Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time: “after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City. Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accomodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished. On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government. [Source: Wiskonsan Enquirer, Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, 1838]”

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Gerson, a religious conservative, considers The Religious Right’s Scary, Judgmental Old Men:

….On sexual harassment, our country is now in a much better ethical place. And how we got here is instructive. Conservatives have sometimes predicted that moral relativism would render Americans broadly incapable of moral judgment. But people, at some deep level, know that rules and norms are needed. They understand that character — rooted in empathy and respect for the rights and dignity of others — is essential in every realm of life, including the workplace.

And where did this urgent assertion of moral principle come from? Not from the advocates of “family values.” On the contrary, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family (now under much better management), chose to side with GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama against his highly credible accusers. “I have been dismayed and troubled,” Dobson said, “about the way he and his wife Kayla have been personally attacked by the Washington establishment.”

It is as if Dobson set out to justify every feminist critique of the religious right. Instead of standing against injustice and exploitation — as the Christian gospel demands — Dobson sided with patriarchal oppression in the cause of political power. This is beyond hypocrisy. It is the solidarity of scary, judgmental old men. It is the ideology of white male dominance dressed up as religion.

This is how low some religious conservatives have sunk: They have left me sounding like an English professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Conservatives need to be clear and honest in this circumstance. The strong, moral commitment to the dignity of women and children recently asserting itself in our common life has mainly come from feminism, not the “family values” movement. In this case, religious conservatives have largely been bystanders or obstacles. This indicates a group of people for whom the dignity of girls and women has become secondary to other political goals.

We are a nation with vast resources of moral renewal. It is a shame and a scandal that so many religious conservatives have made themselves irrelevant to that task.

(These religious conservatives may have abandoned their responsibilities; there are many others of us who are religious, in opposition and in resistance, who will hold fast.)

Jim McDermott contends (rightly, to my mind) There’s no problem with praying after a mass shooting—but what does that prayer look like?:

….When we offer “thoughts and prayers,” the commitment we are making is both to ask God to help and to take some time to listen for his suggestions as how we might contribute to that, or his point of view on what is going on.

If I say I will offer thoughts and prayers but my own thoughts don’t change or grow in any way, if the process of prayer over time leads to nothing new, no fresh choices or insight, the fact is that I am missing something. Prayer is not supposed to be a substitute for action, but a means by which we learn the right actions to take.

(We are called to action.)

Sharon LaFraniere, Maggie Haberman, and Peter Baker report Jared Kushner’s Vast Duties, and Visibility in White House, Shrink:

WASHINGTON — At a senior staff meeting early in President Trump’s tenure, Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, posed a simple question to Jared Kushner: What would his newly created Office of American Innovation do?

Mr. Kushner brushed him off, according to people privy to the exchange. Given that he and his top lieutenants were paid little or nothing, Mr. Kushner asked, “What do you care?” He emphasized his point with an expletive.

“O.K.,” Mr. Priebus replied. “You do whatever you want.”

Few in the opening days of the Trump administration dared to challenge Mr. Kushner’s power to design his job or steer the direction of the White House as he saw fit. But 10 months after being given free rein to tackle everything from the federal government’s outdated technology to peace in the Middle East, the do-whatever-you-want stage of Mr. Kushner’s tenure is over.

Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who had been in seemingly every meeting and every photograph, has lately disappeared from public view and, according to some colleagues, taken on a more limited role behind the scenes. He is still forging ahead on a plan to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a goal that has eluded presidents and diplomats for generations, and he has been credited with focusing attention on the government’s technological needs. But he is no longer seen as the primary presidential consigliere with the limitless portfolio….

(A funny exchange between Priebus and Kushner: Priebus is stupid enough to think his question would matter within the Trump Administration, and Kushner arrogant enough to think it wouldn’t matter outside the Trump Administration.)

Christopher Ingraham writes How Americans lost the stars and how we might be able to get them back:

The United States is poised to get its first Dark Sky Reserve under the pristine nighttime skies of central Idaho. Pending approval from the International Dark-Sky Association, the designation would recognize the region’s clear skies, virtually untouched by light pollution, as “possessing an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment.”

If you’ve lived in or near cities most of your life and have never seen a truly dark sky you may not understand why anyone would bother with this. The night is dark, and dark is dark wherever you are, right?

Not exactly. The best way to explain what the Idaho Dark Sky Reserve backers want to preserve is to show it visually. Below are two photographs: on the left, a shot of the night skies in Washington, D.C. On the right, the sky above Idaho’s White Cloud mountains, which would make up part of the proposed reserve.

Lost in Light shows how light pollution affects one’s view of the night sky:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 23m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1783, the British evacuate New York City after the end of the Revolution: “Evacuation Day on November 25 marks the day in 1783 when British troops departed from New York City on Manhattan Island, after the end of the American Revolutionary War. After this British Army evacuation, General George Washington triumphantly led the Continental Army from his former headquarters, north of the city, across the Harlem River south down Manhattan through the town to The Battery at the foot of Broadway.”

On this day in 1863, at the Battle of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga, Tennessee, “[f]ourteen Wisconsin units — seven Wisconsin Infantry regiments and seven Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries participated in breaking the siege at Chattanooga. The 15th and 24th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were among the forces that charged up Missionary Ridge, broke through the Confederate ranks, and seized the strategic location on November 25.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ryan Lizza reports A Russian Journalist Explains How the Kremlin Instructed Him to Cover the 2016 Election:

On a recent Saturday in November, Dimitri Skorobutov, a former editor at Russia’s largest state media company, sat in a bar in Maastricht, a college town in the Netherlands, with journalists from around the world and discussed covering Donald Trump. Skorobutov opened a packet of documents and explained that they were planning guides from Russian state media that showed how the Kremlin wanted the 2016 U.S. Presidential election covered.

Among the journalists, Skorobutov’s perspective was unique. Aside from Fox News, no network worked as hard as Rossiya, as Russian state TV is called, to boost Donald Trump and denigrate Hillary Clinton. Skorobutov, who was fired from his job after a dispute with a colleague that ended in a physical altercation, went public with his story of how Russian state media works, in June, talking to the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Radio Liberty. The organizers of the Maastricht conference learned of his story and invited him to speak. He flipped through his pages and pointed to the coverage guide for August 9, 2016, when Clinton stumbled while climbing some steps. The Kremlin wanted to play the story up big….

As is often the case with state censorship, the workings of Kremlin-controlled media, as Skorobutov described them, were far more subtle than is popularly imagined. He described a system that depended on a news staff that knew what issues to avoid and what issues to highlight rather than one that had every decision dictated to it. “We knew what is allowed or forbidden to broadcast,” he explained. Any event that included Putin or the Russian Prime Minister “must be broadcast,” while events such as “terroristic attacks, airplane crashes, arrests of politicians and officials” had to be approved by the news director or his deputy. He offered a list of embargoed subjects: “critique of the State, coming from inside or outside of Russia; all kinds of social protests, strikes, discontent of people and so on; political protests and opposition leaders, especially Alexey Navalny,” an anti-corruption figure despised by the Kremlin. Skorobutov said that he overcame censorship rules and convinced his network to cover stories only twice: for a story about a protest against the construction of a Siberian chemical plant and for one about the food poisoning of children at a kindergarten….

Tom Phillips and James Ball report Twitter Has Suspended Another 45 Suspected Propaganda Accounts After They Were Flagged By BuzzFeed News:

BuzzFeed News has uncovered a new network of suspected Twitter propaganda accounts – sharing messages about Brexit, Donald Trump, and Angela Merkel – that have close connections to the Russian-linked bot accounts identified by the social media platform in its evidence to the US Congress.

The 45 suspect accounts were uncovered through basic analysis of those that interacted or retweeted accounts cited by Twitter to Congress, yet none of them appeared on the company’s list.

The relative ease of discovery raises serious questions as to just how many Russian-linked bots may still be active on Twitter, how the company identifies and removes such accounts, and whether its process for identifying accounts for its evidence was inadequate.

Until BuzzFeed News approached Twitter on Tuesday afternoon with details of the accounts, they all remained active on the platform, though dormant. But within 24 hours, all 45 had been suspended….

Monika Bauerlein reports Journalism Is Imploding Just When We Need It Most (“But we may have one last shot at a reset”):

One of the few bright spots this past year was supposed to be the revival of journalism. And to be sure, it’s been a great time for muckraking, with newsrooms bringing home scoop after scoop on the Trump administration. Subscriptions to everything from the New York Times to Mother Jones are up. And for the first time in decades, trust in news media is rising too: Today, 54 percent of the public have confidence in journalists to tell the truth, while only 36 percent trust the president.

So: Will Donald Trump, perhaps the most anti-journalism president in modern times, actually end up saving journalism?

Here’s where the story turns more complicated. Look at this picture of newspaper circulation nationwide:

No “Trump bump” there. As a regional newspaper editor recently told me, “I showed that graph to our newsroom and said: If that line keeps going, there’s no one left working here in 10 years.” Right after that I watched a presentation on news robots—algorithms that can put together credible stories with stunningly little help from humans. It’s not at all hard to imagine newsrooms populated largely by artificial intelligence a few years hence.

And it’s not just legacy shops that are imploding. Virtually every news organization in America has seen its audience decline (and in some cases crater) since the record numbers of last winter. Some blame the Google and Facebook algorithms (could real news getting caught up in the fight against the fake stuff?). Others speculate that readers and viewers are simply tiring of the 24/7 onslaught of crazy….

But then Donald Trump came along and did the one thing that could reverse this spiral: He redrew the battle lines. He brutally humiliated reporters (especially women) who covered the campaign. He cheered his surrogates as they insisted on “alternative facts” and cast the press as “the enemy of the people.” He joked with Vladimir Putin, under whose government journalists keep mysteriously dying, about journalists being spies. Like authoritarian figures the world over, the only kind of coverage he tolerated was Hannity-style fawning.

When Trump lashed out at “fake news,” when Steve Bannon called reporters “the enemy of the people,” when a Congressional candidate body-slammed a reporter, they asked Americans to take sides—with them, or with a free, fact-oriented press. And, remarkably, a majority is coming down on the side of journalism….

(Note for Whitewater : Journalism, professional or its crude imitation, fails locally when it’s no more than stenography or boosterism. It has no future.)

Gardiner Harris reports Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves:

WASHINGTON — Of all the State Department employees who might have been vulnerable in the staff reductions that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has initiated as he reshapes the department, the one person who seemed least likely to be a target was the chief of security, Bill A. Miller.

Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state.

But in his first nine months in office, Mr. Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him, according to several former top officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Finally, Mr. Miller, the acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security, was forced to cite the law’s requirement that he be allowed to speak to Mr. Tillerson.

Mr. Miller got just five minutes with the secretary of state, the former officials said. Afterward, Mr. Miller, a career Foreign Service officer, was pushed out, joining a parade of dismissals and early retirements that has decimated the State Department’s senior ranks. Mr. Miller declined to comment….

Frontline considers Child Hunger in America:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 9h 25m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1971, a man calling himself ‘Dan Cooper,’ and popularized in the media as D.B. Cooper,  hijacked a “Boeing 727 aircraft in Washington, on November 24, 1971. Utilizing knowledge that was virtually unique to the CIA, he escaped by parachute with over a million dollars at current values. A massive search failed to find any trace. After decades of fruitless inquiries, the lead investigators began to publicly suggest Cooper had been killed and all physical evidence lost in the wilderness, although the FBI nonetheless continued the hunt for Cooper until 2016.”

On this day in 1959, I-90 opens to traffic: “Interstate 90 opened to traffic between Janesville and Beloit. Work was temporarily halted north of Janesville as the exact route was not yet determined and property not yet acquired.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael S. Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo, and Maggie Haberman report A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller:

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case, an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating such a deal.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.

The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.

Still, the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating….

(The New York Times, above, first reported this story. Shortly afterward, the Washington Post confirmed the termination of defense cooperation between Flynn’s attoneys and Trump’s legal team. See from Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman, Flynn’s lawyer shuts down communications with Trump’s team, a sign he may be cooperating with Mueller probe.)

Meanwhile, of Congressional probes, Mary Clarke Jalonick reports Congressional Russia probes likely to head into 2018:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Republicans are hoping lawmakers will soon wrap up investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election that have dragged on for most of the year. But with new details in the probe emerging almost daily, that seems unlikely.

Three congressional committees are investigating Russian interference and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign was in any way involved. The panels have obtained thousands of pages of documents from Trump’s campaign and other officials, and have done dozens of interviews.

The probes are separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller can prosecute for criminal activity, while Congress can only lay out findings, publicize any perceived wrongdoing and pass legislation to try to keep problems from happening again. If any committee finds evidence of criminal activity, it must refer the matter to Mueller.

All three committees have focused on a June 2016 meeting that Trump campaign officials held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and others. They are also looking into outreach by several other Russians to the campaign, including involvement of George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this month to lying to the FBI as part of Mueller’s probe. New threads continue to emerge, such as a recent revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was messaging with WikiLeaks, the website that leaked emails from top Democratic officials during the campaign….

Anna Nemtsova reports An Arrest in France Freaks Out the Kremlin Kleptocracy:

MOSCOW—He was one of Russia’s untouchables: the country’s 21st richest man, a senator in the upper chamber of parliament. He is part of the circle of businessmen known for their loyalty to President Vladimir Putin and the benefits they’ve reaped as a result, a billionaire member of Putin’s United Russia party who has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in important state projects to curry favor.

Such “pocket oligarchs” earn official status, even diplomatic immunity when they travel. And Suleiman Karimov, 51, reportedly has a Russian diplomatic passport. But according to the Russian press, when he landed in France earlier this week he was on a private trip, and didn’t bring it.

Then, almost as soon he got off the plane in Nice, he got arrested for alleged tax evasion and money laundering. And the vision of Karimov behind bars splashed in the Russian press shocked the country’s elite. Many of them, like Karimov, have gotten used to keeping their fortunes, their luxury properties, their yachts, and indeed their families abroad….

Olga Proskurina, who has been covering Russian business news as an independent observer since 1992, keeps a close eye on Karimov and many other Russian businessmen and officials enjoying their lives on the south of France.

“More than 350 Russian millionaires and eight billionaires own properties in Monaco and on the French Riviera,” says Proskurina. “Their real life is abroad, so they come to Russia just to make money, creating all sorts of schemes to cover up their true deals.”

Both liberal and conservative experts believe that Russians keep around $1 trillion abroad in offshore banks accounts.

“Karimov’s case made many in the elite concerned, as he seemed to be safe with his Russian diplomatic immunity,” Proskurina noted….

(Putin presides over an oligarchy of lies and corruption, where lies and corruption are the very least of his own wrongs.)

Peter Stone And Greg Gordon report an Exclusive: Manafort flight records show deeper Kremlin ties than previously known:

Good morning.

Thanksgiving in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 27m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1889, “44-year-old wild-haired inventor named Louis Glass installed in a corner of the bar [at 303 Sutter Street] his newest-fangled contraption: a coin-operated Edison Class M electric phonograph fitted inside a beautiful oak cabinet. Requiring a nickel to play and having four stethoscope-like listening tubes snaking out, Glass’s creation was met with curious glances and willing customers. This was the world’s first jukebox.”

On this day in 1909, a Wisconsin man goes on trial: “A.E. Graham of Janesville was put on trial for selling oleo as butter. Oleo, an early form of margarine, was outlawed in the dairy state of Wisconsin. On January 27, 1910, he was found guilty in federal court and sentenced to 18 months in Fort Leavenworth Prison.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Jeff Pegues reports Trump Jr. met with man with close ties to Kremlin:

CBS News has confirmed that Donald Trump Jr. met with Alexander Torshin – a man with close ties to the Kremlin — at an NRA event in May 2016. Torshin had been trying to set up a meeting with then-candidate Donald Trump but ended up being introduced to Mr. Trump’s son.

A source familiar with the meeting says the two men were introduced to each other by a third party and that the conversation only last about two or three minutes. The source says the conversation centered on the men’s mutual interest in firearms and, as far as the source could recollect, there was no discussion of the campaign.

The meeting prompted attention last week when the Senate Judiciary Committeefired off a letter to Jared Kushner and his attorney scolding them for not handing over documents about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite.”  As CBS News reported last Friday, that “dinner invite” came in the form of a lengthy email from an intermediary who said that Torshin wanted to set up a meeting with Mr. Trump and that he was interested in setting up a meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.  The email was sent to top Trump campaign officials including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, campaign official Rick Gates and eventually Jared Kushner who is the president’s son-in-law. Kushner’s attorney says his client said to “pass on this” and warned campaign officials to “decline such meetings.”  But in the end Donald Trump Jr. was introduced to Torshin anyway….

Matthew DeFour reports UW-Madison dean acknowledges failure to create safe environment:

The dean of UW-Madison’s College of Letters & Science acknowledged this week a failure to provide a safe environment in the wake of a Wisconsin State Journal report on a culture of persistent sexual harassment in a university department.

One of the women who spoke to the State Journal also wrote an open letter to UW-Madison leadership Tuesday, saying her efforts to report the behavior of one professor were met with skepticism from the department’s head and warnings from the university’s legal department that she would be on her own if she were sued by the professor for defamation.

“Due process cannot be a justification for inaction or a barrier to clear and confidential reporting options and tangible whistleblower protection,” former graduate student and current administrator of the art history department Clare Christoph wrote. “Without these, campus assurances that sexual harassment will not be tolerated will continue to be meaningless and women who experience this demoralizing and damaging behavior will not feel safe coming forward”….

(There should be – and so will be – no yielding on similar concerns in Whitewater.)

The Committee to Investigate Russia notes a New Book Reveals More On Russia Dossier And British Spy Behind It:

Karin Bruillard writes Here’s the deal with all those turkeys terrorizing the suburbs:

Wild turkeys are causing troubles across the American suburbs.

The birds of late have been accused of cracking roof tiles outside Sacramento, dangerously disrupting traffic in western New York and “terrorizing” residents near Akron, Ohio. Reports of turkey aggression in the Boston area have spiked in the past three years, forcing authorities to use lethal force at least five times, the Associated Press found. When the Cambridge, Mass., city council took up the matter recently, one member told of a turkey that chased a child and her dog outside church, and another recounted coming face-to-beak with a bird outside a community gathering where the large fowl had been discussed….

If turkey-human conflicts seem to be increasing, Chamberlain and Hatfield argue, it’s because urban and suburban birds are not hunted and so do not view humans as threats. Also, turkeys are generalists that can get by quite nicely so long as they have trees to roost in at night and space to strut — particularly in the spring, when males woo females with a show that requires a sizable stage.

“They want open areas. Well, lawns and golf courses? All of these are great open spots for wild turkeys,” Hatfield said. “Suburban areas are pretty good habitat.”

Humans have changed turkeys more than we may realize:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:25 PM for 9h 29m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 14.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1963, Pres. Kennedy is assassinated while riding in a Dallas motorcade. On this day in 1935, the China Clipper (NC14716) makes the first trans-Pacific airmail delivery,”via via Honolulu, Midway Island, Wake Island, and Guam, and deliver[ing] over 110,000 pieces of mail.”

Recommended for reading in full – 

Luke Harding relates The Hidden History of Trump’s First Trip to Moscow (“In 1987, a young real estate developer traveled to the Soviet Union. The KGB almost certainly made the trip happen):

Trump’s first visit to Soviet Moscow in 1987 looks, with hindsight, to be part of a pattern. The dossier by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele asserts that the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for “at least five years” before his stunning victory in the 2016 US presidential election. This would take us back to around 2011 or 2012.

In fact, the Soviet Union was interested in him too, three decades earlier. The top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged his 1987 Moscow visit. With assistance from the KGB. It took place while Kryuchkov was seeking to improve the KGB’s operational techniques in one particular and sensitive area. The spy chief wanted KGB staff abroad to recruit more Americans….

(Trump was an organ grinder’s monkey even before Putin became the organ grinder.)

Nicholas Fandos reports He’s a Member of Congress. The Kremlin Likes Him So Much It Gave Him a Code Name:

WASHINGTON — For two decades, Representative Dana Rohrabacher has been of value to the Kremlin, so valuable in recent years that the F.B.I. warned him in 2012 that Russia regarded him as an intelligence source worthy of a Kremlin code name.

The following year, the California Republican became even more valuable, assuming the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee that oversees Russia policy. He sailed to re-election again and again, even as he developed ties to Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.

Then came President Trump.

As revelations of Russia’s campaign to influence American politics consume Washington, Mr. Rohrabacher, 70, who had no known role in the Trump election campaign, has come under political and investigative scrutiny. The F.B.I. and the Senate Intelligence Committee are each seeking to interview him about an August meeting with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, Mr. Rohrabacher said. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is said to be interested in a meeting he had last year with Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s short-lived national security adviser….

(So reprehensible is he, that Rohrabacher’s more a true fifth columnist than even a fellow traveler.)

Alice Ollstein reports Trump May Tap Pro-Gerrymandering Professor To Run The 2020 Census:

The 2020 U.S. Census will determine which states gain or lose electoral power for years to come, and President Donald Trump is leaning towards appointing a pro-gerrymandering professor with no government experience to help lead the effort.

Politico reported Tuesday that Trump may soon tap Thomas Brunell, a political science professor at the University of Texas at Dallas who has no background in statistics, for a powerful deputy position that doesn’t require congressional approval.

He authored a 2008 book titled Competitive Elections are Bad for America.

The position has historically been held by a career civil servant who has served many years in the Census Bureau….

(Trump’s great effort in ’18 and beyond will be attempts to suppress the vote, and later to distort the decennial census to favor pro-Trump states and constituencies.)

Adam Serwer writes of  The Nationalist’s Delusion:

….During the final few weeks of the campaign, I asked dozens of Trump supporters about their candidate’s remarks regarding Muslims and people of color. I wanted to understand how these average Republicans—those who would never read the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer or go to a Klan rally at a Confederate statue—had nevertheless embraced someone who demonized religious and ethnic minorities. What I found was that Trump embodied his supporters’ most profound beliefs—combining an insistence that discriminatory policies were necessary with vehement denials that his policies would discriminate and absolute outrage that the question would even be asked.

It was not just Trump’s supporters who were in denial about what they were voting for, but Americans across the political spectrum, who, as had been the case with those who had backed Duke, searched desperately for any alternative explanation—outsourcing, anti-Washington anger, economic anxiety—to the one staring them in the face. The frequent postelection media expeditions to Trump country to see whether the fever has broken, or whether Trump’s most ardent supporters have changed their minds, are a direct outgrowth of this mistake. These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of….

(Serwer sees the so-called base of Trump’s support for what it is. America has seen other vile factions, from Know Nothings to Confederates to the Klan to the Bund. Our people have overcome them all, and will overcome this present challenge.)

Ronan Farrow reports Harvey Weinstein’s Secret Settlements (“The mogul used money from his brother and elaborate legal agreements to hide allegations of predation for decades”):

On April 20, 2015, the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez sat in an office in midtown Manhattan with an eighteen-page legal agreement in front of her. She had been advised by her attorney that signing the agreement was the best thing for her and her family. In exchange for a million-dollar payment from Harvey Weinstein, Gutierrez would agree never to talk publicly about an incident during which Weinstein groped her breasts and tried to stick his hand up her skirt.

“I didn’t even understand almost what I was doing with all those papers,” she told me, in her first interview discussing her settlement. “I was really disoriented. My English was very bad. All of the words in that agreement were super difficult to understand. I guess even now I can’t really comprehend everything.” She recalled that, across the table, Weinstein’s attorney was trembling visibly as she picked up the pen. “I saw him shaking and I realized how big this was. But then I thought I needed to support my mom and brother and how my life was being destroyed, and I did it,” she told me. “The moment I did it, I really felt it was wrong.”

Weinstein used nondisclosure agreements like the one Gutierrez signed to evade accountability for claims of sexual harassment and assault for at least twenty years. He used these kinds of agreements with employees, business partners, and women who made allegations—women who were often much younger and far less powerful than Weinstein, and who signed under pressure from attorneys on both sides.

Weinstein also hid the payments underwriting some of these settlements. In one case, in the nineteen-nineties, Bob Weinstein, who co-founded the film studio Miramax with his brother, paid two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, roughly six hundred thousand dollars today, to be split between two female employees in England who accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. The funds came from Bob Weinstein’s personal bank account—a move that helped conceal the payment from executives at Miramax and its parent company, Disney, as well as from Harvey Weinstein’s spouse….

(In places big and small, corrupt organizations and institutions will conceal actual injuries to individuals for the sake of leaders’ personal satisfaction or self-serving appeals to an institutional reputation they, and they alone, have in fact blackened.

Some in Whitewater have, for so many years, ignored or defended institutional wrongdoing of their friends though boosterism of the most childish kind: if all they owned sank to the bottom of Cravath, still it would not compensate adequately the assault survivors in this city who have been wronged not once, but twice over. For a FW category on this subject, see Assault Awareness & Prevention.)

Cockatoos, it turns out, are pretty darn sharp:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 30m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1973, Pres. Nixon’s lawyers tell John Sirica, Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, of an eighteen and a half minute gap in White House audio tapes.

Recommended for reading in full —

Chris Strohm and Shannon Pettypiece report Ex-Fox News Employee Says She Was Blocked From Investigating Trump-Russia Ties:

A former Fox News employee said the network blocked her from going to Moscow to investigate President Donald Trump’s links with Russia, one of several claims of news bias at 21st Century Fox Inc. made by former and current workers opposing its takeover of Sky Plc.

“You can’t do in-depth reporting if you’re not there,” said Jessica Golloher, a former Fox Radio correspondent who is suing the division for gender discrimination, at a gathering with U.K. lawmakers and citizens in Parliament on Monday. “Fox didn’t let me go to Moscow to dig into Trump’s Russian connections, even when I offered to pay my own way.”

“Fox is just buying what the White House is selling,” she said….

(Fox is the closest thing America now has to state media).

Devlin Barrett and Carol D. Leonnig report DHS inspector general: Travel-ban confusion led agents to violate court order:

The Trump administration’s botched rollout of its first travel ban led federal agents to violate court orders by telling airlines not to let certain passengers board U.S.-bound flights, according to an internal watchdog.

In a letter Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, John Roth, notified lawmakers of the violations. He also alerted them that his findings have become bogged down in a battle with the department over redactions that he said would obscure the true failures of the administration’s handling of the first travel ban.

In the early days of the Trump administration, the president signed an executive order temporarily banning entry to the United States by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, as well as refugees.

The move led to confusion and alarm at airports, where immigration agents were unsure how to enforce the order and passengers were unsure whether they could enter the United States. It also sparked protests at some major international airports….

(Lack of clear direction served the darker purpose of inflicting maximum worry on those who might, but were not, part of a travel ban.)

Catherine Rampell contends The GOP readies itself to welcome Roy Moore:

….In any case, by arguing that victory refutes all allegations against Trump, Republicans are laying the groundwork to welcome Moore to Washington if he wins next month.

Already, White House officials are ducking questions about whether Moore should be allowed to serve as senator. A mere week ago, Conway said there was “no Senate seat worth more than a child.” On Monday, when asked whether Alabama voters should cast their ballots for Moore, she denounced his Democratic opponent and said, “I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through”….

(If Moore should win – and there’s a good chance he will – one can expect that the GOP majority will allow him into the chamber and will rely on his vote.)

Betsy Woodruff, Ben Collins, and Spencer Ackerman report Twitter Clams Up Over Russian Trolls:

Twitter has not provided the House and Senate Russia investigations with any additional Kremlin-backed imposter accounts and bots since at least Nov. 1, The Daily Beast has confirmed.

The lack of new disclosure comes as evidence continues to mount that inauthentic Russian activity continues apace on the microblogging platform.

Twitter first identified 201 non-bot accounts tied to the St. Petersburg-based troll farm known as the Internet Research Association on Sept. 28. Barely a month later, for a Nov. 1 congressional hearing, the company increased that figure tenfold, to 2,752—in addition to the existence of 36,746 Russia-linked bot accounts involved in election-related tweets. Twenty days after that, however, Twitter has yet to provide an updated amount, let alone specific propaganda accounts, to legislators, three sources familiar with the inquiries tell The Daily Beast….

Sunday was turkey, Monday was mashed potatoes, and today it’s classic pan gravy:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 32m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Police and Fire Commission meets at 6:30 PM, and her Library Board also meets at 6:30 PM. The Whitewater Unified School Board meets (in open session) beginning at 7 PM.

On this day in 1789, New Jersey becomes the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.

On this day in 1859, the Milwaukee’s  first recorded game of ‘base ball’ is played: “An impromptu game of base ball , as it was spelled in the early years, was played by two teams of seven at the Milwaukee Fair Ground. The game was organized by Rufus King, publisher of the Milwaukee Sentinel, and is believed to have been the first baseball game played in Milwaukee. In spite of cold weather, two more games were played in December, and by April 1860 the Milwaukee Base Ball Club was organized. View early baseball photographs at Wisconsin Historical Images, and read about baseball’s first decades in Wisconsin at Turning Points in Wisconsin.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mike Levine reports Special Counsel sends wide-ranging request for documents to Justice Department:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s team investigating whether President Donald Trump sought to obstruct a federal inquiry into connections between his presidential campaign and Russian operatives has now directed the Justice Department to turn over a broad array of documents, ABC News has learned.

In particular, Mueller’s investigators are keen to obtain emails related to the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the earlier decision of Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the entire matter, according to a source who has not seen the specific request but was told about it.

Issued within the past month, the directive marks the special counsel’s first records request to the Justice Department, and it means Mueller is now demanding documents from the department overseeing his investigation.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein played key roles in Comey’s removal. And Sessions has since faced withering criticism from Trump over his recusal and Rosenstein’s subsequent appointment of Mueller….

(Sessions is variously a forgetful, evasive, and arrogant man.)

Alex Eule asks Unicorns: What Are They Really Worth?:

When a venture capitalist coined the concept “unicorn club” in 2013, it referred to software start-ups valued at $1 billion or more—just 39 at that time.

“We like the term because, to us, it means something extremely rare, and magical,” Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee wrote in a column for Techcrunch. Four years later, the rarity—and the magic—has worn off. Today, Dow Jones VentureSource tracks 170 unicorns in its database.

Equity investors once held high hopes for these companies to come to market and become the next Facebook or Google. But in recent years, the unicorns have preferred to raise funds behind closed doors. Just 32 have gone through with initial public offerings since they became a class unto themselves, according to VentureSource, and they have tended to be smaller names. Large companies like Uber Technologies, Dropbox, Lyft, Spotify, and Airbnb have so far spurned the public market.

As the private companies become household names, they face questions about their workplace cultures, business models—and valuations.

The unicorn experience is teaching us an unexpected lesson: The public markets remain the best place to achieve long-term corporate success….

(The public markets remain the best – if not perfect – place to achieve long-term success because they’re exposed to the greatest range of market forces, of decisions of buyers and sellers. Simplified, yet fundamentally true true.)

Desmond Butler, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Eric Tucker report Moscow meeting in June 2017 under scrutiny in Trump probe:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Earlier this year, a Russian-American lobbyist and another businessman discussed over coffee in Moscow an extraordinary meeting they had attended 12 months earlier: a gathering at Trump Tower with President Donald Trump’s son, his son-in-law and his then-campaign chairman.

The Moscow meeting in June, which has not been previously disclosed, is now under scrutiny by investigators who want to know why the two men met in the first place and whether there was some effort to get their stories straight about the Trump Tower meeting just weeks before it would become public, The Associated Press has learned.

Congressional investigators have questioned both men — lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and Ike Kaveladze, a business associate of a Moscow-based developer and former Trump business partner — and obtained their text message communications, people familiar with the investigation told the AP.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team also has been investigating the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, which occurred weeks after Trump had clinched the Republican presidential nomination and which his son attended with the expectation of receiving damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton. A grand jury has already heard testimony about the meeting, which in addition to Donald Trump Jr., also included Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and his then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

The focus of the congressional investigators was confirmed by three people familiar with their probe, including two who demanded anonymity to discuss the sensitive inquiry….

(The closer one looks, the more one finds.)

Ashley Parker and Carol D. Leonnig write of ‘A long winter’: White House aides divided over scope, risks of Russia probe:

…. [One of Trump’s lawyers, Ty] Cobb added that those who have already been interviewed by Mueller’s team have left feeling buoyed. “The people who have been interviewed generally feel they were treated fairly by the special counsel, and adequately prepared to assist them in understanding the relevant material,” he said. “They came back feeling relieved that it was over, but nobody I know of was shaken or scared.”

But the reassurances from Cobb and others — which seem at least partially aimed at keeping the president calm and focused on governing — are viewed by others as naive.

“The president says, ‘This is all just an annoyance. I did nothing,’?” said one person close to the administration. “He is somewhat arrogant about it. But this investigation is a classic Gambino-style roll-up. You have to anticipate this roll-up will reach everyone in this administration”….

(Those of us in opposition will hold fast far longer than a single season, however long, however cold.)

Yesterday was turkey, and today it’s a recipe for Simple Mashed Potatoes: