Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny and cold, with a high of nineteen. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 5:23 PM, for 10h 28m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 10.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 7 AM, and her Planning Commission at 6:30 PM.

It’s Lincoln’s birthday. Every tradition has its fringe, and among some who call themselves libertarian, there’s opposition to Lincoln. They could not be more wrong; Lincoln is exceptional and canonical to our politics the way Shakespeare is to the English language. See Elesha Coffman, A Libertarian’s Lincoln (reviewing Thomas Krannawitter’s Vindicating Lincoln) and Nick Gillespie’s A Libertarian Lincoln? (reviewing The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America).

  Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Kyle Swenson reports Rob Porter ex Jennie Willoughby: ‘The truth exists whether the President accepts it or not’:

When Jennie Willoughby went public with the physical and emotional abuse she allegedly suffered in her marriage to former White House aid Rob Porter, the ex-schoolteacher found herself catapulted into a media and political storm.

Following a Feb. 6 Daily Mail article recounting allegations of abuse against Porter by both Willoughby and his first ex-wife Colbie Holderness, the 40-year-old White House staffer resigned from his position as staff secretary. Willoughby did not hide from the ensuing public conversation. In cable interviews and her own writing, she tackled the messy emotional fallout of domestic violence, a candor that planted her on the front lines of the #MeToo movement and won her heartfelt supporters.

The publicity also attracted angry detractors — including figures at the top rung of the current administration.

On Saturday, President Trump snapped out a tweet obliquely addressing the Porter scandal. Although Axios has reported the president has privately said he believes Porter’s ex-wives, on Twitter the president cast skepticism on both the current White House intrigue as well as the larger movement.

➤ Damian Paletta reports In big reversal, new Trump budget will give up on longtime Republican goal of eliminating deficit:

President Trump on Monday will offer a budget plan that falls far short of eliminating the government’s deficit over 10 years, conceding that huge tax cuts and new spending increases make this goal unattainable, three people familiar with the proposal said.

Eliminating the budget deficit over 10 years has been a North Star for the Republican Party for several decades, and GOP lawmakers took the government to the brink of default in 2011 when they demanded a vote on a amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit the federal government from spending more than it takes in through revenues.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), when he used to chair the House Budget Committee, routinely proposed tax and spending outlines that would eliminate the deficit over 10 years, even though critics said his changes would lead to a severe curtailment in government programs.

In 2013, Ryan proposed $4.6 trillion in cuts over 10 years, an amount he said was sufficient to eliminating the deficit. Those changes were not adopted by Congress or supported by the Obama administration.

The White House and GOP leaders have largely jettisoned goals like this since Trump took office last year. Trump’s budget plan will call for a range of spending cuts that reduces the growth of the deficit by $3 trillion over 10 years, but it would not eliminate the deficit entirely, said the people familiar with the proposal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans before they’re publicly unveiled.

➤ Eliot Cohen writes The Truth About Military Parades:

Victory parades are easy enough to figure out. The Grand Review of the Armies in May 1865 included 145,000 troops from three Union armies—of the Potomac, Tennessee, and Georgia—marching past cheering throngs of onlookers. There were some uncomfortable moments. General William Tecumseh Sherman, still bristling over what he regarded as unwarranted and brusque orders from Secretary of War Stanton, refused to shake the latter’s hand. But overall, the mood was joyous, albeit still shadowed by the assassination of President Lincoln little more than a month before. The armies marched down Washington streets for two days, and then quietly, almost instantly, melted away to their homes.

…

Americans don’t goose step. But they are not immune to an adolescent fascination with weaponry, and a celebration of raw strength. Hence the unseemly pronouncements in the current case by pundits and politicians, most of them remarkably devoid of military experience themselves or among their children. One thing they may miss is that a military parade would show off some really old pieces of hardware, first designed and deployed (if modernized since) over 30 years ago—M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, F-15 jets. One thinks of the aging alpha male baboon who attempts to intimidate the rest of the troop by baring his teeth, but has failed to notice that some of his fangs have dropped out. The Chinese colonels taking careful notes might be less impressed than the talking heads of Fox News.

What parades do not do is adequately celebrate today’s soldier and his or her spirit. What they do not show is the personal appreciation Americans should appropriately offer men and women who have repeatedly left family behind for danger and boredom, often leaving pieces of who they once were on the battlefield. What they do not do is replace the barbecue or the beer, the patience with the far-away look and sudden irritability, the long walk and the arm around the shoulder, the welcoming smile and the attentive ear.

Thirty-five years ago, during my own brief and inglorious Army reserve career, I went to an officer’s basic course with D. J. Reyes, who unlike me, later spent nearly 34 years doing hard work in hard places, including serving as then Major General David Petraeus’s intelligence officer for the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. “Quiet warrior, quiet professional is the motto,” he recently reminded me. We should respect that spirit, realizing that Orwell was right, and that parades say more about those who order and watch them, than those who participate in them.

➤ Ezra Klein writes Donald Trump, Fox News, and the logic of alternative facts (“The Nunes memo and the FBI texts gave Trump the alternative story he needed”):

Watching all this play out, I’ve been thinking about a profile Molly Ball wrote of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, limning her peculiar talent for cheerfully denying the towering masses of factual evidence against her boss’s statements. “She figured out that she doesn’t need to win the argument,” Ball wrote of Conway. “All she has to do is craft a semi-plausible (if not entirely coherent) counternarrative, so that those who don’t want to look past the facade of Trump’s Potemkin village don’t have to.”

We like to imagine American politics as a kind of scored debate, with political actors acting as the debaters, the media acting as the judge, and the public acting as the audience. Much of cable news is based, implicitly or explicitly, on this metaphor. Panelists from different sides of issues are introduced to “debate” an issue; shows sell themselves as “no-spin zones”; networks brag that they’re “fair and balanced” or place “facts first.” Under this conception of American politics, a memo that proves a fraud, an argument that proves a bust, a politician who is seen to lie — all of it is revealed and punished, the system self-regulates.

But that metaphor is often wrong, and it’s particularly wrong in the ecosystem driven by Fox News and Trump’s Twitter account. What Conway and others understand is that if you’re just trying to activate your tribe, you don’t have to win the argument, you just need to have an argument; you need to give your side something to say, something to believe. Something like the Nunes memo or the various out-of-context texts aren’t part of a search for truth — they’re an ammo drop, or, to go back to the way Ball put it, “a semi-plausible (if not entirely coherent) counternarrative.”

Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk radio host turned Trump critic, put it well. “The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It’s to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people.”

➤ How AI Could Revolutionize Coffee:

(The market price is the fair price, but more information about production is useful to buyers and sellers.)

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see light morning snow, on an increasingly sunny day with a high of twenty-four. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 5:22 PM, for 10h 26m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 16.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1842, it’s a Shooting in the Legislature: “On this date the Territorial Legislature of Wisconsin met in Madison, only to be interrupted by the shooting of one member by another. The legislature was debating the appointment of Enos S. Baker for sheriff of Grant County when Charles Arndt made a sarcastic remark about Baker’s colleague, James Vineyard. After an uproar, adjournment was declared and when Arndt approached Vineyard’s desk, a fight broke out during which Vineyard drew his revolver and shot Arndt. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Patrick Kingsley reports As West Fears the Rise of Autocrats, Hungary Shows What’s Possible:

BUDAPEST — The senior leaders of Fidesz gathered on the banks of the Danube, in a building known as the Hungarian White House, stunned by the scale of their good fortune. Their right-wing party had won unexpectedly sweeping political power in national elections. The question was how to use it.

Several men urged caution. But Viktor Orban, the prime minister-elect, disagreed. The voting result, Mr. Orban continued, had given him the right to carry out a radical overhaul of the country’s Constitution.

Mr. Orban won the argument.

The private meetings, recounted by two people who were in the room and by a third who was briefed on the discussions at the time, occurred in early May 2010. Nearly eight years later, Mr. Orban has remade Hungary’s political system into what one critic calls “a new thing under the sun.” Once praised by watchdog groups as a leading democracy of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Hungary is now considered a democracy in sharp, worrisome decline.

Through legislative fiat and force of will, Mr. Orban has transformed the country into a political greenhouse for an odd kind of soft autocracy, combining crony capitalism and far-right rhetoric with a single-party political culture. He has done this even as Hungary remains a member of the European Union and receives billions of dollars in funding from the bloc. European Union officials did little as Mr. Orban transformed Hungary into what he calls an “illiberal democracy.”

➤ Jonathan Alter and Nick Akerman contend Trump-Russia Isn’t About the Cover-Up. It’s About the Crime (“In Watergate, it was the cover-up, not the crime. But in Russiagate, that stands to be turned on its head. We already know a lot—and we can be sure Mueller knows more”):

In the Russia scandal, special counsel Robert Mueller has credible proof of obstruction of justice—i.e., the cover-up. But in a highly politicized climate, where “memos” and insults are weapons of distraction, that won’t likely be enough. Even if Democrats take control of Congress in November, most Republicans—like most juries in run-of-the-mill criminal cases—will demand significant evidence of an underlying crime as a motive for the obstruction before turning on President Trump, much less voting in the Senate to remove him from office.

While Mueller and his team don’t leak, signs that such evidence exists are clear from news reports, which contain only a tiny portion of what the special counsel’s office possesses. The fragmentary and often disconnected nature of those reports obscures the reasonable supposition that Mueller is well on his way to detailing conspiracy, wire fraud, illegal foreign campaign contributions, or all three. During Watergate, the special prosecutor had most of the evidence that doomed Nixon at least nine months before his August 9, 1974 resignation. Mueller, too, likely has the goods already, even without “smoking gun” tapes.

One tip-off was in Michael Flynn’s December 1 “allocution”—his signed submission to the court as part of his guilty plea to making false statements to the FBI on January 24, 2017. It received almost no media attention but suggested the nature of the criminal conspiracy that would likely be at the heart of Mueller’s prosecution.

➤ Edwin Rios observes Turns Out the Olympic Ban on Russia Was Pretty Much a Joke (“There are 169 “Olympic athletes from Russia” taking part in the South Korea games”):

Just two months ago, the International Olympic Committee barred Russia from competing in this year’s Winter Olympics. The move came a year after the IOC punished Russia for “systemic manipulation of the anti-doping rules and system” dating back to the 2012 London Olympics. And yet, on Thursday, the games’ first day of competition, the US curling team defeated a pair of Russian athletes in a mixed doubles match.

Since the ban, 169 Russian athletes have been cleared by the IOC to compete in all 15 of this year’s events under the Olympic flag—more than Team Germany (157) and host South Korea (145). Instead of Russian white, blue, and red, these athletes will wear “neutral” red and gray uniforms bearing the words “Olympic athletes from Russia.” During the Opening Ceremony, the representatives marched behind the Olympic flag, and whenever they win gold, they’ll be serenaded by the Olympic Hymn.

Only the United States and Canada will field larger squads than Russia.

➤ Marc Fisher contends In fun-house mirrors of Trump White House, disarray can look like victory:

For a president who often sees himself as standing tall against powerful forces that only want him to fail, things were looking up. The tax cuts were selling well, he had gotten credit for a pretty good State of the Union address, employment numbers were good, and his approval rating was improving.

Any other president would have seen this as a week to claim some credit (Congress passed a spending bill, with bipartisan support), do some presidential reassuring (the markets sure could have used some calming words), maybe take the high road and wave the flag (the Olympics are a fine opportunity for that).

But, in case anyone hadn’t noticed, this is not your standard presidency, and that made a whack-a-mole day such as Friday nearly inevitable. President Trump’s week ended with the sudden departure of a speechwriter who had been accused of brutally attacking his wife, the president’s defense of another staffer who allegedly assaulted two ex-wives, the chief of staff’s inartful attempts to recast his own handling of that episode, and the revelation that the president doesn’t read his full intelligence briefings.

…

Not Trump. He simply does what he’s always done — whatever it takes to claim center stage.

As he said in his book “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire,” visionary business leaders succeed “because they are narcissists who devote their talent with unrelenting focus to achieving their dreams, even if it’s sometimes at the expense of those around them.”

➤ John Daly explains What it Feels Like to Slide Downhill at 90 M.P.H.:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see cloudy skies with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 5:20 PM, for 10h 23m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 23.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

At Whitewater’s Cravath lakefront (341 S. Fremont St., Whitewater, WI 53190, see map), there will be a Polar Plunge for Special Olympics, with registration beginning @ 10 AM, a chili cook-off at 11 AM, and opening ceremonies & freezin’ for a reason beginning at noon.

On this day in 1950, Joe McCarthy continues his baseless allegations: “in a speech delivered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed to possess the names of 57 U.S. government employees, actively engaged in Communist activities. [Source: Google Newspaper Archives].”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ GOP Congressman Will Hurd contends Russia Is Our Adversary (“Russia is eroding democracy by exploiting the nation’s divisions. To save it, Americans must begin working together”):

Before I was elected to represent southwestern Texas in the U.S. Congress, I spent almost a decade as an undercover officer in the CIA. I served in places where Russia has geopolitical interests, and learned that Russia has one simple goal: to erode trust in democratic institutions. It has weaponized disinformation to achieve this goal for decades in Eastern and Central Europe; in 2016, Western Europe and America were aggressively targeted as well. Social media is merely a 21st-century mechanism to fuel the familiar Cold War-propaganda machine. The Russians know that well executed disinformation, when exercised tactically, can quickly metastasize.

Unfortunately, over the last year, the United States has demonstrated a lack of resilience to this infection. The current highly charged political environment is making it easier for the Russians to achieve their goal. The hyperbolic debate over the release of the FISA memos by the House Intelligence Committee further helps the Russians achieve their aim. Most recently, Russian social-media efforts used computational propaganda to influence public perceptions of this issue, and we found ourselves once again divided among party lines.

When the public loses trust in the press, the Russians are winning. When the press is hyper-critical of Congress for executing oversight and providing transparency on the actions taken by the leaders of our law-enforcement agencies, the Russians are winning. When Congress and the general public disagree simply along party lines, the Russians are winning. When there is friction between Congress and the executive branch resulting in the further erosion of trust in our democratic institutions, the Russians are winning.

The cycle will not stop, and Russian influence operations will continue, unless we take immediate action.

To address continued Russian disinformation campaigns, we need to develop a national counter-disinformation strategy. The strategy needs to span the entirety of government and civil society, to enable a coordinated effort to counter the threat that influence operations pose to our democracy. It should implement similar principles to those in the Department of Homeland Security’s Strategy for Countering Violent Extremism, with a focus on truly understanding the threat and developing ways to shut it down.

(Americans who defend Putin’s regime defend its imperialism & oppression abroad, and the degradation of democratic institutions in this country.)

➤ Kate Benner reports No. 3 Official at the Justice Department Is Stepping Down:

Rachel L. Brand, the No. 3 official at the Justice Department, plans to step down after nine months on the job as the country’s top law enforcement agency has been under attack by President Trump, according to two people briefed on her decision.

Ms. Brand’s profile had risen in part because she is next in the line of succession behind the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, who is overseeing the special counsel’s inquiry into Russian influence in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump, who has called the investigation a witch hunt, has considered firing Mr. Rosenstein.

Such a move could have put her in charge of the special counsel and, by extension, left her in the cross hairs of the president.

Ms. Brand, who became the associate attorney general in May 2017, will become the global governance director at Walmart, the company’s top legal position, according to people briefed on her move. She has held politically appointed positions in the past three presidential administrations.

In her current job, she reports directly to Mr. Rosenstein and Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, who has recused himself from the Russia investigation.

(Whether Brand’s departure weakens her department yet further one cannot say; it’s enough to know that she would have, in time, likely ruined her worthy, deserved reputation in the service of Sessions, and under pressure from Trump, had she stayed. She surely made the right personal choice.)

➤ Karoun Demirjian, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Matt Zapotosky report Trump will not release Democrats’ memo on FBI surveillance:

President Trump will not immediately agree to release a Democratic memo rebutting GOP claims that the FBI abused its surveillance authority as it probed Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but he has directed the Justice Department to work with lawmakers so some form of the document could be made public, the White House counsel said Friday night.

In a letter to the House Intelligence Committee, White House counsel Donald McGahn wrote that the Justice Department had identified portions of the Democrats’ memo that it believed “would create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests” if disclosed. McGahn included in his note a letter from Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray supporting that claim.

The decision stands in contrast to one Trump made last week on a Republican memo alleging the FBI misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. After the House Intelligence Committee voted on a Monday to make that document public, Trump authorized its release swiftly on a Friday afternoon.

➤ Kaitlan Collins and Sophie Tatum report Second WH official resigns over domestic abuse allegations:

David Sorensen, a member of the Trump administration’s speechwriting team, has resigned after being accused of domestic abuse, a White House official says.< He is the second administration official to resign this week over domestic abuse allegations, after top White House staffer Rob Porter resigned on Wednesday.

According to a White House official, Sorensen’s job with the Council on Environmental Quality did not require a security clearance, but his background check was ongoing.

The Washington Post first reported Sorensen’s resignation Friday evening, and reported that his ex-wife alleged that “he ran a car over her foot, put out a cigarette on her hand, threw her into a wall and grasped her menacingly by her hair while they were alone on their boat in remote waters off Maine’s coast, an incident she said left her fearing for her life.”

➤ This year is the 50th anniversary of the Special Olympics. There will be a national anniversary celebration in Chicago this summer —

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see cloudy skies with a high of twenty. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 5:19 PM, for 10h 20m 51s of daytime. The moon a waning crescent with 32.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

School’s out today in Whitewater and nearby towns; play responsibly. 

On this day in 1943, the Battle of Guadalcanal in the southwest Pacific ends with an Allied victory over Japanese forces. On this day in 1870, the National Weather Service begins: “resident Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution authorizing a National Weather Service, which had long been a dream of Milwaukee scientist Increase Lapham. Lapham, 19th-century Wisconsin’s premier natural scientist, proposed a national weather service after he mapped data contributed over telegraph lines in the Upper Midwest and realized that weather might be predicted in advance. He was concerned about avoiding potential disasters to Great Lakes shipping and Wisconsin farming, and his proposal was approved by Congress and authorized on this date. ”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Cynthia McFadden reports DHS Cybersecurity Head: ‘No Doubt’ Russians Penetrated Voter Registration Systems:

➤ Hannah Levintova reports Russian Activist Alleges New Link Between the Kremlin and Paul Manafort:

In a 25-minute video published on YouTube Thursday morning, Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny accused Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko—a top foreign policy official—of having been a conduit between the Kremlin and an oligarch linked to the Trump campaign.

With a mix of news clips, Navalny presented the case that during the 2016 election Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, a past business associate of Paul Manafort, the indicted former Trump campaign chairman, passed to the Kremlin inside information about the Trump campaign he obtained from Manafort. Navalny also cites social media posts from Nastya Rybka, a Russian model and escort who has claimed to have been Deripaska’s mistress and who has written a memoir about their supposed affair titled A Diary of Seducing a Billionaire.

Navalny’s video, produced in the style of a late-night news show, features a recording made by Rybka when she was with Deripaska on his yacht sailing off the coast of Norway. Her video includes photos of Deripaska sitting next to a man who looks very much like Prikhodko, and it includes audio of Deripaska saying the following to Rybka: “We’ve got bad relations with America. Why? Because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich, Nuland is her name, is responsible for them. When she was young, she spent a month on a Russian whaling boat, and after this, she hates the country.”

“Sergey Eduardovich” is a term of respect for Prikhodko, made from his first name and patronym. “Nuland” refers to Victoria Nuland, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.

➤ Charles Lane contends We are witnessing a democratic nightmare:

In short, the American national consensus about intelligence, and many other things, was already in deep trouble long before Trump came on the scene. If there were still a robust political center, Trump never would have been elected in the first place.

Acting on instinct as much as anything else, the president is now exploiting the instability and confusion to neutralize threats to his power, the most salient of which, in the short term, is the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III. Full co-optation of the intelligence community could be his grand prize later on.

It is futile to count on the FBI itself — a “pillar of society,” as a New York Times headline strangely called it — to check Trump, even though many people who should know better seem to be doing just that.

When Phil Mudd, a former top official of both the CIA and FBI, warns on television that the FBI is “ticked” at Trump and preparing to “win” against the elected president, it only feeds Trump’s “deep state” narrative.

“Those who would counter the illiberalism of Trump with the illiberalism of unfettered bureaucrats would do well to contemplate the precedent their victory would set,” Tufts University constitutional scholar Michael J. Glennon warns in a 2017 Harper’s article.

We are witnessing a democratic nightmare: partisan competition over secret and semi-secret intelligence and law- enforcement agencies. And as Glennon notes, it would be unwise to bet against Trump; he has favors to dispense and punishments to dish out.

Alone among all the others blundering about in the ruins of America’s shattered political consensus, he knows exactly what he wants.

➤ Oliver Darcy reports Right-wing media obsesses over FBI text message story; hours later it’s debunked:

Members of the pro-Trump media acted like they hit the goldmine on Wednesday morning. Led by Fox News, these outlets went into a frenzy over what they presented as an explosive story that not only cast former President Obama and Hillary Clinton in a negative light, but simultaneously helped vindicate claims then-candidate Donald Trump made about the investigation into Clinton’s private email server being “rigged.”
But a CNN review of the story’s premise indicates that key text messages the story relied on were taken out of context, and portrayed as meaning something entirely different than what they actually meant.

In the early hours of the morning, Fox News published an article on its website based on newly-released communications between senior FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. The text messages were released Tuesday in a report produced by the office of Republican Sen. Ron Johnson.

In one September 2, 2016, text message, Page wrote that there was a meeting at the bureau setup because Obama wanted “to know everything we are doing.”

…

The story eventually made its way to the president himself, who amplified it further when he tweeted, “NEW FBI TEXTS ARE BOMBSHELLS!”

People familiar with the matter strongly dispute the assertion that the text message referenced the Clinton email probe. The text message, they say, was actually referencing Obama’s desire to be kept abreast on the FBI’s investigation into Russian election meddling.

One former Obama official told CNN that the idea the text message was about the Clinton email investigation was “total nonsense,” noting that the theory did not conform with the timeline of events.

Indeed, the text message was sent on September 2, 2016, months after the bureau had closed its investigation into Clinton, and before it reopened that investigation. But September 2, 2016 was just days before Obama confronted Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia’s meddling in the presidential election.

A person familiar with Strzok’s thinking reiterated this account, telling CNN that the text referred to Obama’s broader interests in issues of potential Russian interference in the election more generally. The idea that Obama was micromanaging the FBI’s investigation does not match reality, the person said.

➤ Meet the The El Chapo of Orangutans:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater be cloudy with a high of twenty, with snow beginning this evening. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 5:18 PM, for 10h 18m 15s of daytime. The moon a waning crescent with 47.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1922, President Harding has a radio installed in the White House: “At the time, radio was the hottest technology there was, and the White House was on the cutting edge. Almost two years later, Calvin Coolidge, who followed Harding, was the first president to broadcast from the White House. Coolidge’s address for Washington’s Birthday was heard on 42 stations from coast to coast. Before that historic broadcast, radio had played a big role in Coolidge’s victory in the 1924 presidential election. The night before the election, Coolidge made history when the largest radio audience ever tuned in to the broadcast of his final campaign speech. Coolidge won the election easily, and in March, Americans listened for the first time to their president take the oath of office on the radio.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Kaitlan Collins, Kevin Liptak and Dan Merica report White House officials knew about Porter’s abuse allegations and scrambled to protect him:

Senior aides to President Donald Trump knew for months about allegations of domestic abuse levied against top White House staffer Rob Porter by his ex-wives, even as Porter’s stock in the West Wing continued to rise, multiple sources told CNN on Wednesday.

Porter denied the allegations but resigned on Wednesday.

A scramble ensued inside the West Wing to defend him when the claims became public this week, the sources said. That effort continues even after his resignation.

➤ Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng report Trump White House Tried, and Failed, to Keep Aide Rob Porter After Accusations of Wife-Beating Surfaced (“Chief of Staff John Kelly fought for him to stay and options included taking ‘some time off.’ “):

By Wednesday morning, however, events had begun overtaking spin. The White House convened several small meetings to determine what was to be done about “Porter-gate,” as one senior White House official said. Among the options weighed included having Porter leave the White House, allowing him to weather the fallout, or encouraging him to take “some time off,” the official said.

They settled on a departure, though two officials confirmed to The Daily Beast that Kelly, for his part, had implored Porter not to quit.

The recently resigned Trump aide said there would be a “smooth transition” around Porter’s exit. But virtually nothing about the episode can be categorized as “smooth.”

The saga began with a Daily Mail piece published on Tuesday evening that reported on allegations of routine domestic abuse by Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness. “He was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive and that is why I left,” she told the Mail, which previously reported on Porter’s romantic relationship with White House communications director Hope Hicks. “He was angry because we weren’t having sex when he wanted to have sex and he kicked me,” Holderness recalled. “It seems such a juvenile thing at the time, but I remember thinking about words my mother had told me when it happened.”

➤ David A. Graham surveys The Rise and Fall of John Kelly’s Reputation:

This is not the only turn in the spotlight this week for Kelly, a generally press-shy individual. The chief of staff, rejecting calls for the White House to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, said that “Dreamers” should have registered during the Obama administration, and those who did not were “too lazy to get off their asses.” Democrats lashed out at Kelly about the comments behind closed doors, but rather than try to set the incident aside, Kelly repeated what he’d said to reporters. As even rigorously nonpartisan reporters noted, Kelly was invoking shopworn stereotypes about immigrants and people of color.

Only a few weeks ago, Kelly reportedly torpedoed a deal between Trump and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to extend DACA. After a productive meeting between Schumer and the president, Kelly called Schumer and informed him that the deal was insufficiently tough on immigration, eventually leading to a brief government shutdown.

It seems as if scales are falling from some eyes in Washington, allowing them to see Kelly more clearly—just the same arc of meteoric rise followed by disillusionment that Porter followed. When Kelly was moved to the White House in July, at the time of the political murder-suicide of Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci, he was hailed as the “adult in the room.” With his military background and baseline competence, this was true—but, as it turned out, this was more of a commentary on what came before. Adoring press coverage portrayed Kelly as a patriot who was taking on an impossible job with an impossible president out of love of country and out of desire to protect the nation from its own president.

It quickly became clear, however, as I wrote in October, that Kelly is a true Trumpist. Early on, he was caught on film appearing to grimace as Trump offered aid and comfort to white supremacists; it didn’t take too long for it to become clear that this was just Kelly’s default facial expression, and he had no compunctions about the president’s actual comments.

➤ The USA Today editorial board contends Trump squanders moral authority — for evangelical leaders:

What’s more puzzling is that leaders of the religious right feel it’s somehow necessary to shoehorn the president’s character into some kind of born-again template, a mold he has never fit and never will.

By the accounts of more than a dozen women, Trump is a serial sexual predator. On the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he boasted of grabbing women’s genitals. And in the 2006 encounter with Stormy Daniels, he allegedly betrayed his marriage vows to Melania shortly after the birth of his youngest son.

To this day, he bears false witness an average of several times a day and uses vulgarities to denigrate entire nations of people.

Yet Graham and Falwell say they believe Trump has morally changed over the years. “He’s not the same person now that he was back then,” Falwell told CNN. “That’s why evangelicals are so quick to forgive Donald Trump when he asked for forgiveness for things that happened 10, 15 years ago.”

Except he never really did. The Access Hollywood tape is about the only thing Trump has publicly apologized for. But The New York Times reported he has since questioned the tape’s authenticity.

On more than one occasion, the president has all but rejected a fundamental religious tenet: seeking Christ’s forgiveness. “I am not sure I (ever) have,” he said in 2015.

Evangelical leaders should dispense with the do-overs and simply acknowledge that Trump is what he is: a means to a political end.

➤ This pupper’s day got better thanks to a rescue team:

A dog stuck in the middle of a frozen creek was rescued after a firefighter who just happened to be passing by saw her on the ice all by her lonesome. pic.twitter.com/4oboNoEx4Y

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 7, 2018

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater be mostly cloudy with a high of sixteen. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 5:16 PM, for 10h 15m 39s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1497, the most famous bonfire of the vanities takes place in Florence: a burning of objects condemned by authorities as occasions of sin. The phrase usually refers to the bonfire of 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of objects such as cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy, on the Mardi Gras festival. Such bonfires were not invented by Savonarola, but had been a common accompaniment to the outdoor sermons of San Bernardino di Siena in the first half of the century.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Greg Gordon reports ‘Junk’ political news shared more widely by Trump backers, study finds:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater be mostly sunny with a high of fourteen. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 5:15 PM, for 10h 13m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6:10 PM, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1778, the United States of America and France enter into the  Treaty of Alliance: “a defensive alliance between France and the United States of America, formed in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, which promised mutual military support in case fighting should break out between French and British forces, as the result signing the previously concluded Treaty of Amity and Commerce.^[1] The alliance was planned to endure indefinitely into the future. Delegates of King Louis XVI of France and the Second Continental Congress, who represented the United States at this time, signed the two treaties along with a separate and secret clause dealing with future Spanish involvement, at the hôtel de Coislin (4, place de la Concorde) in Paris on February 6, 1778.^[2] ”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Nora Ellingsen, Quinta Jurecic, Sabrina McCubbin, Shannon Togawa Mercer, Benjamin Wittes write FBI Messages Show the Bureau’s Real Reaction to Trump Firing James Comey:

In a May 10 press conference… then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had “lost confidence in Director Comey” and that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” She stated that the president had “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision” and that the president believed “Director Comey was not up to the task…that he wasn’t the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI.”

Trump himself blasted Comey too, stating in an interview that the former director was “a showboat. He’s a grandstander” and that the FBI “has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil—less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.” A few days later, the New York Times reported that Trump had told Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office the day after Comey’s firing that Comey was a “nut job.”

Over the next few days, a wealth of evidence emerged to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI’s reaction to the Comey firing—but it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.

Within a few days of the firing, both current and former FBI officials began pushing back against the White House’s claims. Then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Comey “enjoyed broad support within the FBI” and that “the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”

(Emphasis added. Over 100 pages of documents show that Trump and Sanders simply lied when they said there was meaningful FBI turmoil or opposition to Comey.)

➤ Ben White reports ‘The president clearly set himself up’: Trump’s stock market miscalculation:

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump is learning a basic and painful lesson of Wall Street: Stocks also go down.

A global market sell-off that began Friday continued into Monday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping more than 1,500 in afternoon trading.

The big slide comes alongside growing concern that an economy juiced by a massive corporate tax cut, and already at full employment, could overheat and require forceful action from a new and untested Federal Reserve chairman — installed by Trump — to cool things down.

On top of concerns about rising inflation, the tax cuts are already increasing the federal government’s need to borrow and accelerating the date by which Congress must raise the federal debt limit. And as of Monday, there was still no plan in Washington to raise the limit and avoid a catastrophic default.

The result is that a president who tossed aside traditional presidential caution in cheerleading the stock market now stands poised to take the blame for any correction.

(Live by boosterism, perish by boosterism. No serious understanding of markets would have so personalized their movement as Trump did. )

➤ Conservative Michael Gerson contends The cowardice among Republicans is staggering:

According to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the declassified Devin Nunes memo — alleging FBI misconduct in the Russia investigation — is “not an indictment of the FBI, of the Department of Justice.” According to President Trump, the memo shows how leaders at the FBI “politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats” and “totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe.”

Both men are deluded or deceptive.

Releasing the memo — while suppressing a dissenting assessment from other members of the House Intelligence Committee — was clearly intended to demonstrate that the FBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. The effort ended in a pathetic fizzle. Nunes’s brief, amateurish documentfailed to demonstrate that FBI surveillance was triggered solely or mainly by a Democratic-funded dossier. But for cherry-picking above and beyond the call of duty, Nunes (R-­Calif.) deserves his own exhibit in the hackery hall of fame. This was a true innovation: an intelligence product created and released for the consumption of Fox News.

➤ Jennifer Rubin explains How you can tell Nunes shot himself in the foot:

What was evident is that the memo helped call attention to Carter Page’s Russia ties, a bad fact for a campaign claiming no “collusion” with Russia. Former Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) acknowledged, “So, this is the problem with Carter Page. He had a problem of connections with people that the FBI believed were Russian intelligence officials or were at least passing information back to Russian intelligence officials. … The FISA warrant was really targeted at somebody they knew to be — to have a relation with Russians. And so all of this spin about what it means for Trump or not I think is, well, overblown, candidly.”

Not even Gowdy would accept the premise that the FISA warrant affected the rest of the investigation: “So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’s meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.”

Even on Fox News, the designated Republican, Rep. Chris Stewart (Utah), backpedaled. “I think it would be a mistake for anyone to suggest the special counsel should not continue his work. This memo, frankly, has nothing at all to do with the special counsel.” You know, if you can’t find a booster to spin on Fox News, it’s probably not going well for Republicans.

➤ How ’bout an Aerial tour of San Francisco Cali Coast & Yosemite:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will bring afternoon snowfall with a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 5:14 PM, for 10h 10m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1849, the University of Wisconsin opens: “the University of Wisconsin began with 20 students led by Professor John W. Sterling. The first class was organized as a preparatory school in the first department of the University: a department of science, literature, and the arts. The university was initially housed at the Madison Female Academy building, which had been provided free of charge by the city. The course of study was English grammar; arithmetic; ancient and modern geography; elements of history; algebra; Caesar’s Commentaries; the Aeneid of Virgil (six books); Sallust; select orations of Cicero; Greek; the Anabasis of Xenophon; antiquities of Greece and Rome; penmanship, reading, composition and declamation. Also offered were book-keeping, geometry, and surveying. Tuition was “twenty dollars per scholar, per annum.” For a detailed recollection of early UW-Madison life, see the memoirs of Mrs. W.F. Allen [Source: History of the University of Wisconsin, Reuben Gold Thwaites, 1900]”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Alan Blinder reports What It May Take to Strike a Segregationist’s Name From a Georgia Bridge: Hundreds of Girl Scouts:

SAVANNAH, Ga. — The bridge that carries Highway 17 into Savannah is hard to miss: Its H-shaped towers are among the tallest structures for miles. But many people in the city would like never to lay eyes again on the green and white signs that say the span honors the segregationist former Gov. Eugene Talmadge.

“We would never take the worst parts of his speeches and put them up on big billboards over the bridge and say, ‘Well, welcome to Savannah, here’s what we stand for,’ ” said Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society, which is based here. “But having his name on that bridge is tantamount to doing so.”

Residents of Savannah have been trying for decades to get the state to rename it, only to see their efforts sputter and die in the back rooms and boardrooms of Atlanta, the capital.

But this year is different, and state lawmakers could vote in the coming weeks to give the bridge a less controversial name. And it all may be because of two new factors in the equation: a bit of legal detective work and the Girl Scouts, hundreds of whom are planning to descend on the Capitol this week to argue that the bridge should celebrate Juliette Gordon Low, the Savannah native who founded their organization.

➤ Charles Davis reports ‘Grassroots’ Media Company Admits Kremlin Ties After The Daily Beast Exposé:

A new media startup that billed itself as a “radical,” “grassroots” collective has admitted to being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian government following an exposé by The Daily Beast. Redfish, launched last fall, initially presented itself as an independent, community-based news organization, producing short video features on topics such as the economic crisis in Venezuela and the push for independence in Catalonia. Its work, however, soon began airing on RT, Moscow’s English-language news network, and a Daily Beast investigation revealed that the majority of its staff were longtime employees of the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus. In a statement following that investigation, Redfish conceded that it is in fact “a subsidiary of Ruptly, RT’s video agency.”

(Longtime employees of the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus – that’s a job not worth having, and a degraded & degrading life.)

➤ E.J. Dionne writes Nunes paves Trump’s road to autocracy:

Washington • The autocratic leader lies and then falsely charges his opponents with lying. He politicizes institutions that are supposed to be free of politics by falsely accusing his foes of politicizing them. He victimizes others by falsely claiming they are victimizing him.

The autocrat also counts on spineless politicians to cave in to his demands. And as they destroy governmental institutions at his bidding, they insist they are defending them.

In her classic 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt offered two observations that help us understand the assumptions and purposes behind the memo created by the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chair of the House Intelligence Committee turned propagandist for President Trump.

The totalitarian method of the 1920s and 30s, she noted, was to “dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.”

She also said this: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

Bear Arendt’s warnings in mind in pondering the Nunes screed whose sole purpose is to discredit an investigation that appears to be getting closer and closer to Trump.

A blatant McCarthyite hit piece that breaks little new ground, it cherry-picks from troves of information to feed a dangerous narrative: Even if special counsel Robert Mueller gets the goods on Trump — on Russian collusion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, or all three — the facts won’t matter because the inquiry was driven by partisanship.

The memo pretends that the most important actor in the case is Carter Page, a Trump adviser who had left the campaign by the time the events it describes transpired. The memo’s core assertion is that in a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to authorize surveillance on Page, the FBI relied the findings of former British intelligence official Christopher Steele without informing the court that Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, was paid by Democrats to collect bad stuff on Trump.

Actually, Page is a side player in the story, and his engagement with Russian spies was on the radar of intelligence agencies long before Steele prepared his now-famous dossier. Among the document’s many volumes of convenient omissions is that Fusion GPS was hired first by conservative foes of Trump.

➤ Philip Rucker and Robert Costa write Once the party of law and order, Republicans are now challenging it:

Republican leaders’ open defiance last week of the FBI over the release of a hotly disputed memo revealed how the GOP, which has long positioned itself as the party of law and order, has become an adversary of federal law enforcement as the party continues its quest to protect President Trump from the Russia investigation.

The FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies are now under concerted assault by Republicans, facing allegations of corruption and conspiracy that have quickly moved from the fringes of the right into the mainstream of the GOP.

Republicans in Congress insist that their efforts are meant to fulfill their duty to provide oversight of the executive branch and root out suspected bias. But critics say their campaign — to “cleanse” the FBI, in the words of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — has been clearly orchestrated to safeguard the president and undercut the Russia probe, which includes an examination of whether Trump or his associates have sought to obstruct justice.

“It’s an extraordinary moment,” said Steve Schmidt, a strategist on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns who opposes Trump. “The party has become completely unmoored from things that it held as close to sacred until very recently, including a fidelity to the country’s security institutions.”

(Trump sees law as his whim, and order as his advantage.)

➤ Charlie Sykes is The Conservative Radio Host Urging People to Break Out of Their Bubbles:

Wisconsinites know Sykes well – one can expect opinions are formed on his past work; for today it’s enough that he’s right about our present situation.