netflix begins streaming “The Other Side of the Wind,” the fabled “last” movie by Orson Welles. Welles — the director of such masterworks as “Citizen Kane” who died in 1985 at age 70 — began shooting the movie in 1970, but the production ran into a string of almost surreal delays.

In “The Other Side of the Wind,” John Huston, the Oscar-winning writer-director, plays a legendary filmmaker who returns to Hollywood after years in exile to make a comeback project. His arrival is accompanied by a swirl of paparazzi, former acolytes, hangers-on and colleagues trying to figure out what he and his movie are all about.

A satire of the 1970s’ “New Hollywood,” the movie also stars director-actor Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Random, Susan Strasberg and Oja Kodar, Welles’ longtime partner who also shares screenwriting credit with him.

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 7:30 AM and sunset 5:46 PM, for 10h 16m 32s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 39.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1863, George Safford Parker is born:

On this date George Safford Parker was born in Shullsburg. While studying telegraphy in Janesville, he developed an interest in fountain pens. In 1891 he organized the Parker Pen Company in Janesville. The company gained world-wide acclaim for innovations like the duo-fold pen and pencil. Parker served as president of the company until 1933. Parker died on July 19, 1937.

Recommended for reading in full — a roadmap for Mueller, the law(s) on collusion, why Trump cannot tone it down, using an executive order to violate the Constitution, and video on choosing a landing site on Mars  —

Spencer S. Hsu writes U.S. archivists release Watergate report that could be possible ‘road map’ for Mueller:

U.S. archivists on Wednesday revealed one of the last great secrets of the Watergate investigation — the backbone of a long-sealed report used by special prosecutor Leon Jaworski to send Congress evidence in the legal case against President Richard M. Nixon.

The release of the referral — delivered in 1974 as impeachment proceedings were being weighed — came after a former member of Nixon’s defense team and three prominent legal analysts filed separate lawsuits seeking its unsealing after more than four decades under grand jury secrecy rules. The legal analysts argued the report could offer a precedent and guide for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as his office addresses its present-day challenge on whether, and if so, how to make public findings from its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, including any that directly involve President Trump.

The legal specialists said they and Watergate veterans sought to have the Jaworski report made public because of the historical parallels they see to the current probe and the report’s potential to serve as a counterexample to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s report before President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

….

“There were no comments, no interpretations and not a word or phrase of accusatory nature. The ‘Road Map’ was simply that — a series of guideposts if the House Judiciary Committee wished to follow them,” Jaworski wrote in his 1976 memoir, “The Right and the Power: The Prosecution of Watergate.”

Elizabeth Sablich writes Considering collusion: A primer on potential crimes:

As we explain in a new report, “collusion” is not the name of a codified crime.^[1] Nevertheless, the term has come to be shorthand for the possibility that the Trump campaign, its advisors or the president himself coordinated with Russia to help Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Indeed, Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been authorized to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” and to prosecute federal crimes arising from that investigation.^[2]

The president and his proxies have frequently advanced the claim that such coordination, even if it occurred, would not be unlawful. Their refrain that “collusion is not a crime” is in one sense correct. Collusion is not a single crime. It is instead a rubric that encompasses many possible offenses. We detail some of the principal ones in this report.

All turn on the possibility that Trump or his associates took action in connection with Russia’s attempts to impact the outcome of our country’s presidential election. The criminal nature of the Russian effort is already well-known. The special counsel’s 191 charges brought against 35 individuals and companies spell out some of the crimes allegedly committed in furtherance of the Russian attack on our democracy. Those include indictments of Russian individuals and entities for their participation in conspiracies to hack into the computer and email systems of Trump’s political opponents and release damaging information and to engage in a social media disinformation campaign using fake identities.

It logically follows that if the president or his campaign aides worked with the Russians in connection with those efforts, they too may be liable. That is not just common sense—it is also the law. The specific “collusion” crimes that may be implicated by any coordinated efforts between the president or his campaign aides and Russian operatives principally fall under the rubric of conspiracy: an agreement to further illegal action. The core federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, would be implicated if there was any agreement between members of the Trump campaign (or Trump himself) and Russian agents to do something that the law prohibits.

See also CONSIDERING COLLUSION: A PRIMER ON POTENTIAL CRIMES, October 31, 2018.

 Jennifer Rubin explains Why Trump cannot tone it down:

His refusal to give up the divisiveness, some might say, is simply evidence that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. That may be, but the problem is deeper. If Trump did not divide, lie, boast and incite, what would he possibly have to talk about?

Seriously, here are the topics he would have to avoid if he wanted to cut down on hateful language and stop dividing the country:

• The Clintons
• George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer
• Possible 2020 opponents
• The Russia “hoax”
• The deep state (including agencies and department for which he appointed leaders)
• The Fed’s pace of interest-rate hikes
• President Obama
• Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)
• “Socialism”
• Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)
• The caravan, the wall and the imaginary crime wave caused by immigrants
• Allies ripping us off
• The money we “owe” to trading partners (his misconception of the trade deficit)
• The media
• NATO taking advantage of us
• The epidemic of voting fraud (of which there is none)
• Globalism, nationalism

That takes up, what, like an hour of his campaign speeches? With the stock market now so erratic (can’t talk about his stock market being better than Obama’s) and attempts at Obamacare a failure (so now he’s the big defender of protections for preexisting conditions!), I honestly don’t think he would have more than 15 minutes of material for his rallies if he cut out all the items above.

Stavros Agorakis writes Trump wants to executive-order his way out of the Constitution:

In an exclusive interview with Axios, President Trump said he plans to sign an executive order that removes birthright citizenship to children of non-citizens and unauthorized immigrants in the US. [Axios / Jonathan Swan and Stef W. Kight]

Through this order, Trump essentially wants to change the US Constitution, which was amended 150 years ago to include these words: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” This clause came to become part of the 14th Amendment in 1868. [CNN / Kevin Liptak and Devan Cole]

Experts widely agree that this cannot be done. Not only is the 14th Amendment considered one of the driving laws that govern the US, but Trump’s executive order would be invalid under a longstanding Supreme Court precedent. [Vox / Sean Illing]

Trump told Axios that the order to revoke birthright citizenship is still in the works; it’s unclear how such an executive order would work or what the timeline would be. Not long after, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) wrote that he’ll introduce legislation in Congress along with the president’s proposed reform. [BBC]

News of this comes just one week before the midterm elections, for which Trump has been campaigning by strongly advocating against illegal immigration. One of his key points during rallies for Republican candidates has been stopping the Honduran migrant caravan, which crossed Mexico and is traveling to the US border. [Vox / Dara Lind]

This is just the latest move in Trump’s proposed hardline immigration reform. During his tenure in the White House, he’s upheld a Muslim ban, suggested a multibillion-dollar investment in security at the US-Mexico border, and demanded an end to so-called chain migration. [NPR / Susan Davis and Scott Detrow]

  Mars in a Minute: How Do You Choose a Landing Site?: