Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-three.  Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1832, Black Hawk’s escape across the Mississippi is blocked:

On this date the armed steamboat the Warrior reached the British Band on the Mississippi where they hoped to cross the river and escape the American troops. After being guided by a Sioux Indian, the ship which held an artillery piece, dropped anchor, making the Sauk escape virtually impossible. Black Hawk attempted to surrender to the Warrior, waving a white cloth, but the crew either did not understand or did not accept the message. The ship and its men opened fire, killing a number of unprepared Indians. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 140-141]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jim Acosta shows the sad scene at a Trump rally in Tampa:

Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) August 1, 2018

(The scientific case against the existence of a ‘master race’ is overwhelming, but even as anecdotal evidence this video is a powerful refutation of the ludicrous claim of white superiority.)

  Philip Bump asks Is Bannon right that white, college-educated women have given up on Republicans?:

“The Republican college-educated woman is done,” Bannon replied. “They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”

I spend a decent amount of time looking at polls and data, and Bannon’s comments struck me as accurate. On Monday, I looked at how women broadly were lining up in opposition to Trump and the Republican Party at unusual levels; the idea that white, college-educated women might be out of play rings largely true.

(Bannon uses the condescending Trumpist term ‘triggered’ for how these women feel about Trump.  They’re not triggered, they’re repulsed and infuriated, as any reasonable person would be by Trump’s bigoted, autocratic self-dealing.)

Noah Feldman writes Collusion Isn’t a Crime, But Aiding and Abetting Is (“Trump’s 2016 call for the Russians to hack Clinton’s email should worry his lawyer more”):

Rudy Giuliani can’t seem to get the law right. The president’s lawyer suggested Monday on CNN and Fox News that Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime even if he colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign by encouraging them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani put it. “You start analyzing the crime – the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”

That’s just wrong. Although there is no formal charge known as “collusion,” federal criminal law covers anyone who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” a felony. The elements of the crime need to be broken down to see how they might potentially apply to Trump’s actions during the campaign. And to be sure, not all the facts that would bring Trump under the federal statute have been proved.

But the law definitely doesn’t require Trump to have hacked himself or to have paid the Russians to do the hacking, as Giuliani argued. And the First Amendment wouldn’t protect Trump if the facts showed that he counseled the Russians to commit a federal hacking crime.

  Along similar lines, Randall D. Eliason writes Collusion is not a crime? Not so fast:

It’s true there is no crime called “collusion.” It’s also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened. Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called “collusion” is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit “homicide” not “shooting.”

Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy. A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States. Both charges are potentially relevant here — and Mueller has already deployed both.

Conspiracy to defraud the United States includes an agreement to impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful functions of the federal government. This could include, for example, an agreement with the Russians to interfere with the Federal Election Commission’s administration of federal election laws. Indeed, this type of conspiracy was the lead charge in February’s indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies for interfering with the election largely through social media. That indictment charges the defendants “intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of the FEC, the State Department and the Justice Department by making illegal campaign contributions, obtaining visas under false pretenses and failing to register as foreign agents.

  Maddie About Science describes Building A Probe That Will Survive A Trip To The Sun:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of eighty-one.  Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 29m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, Göring orders Heydrich to prepare for the genocide of Jews in Europe (translated text):

submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Chuck Quirmbach reports Advocates Target Milwaukee County Sheriff For Remarks On Domestic Violence:

The criticism surfaced Monday about comments Schmidt made last year during a podcast interview. Schmidt told domestic violence victims who are Christians to submit themselves to the Holy Spirit, adding that God would restore their relationships.

Schmidt also failed to criticize the podcast host, a minister who said the victim should change, not the abuser.

….

Sarah Pearson of Women’s March Wisconsin said the remarks are alarming.

“They suggest he is not the kind of sheriff that women in Milwaukee County need to take a solutions-based, violence-ending approach to domestic abuse,” Pearson said at a Monday news conference in Milwaukee.

(It’s worth noting – as often as one can – that countless Christians would reject both Schmidt’s scriptural interpretation and his unwillingness during the podcast to describe the duties of his office toward victims of domestic violence.)

  Michael Gerson writes, about Trumpism and Alex Jones, This will never be normal:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with an even chance of an afternoon shower, and a high of eighty.  Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 32m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous, with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1864, Wisconsinites fight for the Union at the Battle of the Crater:

The Battle of the Crater took place outside Petersburg, Virginia. Union troops set off a tremendous mine underneath a stronghold in the Confederate lines. Among the soldiers charging into the resulting crater were Company K, 37th Wisconsin Infantry (composed partly of Menominee Indians) and Wisconsin’s only black unit, Company  F, 29th U.S. Colored Troops. Delayed by bungling commanders, they were trapped in the crater, exposed to crossfire from Confederate soldiers, and cut down mercilessly. Read eyewitness accounts in our Civil War digital collection.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Tory Newmyer writes Trump’s trade rhetoric does not match reality for farmers:

Trump is heralding the trade truce he struck last week with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as a “breakthrough,” telling an Iowa rally last Thursday that he “just opened up Europe for you farmers.” 

Not so, European officials say. “On agriculture, I think we’ve been very clear on that — that agriculture is out of the scope of these discussions,” a European Commission representative said Friday, per the Wall Street Journal.

In fact, the world’s two largest economies are engaging on a pair of agricultural issues. But European moves on both fronts predate last week’s summit. The two sides are continuing ongoing negotiations toward lifting European barriers to high-end American beef. And the Europeans are talking up their intent to buy more American soybeans, although they already needed more of the product and likely won’t make up for orders the Chinese have canceled as part of their trade fight with the Trump administration.

(Emphasis in original.)

  Grigor Atanesian reports Voting systems in Wisconsin, a key swing state, can be hacked, security experts warn (“Even machines disconnected from the internet can be breached, demonstrations have shown — but state and local officials say not to worry”):

A key swing state, Wisconsin was the scene of Russian measures in 2016 that utilized social media and also probed the websites of government agencies.

Wisconsin and other battleground states including Pennsylvania were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim. This campaign tapped into divisive issues like race, gun control and gay and transgender rights. A Twitter account titled @MilwaukeeVoice and styled as a local news outlet was one of 2,752 now-deactivated Twitter bots and trolls — automated or human online fake personas — connected to Russia. Twitter vows further purges of tens of millions of suspicious accounts.

Besides trying to influence Wisconsin voters through political ads and Twitter, alleged Kremlin-linked operatives also probed the website of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. The websites of Ashland, Bayfield and Washburn in northern Wisconsin were targeted from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses listed in the joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security report on Russian malicious activity. And in July 2016, Russian government operatives attacked the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development website, state officials reported.

  Clive Irving remembers the Last Time a President Dismissed the Russian Threat, It Took Churchill to Wake Him Up (“Britain’s greatest war leader came to America to warn us about a despot in Moscow. He was widely attacked for doing so. Sound familiar?”):

In a preamble Churchill thanked Truman for traveling “a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting” and then, signaling the seriousness of the moment, he added “it is his wish that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times.”

He made a token gesture to Stalin: “We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world.”

But then, in a speech that is rightly seen as the moral foundation for the Cold War, he said: “From Stetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I call the Soviet sphere…The communist parties have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control…”

  E.J. Dionne Jr. describes Russia and the far right’s cozy affair:

The links among Vladimir Putin, President Trump, and segments of both the Republican Party and the American conservative movement seem bizarre. How can this be, given the Russian president’s KGB pedigree and a Cold War history during which antipathy toward the Soviet Union held the right together?

In truth, there is nothing illogical about the ideological collusion that is shaking our political system. If the old Soviet Union was the linchpin of the Communist International, Putin’s Russia is creating a new Reactionary International built around nationalism, a critique of modernity and a disdain for liberal democracy. Its central mission includes wrecking the Western alliance and the European Union by undermining a shared commitment to democratic values.

Putin is, first and foremost, an opportunist, so he is also happy to lend support to forces on the left when doing so advances his purposes in specific circumstances. But the dominant thrust of Putinism is toward the far right, because a nationalism rooted in Russian traditionalism cements his hold on power.

And the right in both Europe and the United States has responded. Long before Russia’s efforts to elect Trump in the 2016 election became a major public issue, Putin was currying favor with the American gun lobby, Christian conservatives and Republican politicians.

  Inventing Coca-Cola was a Successful Failure:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 8:18 PM, for 14h 34m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous, with 97.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1958, Pres. Eisenhower establishes NASA:

On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of US$100 million, three major research laboratories (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities.[20] A NASA seal was approved by President Eisenhower in 1959.[21] Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the United States Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA. A significant contributor to NASA’s entry into the Space Race with the Soviet Union was the technology from the German rocket program led by Wernher von Braun, who was now working for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), which in turn incorporated the technology of American scientist Robert Goddard’s earlier works.[22] Earlier research efforts within the US Air Force[20] and many of ARPA’s early space programs were also transferred to NASA.[23] In December 1958, NASA gained control of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a contractor facility operated by the California Institute of Technology.[20]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  This is the Cost of President Trump’s ‘America first’ policy:

This is the cost of President Trump’s ‘America first’ policy from CNBC.

(Trump’s America First is America Poorer.)

  Prof. Walter E. Block writes Trump’s Fake Fix for a Bad Economic Policy (“Using tax dollars to bail out farmers hurt by President Trump’s tariffs is not the way to strengthen the economy”):

What is driving the president’s apparent eagerness to impose tariffs is a simple and wrongheaded idea that plays to a large part of his base: A trade war will spur job growth in America. He is trying to use tariffs to give a leg up to American industries against countries that manufacture the same products that we do — whether steel, aluminum or cars — but more efficiently. And who could be against that if it creates more jobs?

In reality, however, creating jobs alone does not make for a strong economy. What we really want is to increase production. And to achieve that, we need to allocate labor as efficiently as possible. One way to do that is to ensure that if other countries can make certain goods more efficiently than we can, we trade with them for these items, rather than manufacture them ourselves. The result is cheaper goods, which is to our advantage.

But tariffs do nothing to improve this efficient allocation of labor. They also do not increase or decrease employment. They just shift jobs around, and almost always in a manner that hurts the economy.

As an illustration, assume Mr. Trump is the governor of New York. He is devoted to making the Empire State “great again.” Right now, both New Yorkers and Iowans raise pigs — but Iowa produces far more than New York. So Governor Trump sets up a protective tariff against the importation of Iowa-raised pork. Will this make New York great again?

Hardly. There is a very good reason the Empire State does not produce a huge amount of this product: economic efficiency, the true path toward economic greatness. Of course, pork product jobs will increase in New York thanks to the Trump tariffs. But this is the way to ruin the state’s economy.

  Rachel Siegel and Hamza Shaban report Top American brands say the trade war is now eating into their profits:

Rebecca Lindland, an analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said the pressure of tariffs has been weighing on automakers for so long that manufacturers wonder whether this is their new reality. But the industry is not nimble. Carmakers operate on a massive scale, with multiyear commitments to assembly plants and suppliers. According to Lindland, swiftly navigating the whims of the Trump administration won’t be easy.

“Trump will sometimes talk about pain in the short term and gains in the long term,” she said. “But the short term is years, and that pain could lead to very bad consequences, because you’re undermining profitability.”

Higher prices may also trigger challenges for consumers. Most car owners max out the amount of money they can borrow to buy a vehicle, Lindland said. But more expensive cars may lead to extended repayment periods, meaning people will owe more on their vehicles than what they are worth, for longer periods of time. In turn, this may delay or prevent new car purchases, she said.

  Prof. Steven Pearlstein writes The junk debt that tanked the economy? It’s back in a big way.

Like most people, you probably assume that the level of lending done by banks at any moment is largely driven by how much demand there is from borrowers. But in the world of modern finance, that’s only part of the story. For just as important is the level of demand from investors — pension funds, hedge funds, mutual funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies — to buy the loans that banks make. Indeed, there are times when there’s so much demand for loans from investors and the profit from selling them is so lucrative that bankers are only too happy to go out and make bigger and riskier loans than they would if they were keeping them on their own books.

….

It is through such alchemy that the wizards of structured finance are able to take a package of $400 million of loans rated at BBB- or below (junk) and generate $240 million worth of AAA-rated securities, along with $160 million of lower-rated instruments — a tranche to satisfy every risk appetite.

Although financial regulators have taken passing notice of the increased volume and declining quality of corporate credit, they haven’t done much to discourage it — just the opposite, in fact.

Earlier this year, after complaints from banks and dealmakers reached sympathetic ears in the Trump administration, the newly installed chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Comptroller of the Currency Office declared that previous “guidance” against lending to companies whose debt exceeded six times their annual cash flow should not be taken as a hard and fast rule.

  Behold Ethiopia’s Chapel in the Sky:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-seven.  Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 36m 26s of daytime.  The moon is nearly full today, with 99.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1868, Secretary of State William Seward issues an official proclamation declaring the 14th Amendment ratified.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Jennifer Rubin observes The Trump-Russia investigation looks like a mob case:

It also could be “one tile in the larger mosaic” of the alleged conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, Cramer noted, given the discussion of sanctions at the Trump Tower meeting and Russia’s subsequent efforts to undermine the Clinton campaign through hacks and disinformation. “Did the meeting overlap somehow with the Russian hacking? These could have been separate events within the same criminal conspiracy,” Cramer said. Just one day before the Trump Tower meeting, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, set up a website called DCLeaks with the purpose of disseminating Democrats’ stolen emails, according to court documents filed by Mueller earlier this month. Mueller  revealed in those same court filings that Russian hackers began trying to access Clinton staffers’ emails just hours after Trump asked them to. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said in public remarks in July 2016, referring to emails Clinton had deleted from her private server that she’d said were private in nature. It is also worth remembering that, two months before the Trump Tower meeting occurred, a Russia-linked national offered a junior campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, dirt on Clinton from Russia in the form of thousands of stolen emails.

Cohen’s apparent willingness to share information with prosecutors raises questions about what else he could tell them with regard to Trump’s coordination with Russian nationals. Though Cohen has vehemently denied it, the dossier compiled by the former British-intelligence officer Christopher Steele outlining the campaign’s alleged ties to Russia says that Cohen was dispatched to Prague at the tail end of the campaign to pay off Russian hackers in an attempt to keep them quiet. The dossier also alleges a conspiracy between Trump and Russia was managed by Manafort, using the campaign foreign-policy adviser Carter Page as an intermediary. Cohen told me months ago, and has said publicly, that he believes the dossier is a farce. But Mueller is still examining its claims, a person familiar with the investigation told me on the condition of anonymity, making any corroborating information Cohen may have about a possible larger conspiracy incredibly valuable.

Kelly Weill writes American Racists Look for Allies in Russia (“Pro-Trump hate groups are praising Russia and its ‘macho’ leader after the president’s summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki”):

While President Donald Trump pals around with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the U.S.’s racist right is making open overtures to Russian white supremacists.

One day after Trump’s disastrous summit with Putin last week, the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group, announced that it would launch a Russian-language site. The southern secessionist group’s crush on Russia is the latest appeal by U.S. white supremacists to Russia and Putin—an alliance that has strengthened during the Trump presidency.

“Russia is our friend,” a group of torch-waving racists chanted during an October rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “The South will rise again.”

  Eliot A. Cohen, in Pulling Security Clearances Is Just the Start, makes a key point about the time after Trumpism:

And what afterwards? Sooner or later there will be a Democratic administration, or one composed of Trump’s opponents in some conservative configuration that opposes the Republican Party. Can the norms be restored then? That is the real issue. Trump is a 72-year-old wrecker: He will be gone at most in six years, and probably a lot sooner. But will his angry successors act in comity and consideration to their predecessors in this administration? For that matter, should they?

The latter question is the hardest one. For sure, career civil servants and military officers of all kinds should face no retaliation for doing what professionals do—observing their oaths and doing their duty conscientiously. And some political appointees (Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis being the shining example) are real heroes for doing their best to contain the worst instincts of the scoundrel president. But what about the run-of-the-mill political appointees?

On the one hand, no one wants a partisanship that takes no prisoners when parties exchange office. But this is not a normal time, and, unfortunately, the Republican Party is no longer a normal party, but is in the compliant and spineless possession of a political buccaneer. It may not be entirely improper to teach the lesson that if you sign up with an administration so utterly lacking in decency, so contemptuous of historical norms of bipartisanship in national security, so lacking in consideration for critics and defeated opponents, you are not going to be treated with the respect normally accorded to senior members of the loyal opposition. The men and women in the shadows, who for the sake of a corner office and an official car and a high title have held their tongues and dishonored their principles, might want to think about that when Sanders tells her next lie.

(It won’t, indeed can’t, be business as usual after Trump goes. Operatives and officials who brought Trumpism to power, and who during its grip will have enriched themselves, either openly or tacitly, cannot expect that afterward those in opposition will let ‘bygones be bygones.’ Not at all – scraping this ilk from the political scene will be a necessary job for years to come. The original Reconstruction did too little in this regard; we in our time will not make a similar mistake.)

  Someone really wants to go for a walk (and someone else doesn’t):

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-four.  Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:20 PM, for 14h 38m 31s of daytime.  The moon is full today, with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1974, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee votes in favor of its first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon:

the Committee voted 27–11 to recommend the first article of impeachment against the president: obstruction of justice.[90][91] The Committee then recommended the second article, abuse of power, on July 29, 1974.[92] The next day, on July 30, 1974, the Committee recommended the third article: contempt of Congress.[94]

Article I alleged in part:

On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.[95]

Article II alleged in part that Nixon:

repeatedly engaged in conduct violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch and the purposed of these agencies.[95]

Article III alleged in part that Nixon:

failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas.[95]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Matthew DeFour reports National groups have already booked $9.5 million in ads for governor’s race:

The Democratic Governors Association plans to boost its eventual Wisconsin nominee with $3.8 million in TV advertising in the fall election, and is pointing to the now $5.7 million ad buy from the Republican Governors Association as a sign Gov. Scott Walker is in trouble.

The DGA earlier this year announced a $20 million buy in four states in the final five weeks of the election, but didn’t specify how much would be purchased in Wisconsin. The RGA ad buy for the last nine weeks of the election is up from the $5.1 million the organization announced in April. Last week the organization reserved $924,000 in TV ad time.

DGA spokesman Jared Leopold provided the updated figures Thursday for both organizations based on information collected from TV stations, which must report the information to the Federal Communications Commission. An RGA spokesman didn’t respond Thursday to a request for comment and the Walker campaign declined to comment.

  A story from May by Katelyn Ferral, Former DOT head is Scott Walker’s chief critic on transportation, reminds that local issues will shape this race, no matter how much national spending there is:

In 2014, Mark Gottlieb began to realize Gov. Scott Walker was moving away from a goal he thought they shared: fixing the state’s transportation funding problem and its deteriorating roads.

It was one year after a commission, chaired by Gottlieb, then-secretary of Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation, released an 176-page report, affirming what at least two other commissions led by both Republicans and Democrats over the last decade had found: Wisconsin’s highway system and local roads were rapidly deteriorating and there was not enough money to fix or maintain them.

It’s the issue that ground state government to a halt last summer, delaying the budget for months. How to address the state’s aging highways continues to divide Republicans statewide.

Andrew Desiderio and Kevin Poulsen report Russian Hackers’ New Target: a Vulnerable Democratic Senator:

The Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 election cyberattacks targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill as she began her 2018 re-election campaign in earnest, a Daily Beast forensic analysis reveals. That makes the Missouri Democrat the first identified target of the Kremlin’s 2018 election interference.

McCaskill, who has been highly critical of Russia over the years, is widely considered to be among the most vulnerable Senate Democrats facing re-election this year as Republicans hope to hold their slim majority in the Senate. In 2016, President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by almost 20 points in the senator’s home state of Missouri.

There’s no evidence to suggest that this attempt to lure McCaskill staffers was successful. The precise purpose of the approach was also unclear. Asked about the hack attempt by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, McCaskill told The Daily Beast on Thursday that she wasn’t yet prepared to discuss it.

  Jennifer Rubin observes Trump’s Russia problem is getting worse and worse:

President Trump has relied on repeated lies (e.g., a spy was on his campaign), catchphrases (“no collusion”) and media attacks in an attempt to defuse the Russia investigation. It’s not working, and one can conclude a good deal of the reason has to do with his own obsequious performance alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

The latest Quinnipiac poll reports:

American voters believe 51 – 35 percent “that the Russian government has compromising information about President Trump.” … The Helsinki summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin was a failure for the U.S., voters say 52 – 27 percent. The summit was a success for Russia, voters say 73 – 8 percent. Trump was not acting in the best interest of the U.S., voters say 54 – 41 percent. … A total of 68 percent of American voters are “very concerned” or “somewhat concerned” about President Trump’s relationship with Russia, while 32 percent are “not so concerned” or “not concerned at all.”

It is very telling that voters overwhelmingly trust our intelligence community over Trump (63 percent to 25 percent) and think he is too friendly with Russia (55 percent vs. 37 percent who say he’s about right — and only 1 percent thinking he is not friendly enough!). The public is very much supportive of our allies (88 percent) and NATO specifically (78 percent). Fifty-five percent of voters have figured out Russia is an adversary, and only 5 percent think it’s an ally. (Thirty-seven percent say neither.) In addition, 66 percent don’t believe Trump’s excuse that he misspoke about Russian interference, 60 percent think it was a bad idea for Trump to meet alone with Putin, and 54 percent think he is weak on Russia.

  One can find Incredible Art on a Pencil Tip: