Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see snow in the morning on a cloudy day with a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 5:12 PM, for 10h 08m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1783, Britain’s King George III proclaims a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War (although as a practical matter Britain was defeated after Yorktown two years earlier). On this day in 1789, electors choose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Massimo Calabresi and Alana Abramson report Carter Page Touted Kremlin Contacts in 2013 Letter:

Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page bragged that he was an adviser to the Kremlin in a letter obtained by TIME that raises new questions about the extent of Page’s contacts with the Russian government over the years.

The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.

“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.

(Privilege to serve … the staff of the Kremlin.)

➤ Avi Selk reports Paul Ryan celebrated the tax cut with a tweet about a secretary saving $1.50 a week:

He’s been coaching other Republican lawmakers to sell the $1.5 trillion tax cut to voters, and telling people on Twitter to check their paychecks for wage hikes. The bill — which was deeply unpopular when it passed along party lines in December — is now breaking even in a new opinion poll.

So Saturday morning, by way of good news, Ryan’s Twitter account shared a story about a secretary taking home a cool $6 a month in tax savings.

Here is the passage in the Associated Press:

Julia Ketchum, a secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week. She didn’t think her pay would go up at all, let alone this soon. That adds up to $78 a year, which she said will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.

The tweet was deleted within hours, probably guaranteeing it will never be forgotten, and leaving people baffled as to why Ryan ever thought it would make a good advertisement for the tax plan’s supposed middle-class benefit.

It’s true that the bill is stingy to people at the bottom of the pay scale. In fact, the average tax break for someone making $25,400 a year or less happens to be $60 — the exact price of a Gold Star Costco membership.

(Ryan’s gained extraordinary prominence, as a vice presidential candidate, budget chairman, and now speaker of the House. He never had, though, any real testing before his rise from his mediocre hometown newspaper, and a cosseted man is a weak, and often thoughtless, one.)

➤ Rep. Adam Schiff writes a Memo to the Public: The President Wants to Make the FBI His Instrument:

What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice—an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president. Some have attempted to dismiss the president’s conduct as the actions of a new president, a free-wheeling businessman unaccustomed and unacquainted with the finer points of the office and government in general.

However, a year later, it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority. He told a reporter in December that he has “the absolute right” to do whatever he wants with “his” Department of Justice. The president has sought to put that statement into action from the very day he was inaugurated.

Early in his tenure, President Trump demanded former FBI Director James Comey’s “loyalty,” and fired him when he did not get it in the form of ending the Flynn investigation and removing the cloud of the Russia probe. He has repeatedly called for the reopening of the investigation into his 2016 opponent, Secretary Clinton. He publicly berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a step recommended by the Department’s professional ethics staff. Finally, just in the past week it was reported that the president asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the official responsible for overseeing the Special Counsel’s investigation, whether he was “on my team,” and then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe if he voted for the president.

Both the president’s public statements and his private actions make it clear that he is seeking nothing less than to destroy the institutions and norms that shield the Department of Justice from his direction. This is all the more pernicious considering the fact that his own campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Russians in their interference in the presidential election. He would take the reins of the FBI to protect himself and to deploy their immense investigative powers against his political opponents at will.

➤ Renato Mariotti contends The Memo Doesn’t Vindicate Trump. It’s More Proof of Obstruction.

The president himself said, after the memo’s release on Friday, that it “vindicates” him in the probe.

But it does no such thing. The memo from House Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes, fell well short of the hype. Its main argument is that when the Justice Department sought a warrant to wiretap the former Trump adviser Carter Page, it did not reveal that Christopher Steele — the author of a controversial opposition-research dossier — was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign through a law firm.

This is actually a fairly common — and rarely effective — argument made by defendants who seek to suppress evidence obtained by a warrant.

What might be the lasting legacy of the Nunes memo is how President Trump reacted to it. According to reports, Mr. Trump suggested “the memo might give him the justification to fire [the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein] — something about which Trump has privately mused — or make other changes at the Justice Department, which he had complained was not sufficiently loyal to him.”

In fact, Mr. Trump’s approval of the release of the memo and his comments that releasing it could make it easier for him to fire Mr. Rosenstein could help Robert Mueller, the special counsel, prove that Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, with a “corrupt” intent — in other words, the intent to wrongfully impede the administration of justice — as the law requires.

➤ The Rover Curiosity records a Martian Scenic Overlook:

Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada gives a descriptive tour of the Mars rover’s view in Gale Crater. The white-balanced scene looks back over the journey so far. The view from “Vera Rubin Ridge” looks back over buttes, dunes and other features along the route. To see where the rover is now, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/whe…

To aid geologists, colors in the image are white balanced so rocks appear the same color as the same rocks would on Earth. Why? Click here: https://go.nasa.gov/2Fs8tFd

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon snow showers and a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 5:11 PM, for 10h 05m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1690, the first paper money was issued in America: “Over three centuries ago on this day, Massachusetts printed America’s first paper money. Before creating bills, Americans used Pine Tree Shillings and other coins as their currency. After the British shutdown a Massachusetts mint, these coins were in short supply. So, in 1689, when the British wanted Americans to fight the French in Canada, there was no money available to pay the troops. Since the soldiers wouldn’t fight for free, the government thought it best to issue certificates to the troops in lieu of paying them with coins. A piece of paper would represent a coin’s worth and could later be redeemed for “real money.” ”

February 3, 1959 is the day the music died: “Bad winter weather and a bus breakdown prompted rock-and-roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper to rent a plane to continue on their “Winter Dance Party” tour. Icy roads and treacherous weather had nearly undermined their performances in Green Bay and Appleton that weekend, so after a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959, they boarded a four-seat airplane. The three performers and pilot Roger Peterson perished when the plane crashed about 1:00 AM on Monday, February 3rd (“The Day the Music Died,” according to singer Don McLean in his song “American Pie”) .”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ David Corn cautions While You Are Tweeting About the Nunes Memo, Russia Is Plotting Its Midterms Attack:

For the past week or so, the big kerfuffle dominating the news related to Russia has been over the memo—a classified memorandum drafted by the Republican staffers of the House Intelligence Committee that claims the FBI inappropriately used the now infamous Steele dossier in an application for a super-secret warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page. Donald Trump and his champions—including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the committee, and the other Republicans on the panel—want this memo publicly released, presumably because they believe it would undermine the FBI’s Russia investigation. Democrats on the committee contend that the memo cherry-picks facts and is misleading. The FBI and the Justice Department oppose its release, noting that such a disclosure would reveal important national security secrets. Others have noted that this is all a red herring; even if there was something fishy about this one warrant application—and there’s no telling if there was—that would have no bearing on the rest of the FBI’s investigation of Moscow meddling in the 2016 election and interactions between Trump associates and Russians.

But look at what just happened. I spent the opening of this article explaining this dust-up, rather than far more important recent developments related to the Russia scandal. And that’s the point. The Trump White House wants the politerati worked up over this sideshow. Consider these two other occurrences from this week. On Monday, Trump’s CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, told the BBC that Russia will “target” the midterm elections this year. The very same day, it was reported that the Trump administration will not implement the new sanctions on Russia that Congress passed last year in legislation that Trump begrudgingly signed into law. So here we have word that the US political system remains under threat from Vladimir Putin’s covert information warfare campaign and that the Trump administration has decided not to intensify sanctions that might deter Moscow from again subverting American democracy. Still, these significant events received a sliver of the coverage devoted to the tussle over #releasethememo.

A stunt has kicked aside substance. Not only do the memo shenanigans deflect attention from the intelligence committee’s main job—probing the scandal; they also keep the spotlight from shining on a profound national security concern: the continuing threat from Russia. It is not well known that the Moscow cyber assault on the 2016 elections went beyond the presidential campaign. Russian hackers also broke into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party outfit in charge of House races, and swiped and released key internal documents about some of the most important House races that year. This included the group’s strategy documents assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Democratic candidates and its confidential voter turn-out models. Moscow’s assault on the DCCC was an extensive operation that had an impact. In several House races, candidates used the leaked material to attack Democrats. (In primary contests, Democrats exploited the leaks against Democratic rivals. In the general election, Republicans did the same.) DCCC officials came to believe the dumps were a decisive factor in several races in which the Democrat lost.

➤ Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond contend China’s Surveillance State Should Scare Everyone:

Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.

When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before the police show up at your door.

This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: It may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.

➤ Adam K. Raymond offers A Super Bowl LII Glossary for the Uninitiated:

Gronk, G.O.A.T., dog masks — the million of Americans attending Super Bowl parties this weekend are bound to hear those terms and plenty of others that will be unfamiliar to people who don’t follow football.

…

We’re here to help. Here’s a short glossary of terms relevant to Super Bowl LII that will allow anyone to hold up their end of a conversation about horse punching or greasy poles [list follows].

➤ Matt Phillips reports Stocks Fall to End a Bad Week, and a Boom Begins to Look Shaky:

The immediate catalyst was the jobs report, which showed the strong United States economy might finally be translating into rising wages for American workers — a sign that higher inflation could be around the corner. But what is really worrying investors is that the fuel behind this stock market boom, namely cheap money from global central banks, may disappear sooner than they thought.

In recent weeks, the shift in sentiment has played out across the world’s largest financial markets. As stocks have sold off, Treasury yields have surged. The dollar has slumped.
“It’s a legitimate concern, when inflation spikes up a little bit, that people should evaluate how is this going to affect profits and how is this going to affect the Fed,” said Jonathan Golub, chief United States equity strategist at Credit Suisse. “The market is becoming more vigilant around these concerns, and that’s good and that’s healthy.”

➤ Climb Inside Thailand’s Three-Headed Elephant:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny skies with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:10 PM, for 10h 03m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.0% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, and so predicts we’ll have six more weeks of winter:

On this day in 1925, the ongoing 1925 serum run to Nome saves lives:

The 1925 serum run to Nome, also known as the Great Race of Mercy, was a transport of diphtheria antitoxin by dog sled relay across the U.S. territory of Alaska by 20 mushersand about 150 sled dogs 674 miles (1,085 km) in five and a half days, saving the small town of Nome and the surrounding communities from an incipient epidemic.

Both the mushers and their dogs were portrayed as heroes in the newly popular medium of radio, and received headlinecoverage in newspapers across the United States. Balto, the lead sled dog on the final stretch into Nome, became the most famous canine celebrity of the era after Rin Tin Tin, and his statue is a popular tourist attraction in New York City‘s Central Park. The publicity also helped spur an inoculation campaign in the U.S. that dramatically reduced the threat of the disease.

…

All participants in the dogsleds received letters of commendation from President Calvin Coolidge,^[10] and the Senate stopped work to recognize the event. Each musher during the first relay received a gold medal from the H. K. Mulford Company. The mayor of Los Angeles presented a bone-shaped key to the city to Balto in front of City Hall;^[10] silent-film actress Mary Pickford put a wreath around the canine’s neck.^[10] Poems and letters from children poured in, and spontaneous fundraising campaigns sprang up around the country.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Steve Peoples reports that the formerly libertarian, now Republican Koch brothers target Wisconsin senate, governor’s races:

The influential Koch brothers and their powerful donor network plan to pour money into Wisconsin this fall to keep Gov. Scott Walker in the statehouse and replace U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

The Koch network’s chief lieutenants renewed their vow this weekend to spend up to $400 million on politics and policy to shape November’s midterm elections nationwide.

That’s more than the combined resources spent by the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association and the Chamber of Commerce in the 2016 election cycle.

They outlined plans Monday to spend big on political advertising now through the end of July on as many as 14 key Senate races and 15 gubernatorial elections — including those in Wisconsin. Their goal: Flood the airwaves with political messaging early to help shape voters’ opinions long before the election season’s final months.

“We need to be on offense starting now,” said Emily Seidel, CEO of the Kochs’ political arm, Americans for Prosperity.

➤ The Washington Post editorial board writes Paul Ryan is tarnishing the House:

As we’ve said before, we are not in the business of opposing the release of information of potential public value. But if the Nunes memo were truly about fair congressional oversight of law enforcement, as Mr. Ryan claims, Republicans would allow the simultaneous release of a Democratic memo on the same subject. But they are not, though Mr. Ryan’s staff says the speaker supports releasing the Democratic memo after giving it more scrutiny. That leaves only unsettling possibilities for why Mr. Nunes, a longtime Trump ally, is pushing to disseminate his version as the president’s ire about the Russia investigation crests and speculation swirls about his desire to fire senior law enforcement officials, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. CNN reported Thursday that Mr. Trump believes the Nunes memo “could discredit the agency” by exposing “bias within the FBI’s top ranks.”

Mr. Ryan bears full responsibility for the deterioration of congressional oversight of intelligence operations. Once a bipartisan responsibility that lawmakers treated soberly — as they still do in the Senate — oversight under Mr. Nunes has become another front in Mr. Trump’s assault on the law enforcement institutions investigating the president and his associates. House Republicans are poisoning the committee’s relationship with the intelligence community and distracting from real issues demanding attention.

In all the noise around the memo, it is easy to lose sight of the scary truth that a hostile foreign government attempted to influence the 2016 election and shows every intention of trying again this year. You’d think Mr. Nunes’s committee would be alarmed by this threat to American democracy. Instead, Mr. Nunes, with Mr. Ryan’s aid and comfort, is helping Mr. Trump impede an investigation into these very issues. It is sad to see the speaker allow the House to be tarnished in this way.

➤ Pema Levy lists A Timeline of Jeff Sessions’ Recusal Violations (“And other instances where the attorney general inserted himself into matters involving the 2016 campaign”):

On March 2, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Session recused himself from any investigations into the 2016 presidential campaign. This left his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, in charge of the probe into Russian meddling in the election and the possibility of illegal coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign. Not only is Sessions prohibited from making decisions about the investigation, he is barred from responding to queries from Congress or the media about them. Yet despite his recusal, Sessions has found ways to wade into the investigation. In some instances, experts see a clear violation; in others, a series of improper comments and acts whose cumulative effect is that the attorney general is, in fact, a player in the Russia investigation.

Sessions has also promised, under oath, to recuse himself from any investigations into Hillary Clinton that arose during the heated 2016 election. As a key member of Trump’s campaign, which for months pushed the idea that Clinton should be imprisoned for various alleged crimes, Sessions said at his confirmation hearing that he would formally recuse himself from investigations into matters like Clinton’s private email server and family foundation—a promise his office says he intends to keep. But again, there are signs Sessions is meddling.

Sessions’ recusal in March nearly cost him his job. As the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller gets closer to Trump and his top aides, Sessions is under increasing pressure to protect Trump and his inner circle from the investigation. Despite his recusal, Sessions appears to be using his formal powers as the nation’s top law enforcement officer and his bully pulpit to shield the president by discrediting his own department’s investigations. As Republicans in Congress mount new attacks on Mueller’s probe, including accusations of bias by FBI investigators, Sessions’ actions and comments legitimize their claims.

Here’s a timeline of Sessions’ interference in investigations he’s recused from [list follows in article].

➤ Jason Schwartz reports Fox News hosts ramp up ‘deep state’ conspiracies:

As Fox News opinion hosts have grown increasingly conspiratorial in the past week — going to ever-greater lengths to defend President Donald Trump — other conservative commentators are expressing alarm at what they describe as a rising threat to both their movement and the country.

Those concerns seemed to come to a head Thursday night, when Fox host Sean Hannity was widely mocked for his logic-bending dismissal of The New York Times’ report that Trump had sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

But Hannity’s coverage was just part of a wider trend, observers say. For the past week, Fox News opinion hosts have seized on claims by some Republican lawmakers about a “secret society” at the FBI and “deep state actors” to fashion unproven narratives designed to protect Trump and delegitimize Mueller.

On Wednesday night, Hannity told viewers, “The constitutional violations are severe and historically unprecedented in this country. You have deep state actors using and abusing the powerful tools of intelligence we give them to protect this country.”

On Tuesday, Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs said, “It may be time to declare war outright against the deep state and clear out the rot in the upper levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.”

➤ Why do dogs have floppy ears?:

Good morning.

A new month begins in Whitewater with sunny skies and a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:08 PM, for 10h 00m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, the Whitewater Fire Department for a business meeting at 6:30 PM, and the Police & Fire Commission also at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1960, the Greensboro sit-ins begin:

On February 1, 1960, at 4:30pm, the four sat down at the lunch counter inside the Woolworth store at 132 South Elm Street in Greensboro.^[3] The men, later also known as the A&T Four or the Greensboro Four, had purchased toothpaste and other products from a desegregated counter at the store with no problems, and then were refused service at the store’s lunch counter when they each asked for a cup of coffee.^[2][8][9] Following store policy, staff refused to serve the black men at the “whites only” counter and store manager Clarence Harris asked them to leave.^[10] However, the four freshmen stayed until the store closed that night.

The next day, more than twenty black students, recruited from other campus groups, joined the sit-in. Students from Bennett College, a college for black women in Greensboro, also joined. White customers heckled the black students, who read books and studied to keep busy, while the lunch counter staff continued to refuse service.^[9]

Newspaper reporters and a TVfilmographer covered the second day, and others in the community learned of the protests. On the third day, more than 60 people came to the Woolworth store. A statement issued by Woolworth national headquarters said that the company would “abide by local custom” and maintain its segregation policy.^[9]

On the fourth day, more than 300 people took part. Organizers agreed to expand the sit-in protests to include the lunch counter at Greensboro’s Kress store.^[9]

As early as one week after the Greensboro sit-ins began, students in other North Carolina towns launched their own. Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, Charlotte, and out-of-state towns such as Lexington, Kentucky all saw protests.

The sit-in movement then spread to other Southern cities, including Richmond, Virginia and Nashville, Tennessee, where students of the Nashville Student Movement were trained by civil rights activist James Lawson and had already started the process when Greensboro occurred. Most of these protests were peaceful, but there were instances of violence.^[11] In Chattanooga, Tennessee, tensions rose between blacks and whites and fights broke out.^[12] In Jackson, Mississippi, students from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in on May 28, 1963, recounted in the autobiography of Anne Moody, a participant. In Coming of Age in Mississippi Moody describes their treatment from whites who were at the counter when they sat down, the formation of the mob in the store and how they managed finally to leave.^[13]

As the sit-ins continued, tensions grew in Greensboro. Students began a far-reaching boycott of stores with segregated lunch counters. Sales at the boycotted stores dropped by a third, leading their owners to abandon segregation policies.^[3] On Monday, July 25, 1960, after nearly $200,000 in losses ($1.7 million today), store manager Clarence Harris asked three black employees to change out of their work clothes and order a meal at the counter. They were, quietly, the first to be served at a Woolworth lunch counter.^[14] Most stores were soon desegregated, though in other Tennessee cities, such as Nashville and Jackson, Woolworth’s continued to be segregated until around 1965, despite many protests.^[9][15]

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Norman Eisen, Caroline Fredrickson and Noah Bookbinder contend Trump’s Saturday Night Massacre Is Happening Right Before Our Eyes (“The aim of the campaign against the Mueller investigation and the FBI is clear: Obstructing justice”):

The FBI issued an extraordinary statement on Wednesday, pushing back on the release of a partisan congressional memo alleging the bureau used improper evidence to obtain legal permission to surveil a Trump campaign adviser. We’ve never seen anything like it. “[T]he FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the bureau said. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

The memo, written by Congressman Devin Nunes and barreling toward public circulation at the president’s discretion, has already created a firestorm, and it is not even out yet. Nunes fired back at the FBI hours later, claiming, “It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counterintelligence investigation during an American political campaign.”

Let’s be clear about what’s happening here: This memo is the latest escalation in an eight-month effort to tarnish the Russia investigation that might be the most significant smear campaign against the executive branch since Joe McCarthy—only here, the effort is being led by the head of that branch himself. As the New York Times reported, the Nunes memo seems like a dagger aimed by President Trump at Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who is supervising the Russia probe for the Justice Department.
Republican huzzahs over Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment were still echoing when the opening salvo of this shocking campaign was launched: the claim that Mueller had disqualifying “conflicts.” Never mind that the Justice Department cleared Mueller of conflicts before he was appointed. Or that ethical standards do not remotely support disqualification over issues like Mueller’s professional acquaintance with James Comey, his employment at a firm that represented Trump associates, or even a long-ago dispute over the amount of fees Mueller owed at a Trump golf course. These meritless conflicts claims have continued to resurface like a game of whack-a-mole, popping up elsewhere after they are knocked down.

➤ Jo Becker, Mark Mazzetti, Matt Apuzzo, and Maggie Haberman report Mueller Zooms In on Trump Tower Cover Story:

What is already clear is that, as Mr. Trump’s aides and family members tried over 48 hours to manage one of most consequential crises of the young administration, the situation quickly degenerated into something of a circular firing squad. They protected their own interests, shifted blame and potentially left themselves — and the president — legally vulnerable.

The latest witness to be called for an interview about the episode was Mark Corallo, who served as a spokesman for Mr. Trump’s legal team before resigning in July. Mr. Corallo received an interview request last week from the special counsel and has agreed to the interview, according to three people with knowledge of the request.

Mr. Corallo is planning to tell Mr. Mueller about a previously undisclosed conference call with Mr. Trump and Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, according to the three people. Mr. Corallo planned to tell investigators that Ms. Hicks said during the call that emails written by Donald Trump Jr. before the Trump Tower meeting — in which the younger Mr. Trump said he was eager to receive political dirt about Mrs. Clinton from the Russians — “will never get out.” That left Mr. Corallo with concerns that Ms. Hicks could be contemplating obstructing justice, the people said.

➤ Moriah Balingit reports of forgotten Americans in ‘Why can’t I have my life back?’: In Puerto Rico, living and learning in the dark:

Hurricane Maria devastated one of the nation’s largest and poorest school systems, a district of about 347,000 students where nearly all qualified for free meals. Even now, the storm hampers the day-to-day operation of schools. By the time classes resumed after winter break, the island’s education department had decided to close 21 schools because of damage or flagging enrollment.

Of the 1,110 that remained open, nearly one-third had no power. More than 25,000 students had fled the island — many without their parents — in search of more stable schooling in the continental United States. Nearly 200 educators joined them, exacerbating a teacher shortage and leaving scores of students unsupervised during parts of the school day. Teachers struggle to get the basic resources they need to do their jobs, shelling out their own money for food when cafeterias run out and for projectors and air conditioners.

“It’s an injustice,” said Aida Díaz, president of one of Puerto Rico’s teachers unions. “We want to give [children] the best, but it’s impossible.”

➤ Jonathan Chait lists 4 New Trump Corruption Stories From the Last Day Alone:

Politico reported yesterday that Brenda Fitzgerald, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, purchased stock in Merck & Co., Bayer, Humana, and a tobacco company after taking her post last June. Politico quoted numerous ethics watchdogs expressing opposition to the conflicts of interest she took on by buying stock in firms affected by her work. Fitzgerald resigned today.

Also today, the Washington Post reports that Health and Human Services Secretary Ben Carson’s son, Ben Carson Jr., participated in his father’s work in ways that may have benefited his son’s businesses. The scandal would come as no surprise if you had read Alec MacGillis’s report on HUD from last August. MacGillis found Carson Jr. constantly hanging around and networking HUD projects in ways that implied some relation to his own businesses. And sure enough, HUD staffers privately expressed concern that he was inviting clients or potential clients to HUD events and “gave the appearance that the Secretary may be using his position for his son’s private gain.”

A report yesterday found that Trump’s infrastructure council is filled with business owners who stand to benefit from the policies Trump is advancing. For instance, Richard LeFrak, one of the developers on Trump’s council, has lobbied against flood-risk regulations that Trump has eliminated. The plan writ large would steer public funding toward privately owned infrastructure projects that would benefit the developers on Trump’s committee, as well as potentially members of his own family.

Meanwhile, the Palm Beach Post reports that Trump Realty is expanding its operations in southern Florida. The ongoing business by Trump’s business empire is a massive corruption risk, as Trump and his family can benefit from the publicity conferred by his public office, and stand to benefit by anybody who wants to curry favor throwing business their way. The whole problem has faded into the background to the degree that revelations that once would have counted as first-tier presidential scandals — Jimmy Carter was forced to sell his peanut farm to avoid having any pro-peanut bias affect his policies — have disappeared. One of Trump Realty’s agents tells the Post that she “is confident the recent tax law will further spur relocations from high-tax states in the Northeast to South Florida.” This was not an exposé of a reporter discovering that Trump stands to benefit from his tax law. It was a casual boast by the business’s manager to a journalist.

➤ Carrots, lots of ’em:

This monster machine is the ultimate carrot harvester pic.twitter.com/yJDdleojGX

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) February 1, 2018

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 16s of daytime. The moon is full. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1958, the United States enters the Space Age with the launch of Explorer 1 (after the launches in 1957 of two Soviet satellites). On this day in 1862, the 16th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “It would go on to fight in the battles of Shiloh, Corinth, Kennesaw Mountain, and Atlanta, and then participate in Sherman’s March to the Sea. About half of its members would die in the South.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Mira Rapp-Hooper describes The Cataclysm That Would Follow a ‘Bloody Nose’ Strike in North Korea (“H.R. McMaster’s broken rationale for confronting Kim Jong Un”):

Now that Kim has acquired nuclear weapons, a first strike by America against his regime should be a total non-starter. Yet the Trump administration has reportedly considered a “bloody nose” strike on North Korea’s military facilities to coerce Pyongyang, in hopes of punishing the regime with attacks on discrete defense facilities or platforms while blunting its military response. But it makes little sense for American war planners to assume a “limited” strike like this would stay limited. A U.S. operation may not achieve its objectives, and even if it does, it would still leave the decision of whether or not to retaliate up to Kim. The North Korean leader would make that decision based on his own beliefs about the strike once it took place, not based on American wishes for his response. If he did decide to hit back, the result could be the most calamitous U.S. conflict since World War II.

As a result, American alliances would likely suffer irreparable damage. Competitors like Russia and China would capitalize on the blunder to advance their own interests, and U.S. foreign policy would be consumed by the task of reconstruction for years. Jeffrey failed to acknowledge this horrific toll.

In addition to the ruinous human, financial, and political costs of U.S. military action against the North, it’s hard to see how Kim Jong Un could take the South and live to rule it. With America’s heavy troop presence and longstanding security guarantees with countries across the region, his expansive objectives would undermine his most central one—survival. He simply cannot take the South while holding the North.

➤ Nyshka Chandran reports The man who almost became ambassador to South Korea just warned about US plans for North Korea:

Reports first emerged last June that Cha, currently a Georgetown University professor and senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was set to be the U.S. ambassador to South Korea — a post that’s been vacant since Trump took office.

But over the weekend, the White House notified Cha that he was no longer being considered, the Financial Times reported this week. Trump’s team stopped returning Cha’s calls in December after the strategist made his concerns known about attacking the North, the FT continued, noting that Cha was reportedly asked whether he could help manage the evacuation of American citizens from South Korea.

➤ Stephen Stromberg describes Trump’s night of intense gaslighting:

“We have sought to restore the bonds of trust between our citizens and their government,” President Trump said Tuesday night in his first State of the Union address. Was this sarcasm?

This is the president who has fueled a hysterical smear campaign against the FBI for personal gain. He wants to and may soon release a memo with cherry-picked information alleging misconduct in the Justice Department in order to discredit a federal investigation into his associates. He singles out individual FBI officials for accusation and abuse on Twitter. He on a practically daily basis insists that the Russia investigation is based on a hoax, despite the intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that Russia attempted to sway the 2016 election. He insists he respects the professionals in the law enforcement and intelligence communities, until their professionalism clashes with his wishes.

This is the president who alleged, without evidence, that he really won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in California. He empaneled a commission designed to find “evidence” of widespread voter fraud — which only benefits Democrats, of course. To the chagrin of state officials across the country, the message was that Americans cannot trust their voting system.

➤ Greg Sargent writes Trump’s speech exposed Trumpism’s biggest and ugliest lies:

The first required Trump to make a deeply misleading case that the economy is doing far better now than when he took office. Trump hailed the jobs created on his watch, the companies that credited his tax plan with new jobs, the soaring stock market. But as Michael Grunwald shows, Trump cherry-picked good company announcements while conveniently forgetting about the ones that went bad (Carrier, anyone?); misrepresented who actually benefits from his tax cuts; and unleashed a whole string of distortions rooted in a refusal to acknowledge the actual state of the economy he inherited.

Even Trump’s efforts to tout his economic record as a boon to minorities, to show that the race mongers are falsely depicting his presidency as polarizing, accomplished the opposite goal. Trump boasted that the unemployment rate among African Americans is at a record low, but taking credit for this required airbrushing away its huge drop under Obama, thus furthering his racially-divisive narrative that his predecessor was a full-blown disaster for them. Similarly, when Trump talked about the American flag as a unifying symbol, he immediately undercut it by reminding us of his polarizing attacks on African American football players who protest racism.

On the second goal: Trump didn’t back off his immigration agenda, or the toxic ideas and rhetoric undergirding it, in the slightest. He merely tried to repackage those things as conciliatory. Trump called for a deal protecting the “dreamers” that would, he said, give concessions to both sides. But he reiterated his demand for large cuts to legal immigration, even as he rehashed his ugliest demagoguery about undocumented immigrants by blaming fictional open borders for crime and dissembling reprehensibly about the diversity visa lottery program and “chain migration.”

➤ Climb to the Top of Sri Lanka’s Fortress in the Sky:

In order to explore one of Sri Lanka’s most unique and ancient sites you will have to climb up—way up. Perched atop a rock plateau, 660 feet in the air, are the ruins of the 5th century fortress of King Kasyapa, known as Sigiriya. The large rock it sits on was formed from hardened volcanic lava dating back to prehistoric times, while the fortress is entirely surrounded by what are believed to be the world’s oldest landscape gardens. Today, Sigiriya is distinguished as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains the most visited attraction in Sri Lanka.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 55m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1948, a Hindu nationalist assassinates Mohandas Gandhi. On this day in 1866, 9th Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 9th Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Arkansas, including the Battle of Prairie Grove. It lost 191 enlisted men during service; 77 were killed and 114 died from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Eliot Cohen contends Americans Are Rising to This Historic Moment (“The commitment of ordinary citizens to democratic ideals is being tested each day—and its enduring strength is containing the damage of Trump’s presidency”):

A writer usually itches to rewrite any article that is more than a week old: I confess to no such temptation with my first article for The Atlantic, published a year ago. I stand by every word. I think now as I did then that Trump will not grow into his job, “because the problem is one of temperament and character;” I continue to think that to be associated with him “will be for all but the strongest characters, an exercise in moral self-destruction;” and most importantly, “There is nothing great about the America that Trump thinks he is going to make; but in the end, it is the greatness of America that will stop him.”

That last is the key point, and the one I find myself returning to, a year later. Trump himself is not an interesting human being. In Shakespearean terms, he is no Richard III, but rather the dumb, vicious, lecherous, and unsuccessful Cloten of Cymbeline. Nor is there anything particularly intriguing about the brown-nosing and spinelessness of his enablers among politicians and scribblers. They have no excuses, and when the end comes—and it will, be it in seven years, or three, or sooner than that—they will not have much in the way of reputations left to defend. Nor should they.

No, at the end of a year in which American global credibility and reputation has taken a hit from which it cannot fully recover, in which neo-Nazis have been assured by the leader of the Free World that there are some fine people among them, and in which the ethnic divisions of the United States have been exacerbated by a president who seemed to enjoy baiting hapless American citizens who hail from Puerto Rico and who agitated for the political prosecution of his defeated opponent in the last election, the vital signs of American democracy are surprisingly good.

(Cohen – who sees Trump’s harm quite clearly, yet is optimistic. Perhaps, but one can suggest reasonably that we’ll see far worse before Trump meets his political ruin.)

➤ Jay Rosen writes of Normalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer (“A conflict in the journalist’s code was created by a president wholly unfit for the job”):

If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that. 

This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal. 

What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a little.

➤ Franlin Foer describes The Plot Against America (“Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington”):

For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans—oil executives, Cold War spymasters—could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts; according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.

…

When Paul Manafort officially joined the Trump campaign, on March 28, 2016, he represented a danger not only to himself but to the political organization he would ultimately run. A lifetime of foreign adventures didn’t just contain scandalous stories, it evinced the character of a man who would very likely commandeer the campaign to serve his own interests, with little concern for the collective consequences.

Over the decades, Manafort had cut a trail of foreign money and influence into Washington, then built that trail into a superhighway. When it comes to serving the interests of the world’s autocrats, he’s been a great innovator. His indictment in October after investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleges money laundering, false statements, and other acts of personal corruption. (He has pleaded not guilty to all charges.) But Manafort’s role in Mueller’s broader narrative remains carefully guarded, and unknown to the public. And his personal corruption is less significant, ultimately, than his lifetime role as a corrupter of the American system. That he would be accused of helping a foreign power subvert American democracy is a fitting coda to his life’s story.

➤ Bret Stephens ponders The G.O.P.’s Bonfire of the Sanities:

Alas, [Sen. Ron] Johnson’s suspicions are only of a piece with other paranoid G.O.P. effusions. That includes the supposed loss of five months’ worth of texts between Page and Strzok, which on Tuesday President Trump called “one of the biggest stories in a long time” — until the bureau said they were recovering the texts on Thursday.

Or the contrived furor over former National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s “unmasking” of Trump team officials, who, it turned out, were trying to set up a dubious back channel to Russia without notifying the outgoing Obama administration.

Or the outlandish and swiftly refuted claim that the British government had spied on the Trump campaign.

Or the appalling falsehood, aggressively insinuated by Fox’s Sean Hannity, that Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was the victim of a political assassination in the summer of 2016.

Or, for that matter, the very idea that the F.B.I. is dedicated to destroying the Trump presidency. Recall this is the same bureau that, wittingly or not, probably did more than any other arm of government to create the Trump presidency in the first place, in part because disgruntled F.B.I. field agents were intent on forcing James Comey to reopen the Clinton email investigation 11 days before the election.

➤ It’s a Super Blue Blood Moon tomorrow (that’s astronomy with a marketing twist):

On Jan. 31, 2018, the a supermoon and lunar eclipse (blood moon) will occur. It also happens to be the second full moon of the month, known as the blue moon. The show starts just before dawn in the western United States. — When, Where and How to See it: https://www.space.com/39208-super-blu…

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:04 PM, for 9h 53m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1845, Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven. On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites fight in South Carolina in defense of the Union: “The 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fought a skirmish at the Combahee River on the coast of South Carolina, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fought another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, South Carolina.”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Ina Fried, Kim Hart, and David McCabe report Federal takeover of 5G wireless network raises significant concerns:

A Trump administration proposal to nationalize a portion of the nation’s wireless network in order to combat threats from China in 5G raises many technical, logistical and political concerns, including a fierce debate over the proper role of government in business.

The bottom line: The proposal calls for aggressive government involvement in the private wireless market, representing a significant shift in U.S. industrial policy that would hugely disrupt the business plans of America’s largest telecom and technology companies.

As first reported by Axios, a proposal circulated by Trump’s National Security Council proposes building a national 5G network in a chunk of airwaves, known as mid-band spectrum.

While the security of the wireless network and competition with China are both real threats, experts doubt the feasibility of this approach and question whether it would actually lead to a faster, more secure path to 5G connectivity.

(It’s just as likely that China’s being used as bogeyman to justify a Trump Administration proposal to nationalize an incipient next-generation communications network.)

➤ Murray Waas reports Trump Launched Campaign to Discredit Potential FBI Witnesses:

President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.

In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, recently fired FBI Director James Comey disclosed that he spoke contemporaneously with other senior bureau officials about potentially improper efforts by the president to curtail the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s efforts constituted obstruction of justice.

Not long after Comey’s Senate testimony, Trump hired John Dowd, a veteran criminal defense attorney, to represent him in matters related to Mueller’s investigation. Dowd warned Trump that the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion, according to people familiar with the matter.

In discussions with at least two senior White House officials, Trump repeated what Dowd had told him to emphasize why he and his supporters had to “fight back harder,” in the words of one of these officials.

In a brief conversation Friday afternoon, Dowd denied the accounts of administration officials contained in this story as “flat-out wrong,” but he also refused to discuss what details were incorrect. “My advice to the president is confidential,” he told Foreign Policy.

“You don’t know me,” Dowd added. “You don’t how I lawyer, and you don’t know what I communicated to the president and what I did not.”

➤ Neil MacFarquhar and Ivan Nechepurenko report  Russians Brave Icy Temperatures to Protest Putin and Election:

MOSCOW — Protesters across Russia braved icy temperatures on Sunday to demonstrate against the lack of choice in the March election that is virtually certain to see President Vladimir V. Putin chosen for a fourth term.

“What we are being offered right now are not elections, and we must not participate in them,” Yevgeny Roizman, the mayor of the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg and a rare elected official from an opposition party, told a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in protest.

The protests in scores of cities — from Vladivostok in the east to Kaliningrad in the west — were called by Aleksei A. Navalny, the charismatic, anticorruption opposition leader, after he was barred from running for the presidency because of legal problems that he said had been manufactured to prevent his candidacy.

“You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a recorded message urging protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the rallies were banned, to turn out. “Every additional year of Putin staying in power is one more year of decay.”

Attacking the government as thieves, he said: “How many more years will you keep getting a lower salary than you are due? For how many more years will your business receive less revenue than it is due?”

Mr. Navalny was detained before he reached the several thousand demonstrators gathered in Pushkin Square in central Moscow and other main avenues closer to the Kremlin. Video footage showed police officers, who over all were far more restrained than during previous demonstrations, tackling him and dragging him onto a bus.

➤ Gillian B. Wright contends Trump Misunderstands Jay-Z, and the Black Community:

Capitalism has worked out really well for Jay-Z. So well in fact, that he recently dedicated an entire song to promoting capitalism as a tool of black empowerment. But even with promises of lowered taxes, and financial incentives for the wealthy—things that a wealthy capitalist should in theory love— Sean “Jay-Z” Carter still doesn’t think that President Trump is doing that much good for the black community.

In an interview with the CNN* host Van Jones on Saturday, Jones brought up reports that Trump referred to a number of countries, including many in Africa, as “shithole countries” and then asked if it was okay  for Trump to “say terrible things but put money in our pockets.” Carter unequivocally said no, adding “it’s not about money at the end of the day. Money doesn’t equate to happiness. It doesn’t. That’s missing the whole point.”

Trump took umbrage at the remarks, tweeting, “Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!” As I’ve written before, Trump touting the black unemployment rate ignores some crucial context about the economy: First, the black unemployment rate has been dropping for the past eight years. Trump has only been president for one of them. Second, even at 6.8 percent, the black unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high as that of whites.

Trump’s response to Carter confirms precisely what the rapper was trying to say in the first place—that the president fundamentally misunderstands the aims of the black capitalism and the needs of the black community. Jay-Z, and many before him, have espoused capitalism and economic empowerment as a means to an end: racial equality. Being rich is a secondary benefit to the power, stability, and peace of mind that money can provide in a country that has forced blacks into poverty and segregation.

➤ Pow Surf 101 shows the beauty of nature and the beauty of snowboarding through nature:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. (“Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.”) On this day in 1959, Lombardi becomes Packers coach: “He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. ”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Hope Kirwan reports Western Wisconsin Led Nation In Farm Bankruptcies In 2017:

New federal court data shows the Western District of Wisconsin had the highest number of farm bankruptcies in the country last year.

The Western District had 28 Chapter 12 bankruptcy cases filed in 2017, a chapter specifically for family farmers or fishermen. The district includes 44 counties and covers more than half of the geographic area of the state.

The Eastern District of Wisconsin had 17 cases and the Minnesota District had 19 cases. There are 94 federal court districts in the United States.

“The increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is certainly an anomaly when you compare it to the other types of bankruptcies,” said Christopher Seelen, an Eau Claire attorney who represents creditors in bankruptcy court. “People seem to have jobs, and the economy seems to be going well for most folks. Unfortunately for some of these farmers who are suffering through these low grain prices, the economy is not going as well for them.”

(All those Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation grants & loans, eight years of bold declarations of being ‘open for business,’ and yet rural Wisconsin remains a struggling afterthought.)

➤ The editorial board of his district newspaper, the Fresno Bee, blasts how Rep. Devin Nunes, Trump’s stooge, attacks FBI:

Instead of taking Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election seriously and leading an impartial and bipartisan inquiry, Nunes has colluded with the White House. Last March, Nunes said he’d seen secret intelligence reports backing Trump’s claims that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” his offices, but it turned out the documents came from the administration.

The blowback forced Nunes to step away from the Russia investigation. But he never fully recused himself and after the Republican-controlled House Ethics Committee in December cleared him of disclosing classified information, he raised his profile again.

Now, he’s being celebrated in Trumpworld with the four-page memo that accuses the FBI of political bias and misdeeds. Drafted by Nunes staffers, it apparently summarizes classified material and alleges abuse of the surveillance process by the FBI and Justice Department to target the Trump campaign. Conservative media and some Republicans in Congress are calling for it to be released publicly and using it to call for Mueller’s investigation to be shut down.

There are reasons to be very skeptical of this memo. The FBI hasn’t been sent a copy or given a chance to respond. Democrats who have seen it, including Rep. Adam Schiff of Burbank, say it’s full of inaccuracies and innuendo. And the social media campaign #ReleaseTheMemo may be promoted by Russian-linked bots, just as during the 2016 campaign.

(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)

➤ Dana Milbank contends Republicans redefine morality as whatever Trump does:

New evidence suggests that the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way — men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not — except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.

In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).

…

No doubt some of those Republicans now condoning Trump’s behavior will give the standard rebuttal: What about the Clintons? Well, Quinnipiac didn’t poll nationally during the Clinton presidency, but Gallup, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999, asked a similar question. The number of Republicans back then saying Clinton did not provide good moral leadership, 91 percent, was similar to the 96 percent of Democrats who say Trump does not provide moral leadership today. The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.

The triumph of partisanship over morality starts at the top. Franklin Graham excused Trump’s alleged sexual encounter, and Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that Trump gets a “mulligan” — a do-over — for his behavior.

Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017 — a time in which Trump said there were “very fine people” among a march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. (This month, as Trump was whipping up loathing of the “fake news” media, a young man was arrested for threatening to gun down CNN journalists.)

➤ Jordan Bhatt reports Donald Trump tells Theresa May he won’t visit the UK unless she bans protests:

Donald Trump is refusing to visit the UK unless Theresa May can ensure that he is not met with protests.

Bloomberg revealed that Trump complained in a phone call to May about the “negative coverage” he has received in the British press.

May told the US president that that was how the UK media operated and she could do little to change it.

Trump went on to say that he would not visit the UK unless there were guarantees that he would not be met with protests.

[British] Advisers who had been listening to the phone call are reported to have been “astonished” at the demands.

(In effect, Trump insists that he will not visit Britain unless the British prime minister turns her country into a dictatorship on his behalf.)

➤ The Naked Mole Rat Is One of the Weirdest Creatures Out There:

Naked mole rats feel no pain. They’re exceptionally long-lived. They frequently enter reversible comas, and a single queen mole rat rules over her colony with totalitarian authority. They can also survive without oxygen for extended periods of time—a feat that almost no other animal can accomplish. In this episode of “Animalism,” Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, explains why the naked mole rat is one of the strangest animals in the kingdom..