Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 9h 14m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 53.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority Seed Capital Committee meets at 4 PM. The PLanning Commission meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1790, Pres. Washington delivered the first state of the union address.

Recommended for reading in full —

Masha Gessen observes that “Fire and Fury” Is a Book All Too Worthy of the President:

The President of the United States is a deranged liar who surrounds himself with sycophants. He is also functionally illiterate and intellectually unsound. He is manifestly unfit for the job. Who knew? Everybody did….

A year in, the Trump Presidency remains unimaginable. To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the Commander-in-Chief would use Twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a “very stable genius,” verges on the impossible. If the word “unthinkable” had a literal meaning, this would be it. It also brings to mind the psychiatrist Judith Herman’s definition of a related word: “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud,” she once wrote. “This is the meaning of the word unspeakable.” The Trump era is unimaginable, unthinkable, unspeakable. Yet it is waging a daily assault on the public’s sense of sanity, decency, and cohesion. It makes us feel crazy.

At the end of the day, we sit down in front of the screen and watch the late-night comedians state the obvious: they imagine the unimaginable, think the unthinkable, and speak the unspeakable. There is nothing funny about it, but we laugh with relief. However briefly, the comedians free us from the nagging sense that we are crazy. It’s not us, it’s him. The laughter becomes hysterical….

Jake Tapper found himself compelled to cut off an interview with Trump adviser Stephen Miller:

(Miller conveys the impression of someone who tormented small animals as a child.)

Linette Lopez reports that Stephen Miller had to be escorted off CNN’s set after his interview with Jake Tapper went off the rails:

White House adviser Stephen Miller was escorted off the set of CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday after a contentious interview with host Jake Tapper.

Two sources close to the situation told Business Insider that after the taping was done, Miller was politely asked to leave several times.

He ignored those requests and ultimately security was called and he was escorted out, the sources said.

CNN declined to comment on this story.

Miller’s appearance on the cable network quickly went off the rails when Tapper pressed him on explosive claims about President Donald Trump that appeared in the book “Fire & Fury: Inside The Trump White House” by Michael Wolff.

Miller repeatedly attempted to pivot the conversation toward criticism of CNN, a favorite target of Trump’s. He then referred to Trump as a “political genius” and lamented his treatment during the interview, leading Tapper to reply that there was only “one viewer you care about right now”….

David Ferguson reports Ex-GOP Rep explains Stephen Miller’s boot-licking CNN performance: He’s trying to be the new Bannon:

Former U.S. Rep. David Jolley (R-FL) slammed President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller on Sunday after Miller’s toadyish tantrum on CNN forced anchor Jake Tapper to cut him off and end the segment early — a move that earned plaudits for Tapper.

Jolley said that the current rift between Trump and former adviser Steve Bannon will heal and the two will head into the 2018 midterms as a team, especially now that Bannon has rolled over and offered a groveling apology to Trump for the things he said in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

Anchor David Gura played video from Miller’s CNN segment, to which Jolley said, “Stephen Miller is the one person in this White House, through loyalty and sycophancy who can fill Steve Bannon’s shoes and he knows that.”

SpaceX streamed live its Falcon rocket (ZUMA mission) launch last night. The lauch was a success. I watched the live stream, and here’s a replay – the countdown is informative, and oen can learn a lot during a webcast like this:

SpaceX is targeting launch of the Zuma spacecraft from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The two-hour primary launch window opens at 8:00 p.m. EST on Sunday, January 7, or 1:00 UTC on Monday, January 8. A backup two-hour launch window opens at 8:00 p.m. EST on Monday, January 8, or 1:00 UTC on Tuesday, January 9.

Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will attempt to land at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset is 4:38 PM, for 9h 13m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1610, Galileo Galilei observes three of Jupiter’s moons, although he was mistaken at first about what he was seeing: “three fixed stars, totally invisible^[111] by their smallness”, all close to Jupiter, and lying on a straight line through it.^[112] Observations on subsequent nights showed that the positions of these “stars” relative to Jupiter were changing in a way that would have been inexplicable if they had really been fixed stars. On 10 January, Galileo noted that one of them had disappeared, an observation which he attributed to its being hidden behind Jupiter. Within a few days, he concluded that they were orbiting Jupiter:^[113] he had discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest moons. He discovered the fourth on 13 January. Galileo named the group of four the Medicean stars, in honour of his future patron, Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and Cosimo’s three brothers.^[114] Later astronomers, however, renamed them Galilean satellites in honour of their discoverer. These satellites are now called Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.”

On this day in 1901, Robert Marion La Follette becomes governor: “On this date Robert M. La Follette was inaugurated as governor after winning the November 6, 1900 election. La Follette was born in Dane County in 1855. A Wisconsin Law School graduate and three-term member of congress, La Follette was renowned for his oratorical style. He was the first Wisconsin-born individual to serve as governor.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

James Fallows writes of How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves (“Hint: not by discussing IQ”):

….In short (as Lloyd Bentsen might once have put it): I’ve known some very smart people. Some very smart people have been friends of mine. And Donald Trump…

Here are three traits I would report from a long trail of meeting and interviewing people who by any reckoning are very intelligent.

They all know it. A lifetime of quietly comparing their ease in handling intellectual challenges—at the chess board, in the classroom, in the debating or writing arena—with the efforts of other people gave them the message.

Virtually none of them (need to) say it. There are a few prominent exceptions, of talented people who annoyingly go out of their way to announce that fact. Muhammad Ali is the charming extreme exception illustrating the rule: he said he was The Greatest, and was. Most greats don’t need to say so.* It would be like Roger Federer introducing himself with, “You know, I’m quite graceful and gifted.” Or Meryl Streep asking, “Have you seen my awards?”

They know what they don’t know. This to me is the most consistent marker of real intelligence. The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of what any individual person can never know. To read books seriously is to be staggered by the knowledge of how many more books will remain beyond your ken. It’s like looking up at the star-filled sky….

Paul Waldman explains Why Jeff Sessions’s marijuana crackdown is going to make legalization more likely:

Jeff Sessions hates marijuana. Hates it, with a passion that has animated almost nothing else in his career. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he has said. He even once said about the Ku Klux Klan, “I thought those guys were okay until I learned they smoked pot.”

He says that was a joke, but even so, it still says something about where he’s coming from….

the Trump administration has sent a clear message to the public that it wants to turn back the clock on our nation’s drug laws. There’s no doubt that Sessions is sincere in his desire to do so, but politically it could be a disaster. According to the latest Gallup poll, 64 percent of Americans favor legalization, including a majority of Republicans. There could be a dozen more states considering some form of legalization this year, either in their legislatures or through ballot initiatives, which will only bring more attention to the issue and set people’s own states against the administration. Just yesterday, the Vermont House of Representatives voted to legalize personal possession and cultivation of marijuana, and the bill is expected to pass the state Senate and be signed by the governor. They won’t be the last.

That the Trump administration is doing something so unpopular will put a lot of Republicans in a very awkward position, particularly if they come from a state like Colorado or California — precisely the representatives who are going to be most vulnerable in this November’s elections. Many of them have released outraged statements condemning the decision, but it might not be enough to persuade voters not to punish President Trump by voting them out. A member such as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (whose California district was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016) can cry to his constituents that he opposed the marijuana crackdown and the tax bill (which cut back their deduction for state and local taxes), and they might listen. But in a year of a Democratic wave, they might also just decide to sweep him out with the rest of the GOP.

So the end result of this policy could well be to accelerate the liberalization of the nation’s marijuana laws. A backlash could help more Democrats get elected, and push elected Democrats to more unambiguously support legalization. Don’t be surprised if every Democrat running for president in 2020 favors ending the federal prohibition on marijuana and returning the question to the states. One potential candidate, Sen. Cory Booker, has already introduced a bill to do just that….

(I don’t smoke – anything – but advocate treating marijuana like wine. That’s where America’s heading, and Trump won’t meaningfully change that direction. Sessions, in particular, is the distillation of every reactionary idea into one tiny southern politician.)

Jared Yates Sexton contends Steve Bannon sees the writing on the wall for Trump:

Mr. Bannon’s quote and sudden posturing against Mr. Trump and his inner circle seems self-interested only because that’s exactly what it is. He, like a growing number of Trump supporters, can see the writing on the wall and knows it’s time to put as much daylight between himself and the President. Their transactional relationship, it seems, has reached its point of diminishing returns.

In past cases, whether it was Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton, a president caught in the midst of a scandal can at least count on the loyalty of those around them that shared their worldview or had weathered hard times with them, thus creating a sense of intimacy and trust. In those cases, the presidents maintained an inner circle of dedicated true believers who stayed to the bitter end.

Now?

We might be seeing the fall of a captain devoid of followers, and the rats might already be preparing to abandon ship….

(I’d contend that there are, in fact, a core of operatives with an ideology: autocratic white nationalism, sometimes softly, sometimes more loudly, expressed. There are, in fact, ideas that Trump supports, and they are uniformly detestable to the democratic order.)

Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo report Amid Calls from Trump, F.B.I. Renews Questions Over Clinton Foundation:

WASHINGTON — F.B.I. agents have renewed asking questions about the dealings of the Clinton Foundation amid calls from President Trump and top Republicans for the Justice Department to take a fresh look at politically charged accusations of corruption.

People familiar with the F.B.I.’s steps said on Friday that agents have interviewed people connected to the foundation about whether any donations were made in exchange for political favors while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. Career prosecutors shut down that investigation in 2016 for lack of evidence.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump branded his rival “Crooked Hillary” and promised to send her to jail if he won. He struck a more magnanimous tone after the election, however, and said he had no interest in pushing for a prosecution.

That has changed as Mr. Trump’s legal problems have mounted. With four former aides facing federal charges and a special prosecutor investigating him and his campaign, Mr. Trump has resumed his attack on his favorite target. He has openly called for Mrs. Clinton to be investigated and one of her top aides to be imprisoned….

(Trump wields power like a dirty Central American autocrat, but he knows his audience: aged, ignorant Fox News addicts.)

The federal government needn’t be in the egg-ranking business, but as it is in that business, one might as well understand the rankings:

Even eggs have rankings — here’s how to tell a high-quality egg from a low one pic.twitter.com/geK4i6ttAb

— Tech Insider (@techinsider) January 4, 2018

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twelve. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 11m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 73.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1759, George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis are married in New Kent County, Virginia. On this day in 1921, ‘Janesville women abhor salacious entertainment’: “On this date the Janesville Federation of Women decided to “censor” movies and vaudeville in the city. Members of this organization praised and promoted what they considered “better offerings.” They were zealously critical towards those of a “salacious” nature. No follow-up ever determined whether the women were successful in their quest or if the increased publicity for “salacious” shows backfired.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Rachel Maddow contends we’ve seen that “In a year, Republicans went from caring about the Russia investigation to caring about undermining it. And the FBI in that time has become oddly compliant“:

In a year, Republicans went from caring about the Russia investigation to caring about undermining it. And the FBI in that time has become oddly compliant. pic.twitter.com/zJeiUaHHhz

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) January 6, 2018

Jennifer Rubin contends Senate Republicans become Trump accomplices in manipulating the system:

The Post reports:

“The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Friday that the Justice Department investigate for possible criminal charges the author of the now-famous “dossier” alleging the Trump campaign coordinated with the Kremlin during the 2016 election.

The move by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) marks a major escalation in conservatives’ challenges to the FBI’s credibility as the agency investigates whether any Trump associates committed crimes. Another Republican, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), joined in the letter to the Justice Department.

Their letter makes what is called a criminal referral to the Justice Department, suggesting it investigate the dossier author, former British spy Christopher Steele, for possibly lying to the FBI. It is a crime to lie to FBI agents about a material fact relevant to an ongoing investigation.”

This is an outrageous political stunt, one with no legal ramifications and obviously designed to take the heat off the White House as damning reports bolstering an obstruction-of-justice claim and questioning the president’s mental fitness have sent the White House spinning.

(Grassley & Graham have two possible strategies: create a diversion, and also forestall release of the transcript of the ten-hour testimony from FusionGPS executives about the dossier as that those executives have requested. By enoucouraging an investigation into dossier author Steele, Grassley & Graham will be able to say that must withhold FusionGPS’s transcribed testimony about the dossier ‘pending the outcome of an investigation.’ That testimony, if released, would by the account of those who gave it leave Fox, Breitbart, and Trump’s defenders with no credible reply. See The Republicans’ Fake Investigations, linked here on 1.3.18)

Barry Berke, Noah Bookbinder, and Norman L. Eisen ask Did Trump Obstruct Justice?:

….Of all the elements that must be proved to establish the offense of obstruction, the one that is most critical is corrupt intent: Did Mr. Trump wrongfully intend to obstruct the criminal and congressional investigations? The facts contained in these reports strongly suggest he did.

We now know, for example, that the president took aggressive steps to prevent Attorney General Jeff Sessions from recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation because he needed Mr. Sessions to protect and safeguard him, as he believed Eric Holder Jr. and Robert Kennedy did for their presidents. This shows that from the outset the president was concerned that he needed protection from the impact of any investigation. In fact, when the president’s efforts were unsuccessful, he purportedly responded by saying, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” perhaps suggesting that Mr. Trump wanted the attorney general of the United States to act as his personal criminal defense lawyer — a startling view into his state of mind.

Equally significant are new revelations that the president had drafted a letter to the F.B.I. director at the time, James Comey, describing the Russian investigation as “fabricated and politically motivated.” Those disclosures support that the president’s statements to the press and the public in connection with firing Mr. Comey were misleading. The president, of course, publicly claimed that Mr. Comey was fired because of his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. This matters because attempts to cover up the truth are classic indicators of a culpable state of mind under the obstruction statutes.

In this same vein, the Wolff book claims that the president’s lawyers believed that his efforts aboard Air Force One last summer to shape his son Donald Jr.’s statement about a meeting at Trump Tower with Russians was “an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.” Mr. Wolff also asserts that one of Mr. Trump’s spokesmen quit over the incident because of a concern that it was obstruction of justice. That was a wise move. If the president knowingly caused his son to make a false statement to interfere with the investigations or cover up the facts, that alone could constitute obstruction of justice….

(See also from the same authors, as linked here on 10.19.17, Presidential obstruction of justice: The case of Donald J. Trump.)

Jonathan Lemire and Zeke Miller report More departures on horizon for struggling White House staff:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Already setting turnover records, President Donald Trump’s White House is bracing for even more staff departures and an increasing struggle to fill vacancies, shadowed by the unrelenting Russia probe, political squabbling and Trump’s own low poll numbers.

Entering a grueling year that is sure to bring fresh challenges at home and abroad, Trump faces a brain drain across a wide swath of government functions, threatening to hamstring efforts to enact legislation or conduct even basic operations. Some departures are expected to come from senior ranks — the staff churn that makes headlines — but more are likely among the lesser-known officials who help to keep the White House and Cabinet agencies running.

In Trump’s first year, his administration’s upper-level officials have had a turnover rate of 34 percent, much higher than any other in the past 40 years, according to an analysis by Kathryn Dunn-Tenpas, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The study found that 22 of the 64 senior officials she tracked have resigned, been fired or reassigned.

Anecdotal evidence among more junior officials — the White House wouldn’t release data — suggests similar departure rates, and White House aides acknowledge difficulty filling roles in the administration….

(Rats, a listing ship, and rising waters…)

The Quiet Exuberance of Winter:

“You have to be at peace with the fact that something might happen, and you might not make it through,” says Alexandra de Steiguer, the caretaker for the Oceanic Hotel, in Brian Bolster’s short documentary, Winter’s Watch. De Steiguer has spent the past 19 winters tending to the 43-acre grounds of the hotel, on Star Island, which sits 10 miles off the coast of New England. In the long, wintry off-season, she is the island’s sole inhabitant.

Winter’s Watch explores de Steiguer’s relationship to extreme isolation. Its meditative imagery contemplates the beauty of absence, while de Steiguer reflects on the unique challenges and rewards of solitude. “There are no other distractions,” she says. “You have to decide how to fill your days….and yet it is peaceful, and I can use my imagination.”

The hulking—and possibly haunted—hotel bears a striking resemblance to The Shining, but de Steiguer maintains that “if there are ghosts out here, they are being extremely kind to me.” Rather, she has embraced what she calls “the great waiting of winter.”

“Being alone here and seeing the struggle of winter makes me feel connected to the web of life,” she says. “Winter has a quiet exuberance. You have to look into the bones.”

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be party cloudy with a high of nine. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:36 PM, for 9h 10m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1855, King Camp Gillette is born: “On this date King Camp Gillette was born in Fond du Lac. He worked for many years as a traveling salesman. After much experimentation, he developed a disposable steel blade and razor. He established the Gillette Safety Razor Company in 1901. Sales for his product skyrocketed. Gillette remained president of his company until 1931 and was a director until his death the following year.”

Recommended for reading in full —

James Fallows writes It’s Been an Open Secret All Along (“The scandal of Michael Wolff’s new book isn’t its salacious details—it’s that everyone in Washington has known its key themes, and refused to act”):

The details in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury make it unforgettable, and potentially historic. We’ll see how many of them fully stand up, and in what particulars, but even at a heavy discount, it’s a remarkable tale.

But what Wolff is describing is an open secret.

Based on the excerpts now available, Fire and Fury presents a man in the White House who is profoundly ignorant of politics, policy, and anything resembling the substance of perhaps the world’s most demanding job. He is temperamentally unstable. Most of what he says in public is at odds with provable fact, from “biggest inaugural crowd in history” onward. Whether he is aware of it or not, much of what he asserts is a lie. His functional vocabulary is markedly smaller than it was 20 years ago; the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House, he is increasingly prone to repeat anecdotes and phrases. He is aswirl in foreign and financial complications. He has ignored countless norms of modern governance, from the expectation of financial disclosure to the importance of remaining separate from law-enforcement activities. He relies on immediate family members to an unusual degree; he has an exceptionally thin roster of experienced advisers and assistants; his White House staff operations have more in common with an episode of The Apprentice than with any real-world counterpart. He has a shallower reserve of historical or functional information than previous presidents, and a more restricted supply of ongoing information than many citizens. He views all events through the prism of whether they make him look strong and famous, and thus he is laughably susceptible to flattering treatment from the likes of Putin and Xi Jinping abroad or courtiers at home.

And, as Wolff emphasizes, everyone around him considers him unfit for the duties of this office….

Joe Scarborough writes I asked Trump a blunt question: Do you read?:

Mika Brzezinski and I had a tense meeting with Trump following what I considered to be a bumbling debate performance in September 2015. I asked the candidate a blunt question.

“Can you read?”

Awkward silence.

“I’m serious, Donald. Do you read?” I continued. “If someone wrote you a one-page paper on a policy, could you read it?”

Taken aback, Trump quietly responded that he could while holding up a Bible given to him by his mother. He then joked that he read it all the time.

I am apparently not the only one who has questioned the president’s ability to focus on the written word. “Trump didn’t read,” Wolff writes. “He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he didn’t have to …. He was postliterate — total television.” But “Fire and Fury” reveals that White House staff and Cabinet members believed Trump’s intellectual challenges went well beyond having a limited reading list: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin called him an “idiot,” Cohn dismissed him as “dumb,” national security adviser H.R. McMaster considered him a “dope,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson infamously concluded that the commander in chief was a “moron”….

(There are problems either of character or cognition that might make reading difficult.)

Brian Stelter writes This is bigger than Trump vs. Bannon; it’s about Trump’s capability:

Some commentators raised doubts about Trump’s competency even before Election Day. But there’s been a palpable change as of late. Media conversations about Trump’s competency are certainly more common than, say, six months ago.

Jake Tapper said on CNN’s “The Lead” on Thursday that “this new book and the new tweet about his big and powerful button” are “renewing talk about the 25th Amendment and lawmakers’ fears about President Trump’s mental health.” He asked: “Is this all below board?”

Related: Wolff’s Trump book going on sale four days early amid furor

White House aides and pro-Trump hosts on Fox News say that it is completely inappropriate to be questioning his stability.

But Republican Senator Bob Corker has broached the subject several times in recent months. Last October he called the White House “an adult day care center.”

On Thursday it was reported that a Yale psychiatrist briefed a dozen members of Congress — mainly Democrats — last month on Trump’s mental fitness.

The meeting was kept private at the time. These questions about fitness are more frequently whispered than shouted.

On MSNBC on Thursday, anchor Katy Tur, who covered the Trump campaign, recalled that a former Trump staffer asked her a couple of months ago, “Do you think he’s lost a step since the campaign?”

“This,” she said, “is a pervasive view among those who know him. That should not be surprising”….

Steve Vladeck explains The Fatal (Procedural) Flaw In the New Manafort Suit:

For the second time in as many months, “Younger abstention” is in the news. Last month, it was as a legal concept sufficiently foreign to one of President Trump’s district court nominees so as to turn him into a viral internet meme (and, ultimately, lead him to withdraw from consideration). Now, it’s because of the… odd… lawsuit filed on Wednesday by Paul Manafort, seeking to invalidate the authority of Special Counsel Mueller to prosecute him. I already tweeted about why, on the merits, there’s very little to Manafort’s substantive claim until and unless the Supreme Court actually wants to revisit Morrison v. Olson—and perhaps not even then….

the doctrine of “equitable restraint” precludes collateral attacks on ongoing criminal proceedings absent some showing that there is no adequate remedy available to the plaintiff within the ongoing criminal proceeding (e.g., a motion to dismiss the indictment or disqualify the prosecutor). And there is no dispute that equitable restraint applies with equal force to suits to enjoin ongoing federalcriminal proceedings—where there will often be far less of a concern about the availability of an adequate remedy within the criminal process.

In that regard, what is striking about the complaint in Manafort v. U.S. Dep’t of Justiceis what it has to say about the absence of a meaningful remedy for Manafort’s claims within his ongoing criminal proceeding: Absolutely nothing. Instead, Manafort is asking a different judge of the same district court to provide relief that is unquestionably available to him, if appropriate, from the trial judge, without any allegation of the type of bad faith or misconduct by that court (to say nothing of irreparable harm stemming from the same) that would justify an exception….

(Manafort has nothing here except a public-relations angle.)

Iguanas are falling out of trees in Florida:

One of the strongest winter storms on the East Coast in modern history has pummeled cities with snow and sleet, forcing schools and businesses to close while grounding thousands of flights.
And in South Florida, it is “raining iguanas.”

Green iguanas, like all reptiles, are coldblooded animals, so they become immobile when the temperature falls to a certain level, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, they become sluggish. Under 40 degrees, their blood stops moving as much, Sommers said.

They like to sit in trees, and “it’s become cold enough that they fall out.”

This is not a new phenomenon — there were similar reports in 2008 and 2010 — though it is not typical.

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of ten. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 09m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Fire Department will hold a business tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1923, Milton College takes a stand against dancing: “Milton College president A.E. Whitford banned dancing by students in off-campus, semi-public places such as confectionery stores.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Wolff reports “You Can’t Make This S— Up”: My Year Inside Trump’s Insane White House:

….There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump’s family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia “collusion,” Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.)

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn’t stop saying something….

(Everywhere, in public and from private accounts, Trump shows evidence of cognitive decline, approaching in seriousness his long-existing moral and ethical deficiencies.)

Josh Dawsey and Ashley Parker report Trump lawyer seeks to block insider book on White House:

A lawyer representing President Trump sought Thursday to stop the publication of a new behind-the-scenes book about the White House that has already led Trump to angrily decry his former chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.

The legal notice — addressed to author Michael Wolff and the president of the book’s publisher — said Trump’s lawyers were pursuing possible charges including libel in connection with the forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

The letter by Beverly Hills-based attorney Charles J. Harder demanded the publisher, Henry Holt and Co., “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination of the book” or excerpts and summaries of its contents. The lawyers also seek a full copy of the book as part of their investigation….

(Cease and desist on behalf of the most public figure on the planet…good luck with that.)

Josh Marshall sees The End of the Beginning:

One of the things we will be focusing on on the Russia front in 2018 is not simply breaking a lot of news but on narrating the bigger picture. It can be a difficult story to make sense of because it has so many tentacles. There are so many disparate and far-flung parts to keep track of and make sense of. One of the top themes of Glenn Simpson’s and Peter Fritsch’s must-read oped published yesterday in The New York Times is that the focus on conspiracy during the 2016 campaign cycle has almost totally eclipsed examination of Donald Trump’s longstanding involvement with the Russian criminal underworld and money laundering which laid the basis of what happened in 2016. (That has always seemed to be Trump’s greatest fear.) We’ll come back to that.

So where are we now in this story? A series of revelations in the final weeks of 2017 placed us at what we should think not as the beginning or the end but the end of the beginning. We are still only at the front end of this investigation. We still know only the outlines of what happened and how. But we are past any serious question about whether there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. There was. It’s no longer a matter of probability, even high probability. We know it from either undisputed facts or sworn statements from Trump associates now cooperating with the Mueller investigation.

As I wrote a week ago, the entire ‘controversy’ over the Steele Dossier is meaningless in any substantive sense. Even if it were literally propaganda from the DNC comms office it wouldn’t change the facts about what the FBI and then Mueller investigations have already uncovered. It is classic misdirection and mendacity in its most direct form. Steele wasn’t some oppo researcher. He was one of his country’s top Russia spies, very well-placed to conduct such an investigation. He was and is trusted and held in high repute by the FBI, in part because of his work in the FIFA scandal. But the storm of abuse and misinformation from Trump supporters have nonetheless cast his work under some public taint. The aforementioned OpEd by the men who run Fusion GPS, I think, finally sets the matter straight. The dossier wasn’t the origin of the investigation. But it added to US counter-intelligence concerns (perhaps more like alarm bells) because as Simpson puts it, “our sources said the dossier … corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp. The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign”….

(The case against Trump grows stronger each day. Much more to be done, but it will be done.)

Ben Schreckinger reports Vladimir Putin’s Worst Enemies Are Hosting a Summit in His Honor (“Organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” are assembling the Russian president’s fiercest critics to discuss everything from Putin’s finances to his unraveling. Here, an exclusive sneak peek at what’s in store”):

….Imagine Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critics and dogged enemies all getting together in one room to, among other things, discuss his downfall. Well, that’s more or less what organizers of the first-ever “PutinCon” have in mind.

(Good for them – free people should know their enemies.)

These ‘Looping Towers’ Have A Running Track On The Roof:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fourteen. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset is 4:34 PM, for 9h 08m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred nineteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1777, Gen. Washington and the cOntinental Army are victorious at the Battle of Princeton.

Recommended for reading in full —

Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch describe The Republicans’ Fake Investigations:

In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators….

Sarah Kendzior contends With Trump, The GOP Is Playing A Game Of Diminishing Returns:

In December 2016, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham emerged as one of the strongest Republican critics of Donald Trump, and particularly, of his ties with Russia. Graham called for a bipartisan investigation, warning that while the Kremlin had targeted the Democrats this time, it could be the Republicans next. He noted that Russians had hacked his email, and proclaimed: “Russian hacking during the U.S. presidential election is not a Republican or Democrat issue. It’s an American issue. We must stand together.”

One year later, Lindsey Graham is taking a different stand–alongside Donald Trump at his golf course, which Graham deemed “spectacular” in his latest bout of gushing sycophancy toward the POTUS he once rejected. On November 30, Graham slammed the press for characterizing Trump as “some kind of kook not fit to be president,” directly contradicting his own words from 2016, when he said: “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office”….

Given that some of Graham’s worst fears about Trump’s Kremlin ties and mental state have been legitimized, what accounts for the senator’s changed attitude toward the president? There are a variety of possible rationales available for conjecture, many of which apply to the GOP at large. Opportunism may play a role, as Graham complies with Trump in order to pursue right-wing extremist economic policies and war. Blackmail may also be an issue, given that Graham has admitted his email was hacked, as was the RNC’s, by Russia. Trump has derided and threatened members of Congress and private citizens, and it’s not a stretch to imagine him unleashing his fire– publicly or privately–on Graham….

(Who, if anyone, owns Lindsey Graham?)

Anna Nemtsova reports A Russian Blackwater? Putin’s Secret Soldiers in Ukraine and Syria (“While Ukraine’s military has many honored volunteers fighting to defend their border, Russia’s expeditionary forces often are contractors fighting for pay, and dying in silence”):

RUSSIAN VETERANS of modern wars serving abroad do not see much public support, nor do they receive much help from independent civil groups, simply because their participation in the conflicts abroad often is a state secret.

At his annual press conference earlier this month President Vladimir Putin admitted for the first time since the first days of the war that there are members of the Russian military in Ukraine, but denied that they were the same as regular troops. “We never said there were not people there who carried out certain tasks including in the military sphere,” Putin said.

Ruslan Leviyev and his Conflict Intelligence Team are a unique non-commercial group based in Moscow and investigating real stories of Russian soldiers fighting in foreign countries. “If in Ukraine soldiers are treated as national heroes, Russian recruits often die anonymously,” Leviyev told The Daily Beast. “The society feels indifferent to the numbers of casualties in the Russian military, to how many soldiers are wounded.”

(Putin pays for Russian adventurism in others’ blood and others’ money.)

From an August poll and story, Gary Langer reports 1 in 10 say it’s acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views:

….9 percent in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll call it acceptable to hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views, equivalent to about 22 million Americans. A similar number, 10 percent, say they support the so-called alt-right movement, while 50 percent oppose it.

See PDF with full results here….

(One in one hundred would be too many.)

With Turtle Treadmills, a Novel Test For Stamina:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twelve. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 07m 39s of daytime. The moon is nearly full, with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred eighteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1918, Wisconsin troops depart for Europe: “On this date the Wisconsin 127th and 128th Infantries departed for France from their training facility at Camp Arthur in Waco, Texas. Initially, these divisions were assigned to construct depots and facilities for troops that would follow. On May 18, they were assigned to the frontline at Belmont in the Alsace where they faced three German divisions. In the following months, 368 troops were killed, wounded or missing. Ironically, their enemy, native Alsatians, spoke German and the Wisconsin troops were better able to communicate with them than their French allies.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jared Yates Sexton considers The Toxic Loyalty of Trump’s Hardcore Zealots (“They’ve excused his winking at neo-Nazis and his support of an accused child molester. Is there anything—anything—that would make Trump’s die-hards leave his personality cult?”):

….They had stayed with him through an unthinkable gauntlet: frequent criticism of war heroes, racist rhetoric, video of him admitting to disgusting conduct, and a deluge of women charging him with sexual assault. So by the time he assumed the role of president in early 2017, his base was fairly immune to any criticism or story dealing with something as mundane as bureaucratic appointments or legislation.

While he stocked his administration cabinet with lobbyists and billionaires, people worth billions of dollars, including multiple staffers who’d worked at high profile banks like Goldman Sachs, his supporters continued to parrot his intention to drain the swamp even while he filled it with every pen stroke. He told them he was the president of the working people even while he promoted bills that would take away their health insurance his and the GOP’s legislative agenda set its sights on the Affordable Care Act that provided them healthcare and his cabinet stripped nearly every regulation that protected the food they ate, the water they drank, and the schools where their children learned.

As the rest of the country turned on Trump and his approval ratings plummeted, his diehard base stayed firm. Roughly 30% of the voting public continued to support him, seemingly proving his assertion that they were so loyal he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody.” They’d weathered one scandal after another, watched Trump undermine journalists, threaten NBC’s broadcast license, trade barbs with the unpredictable head of a rogue nuclear state, and yet, they still seemed unwavering loyal….

(True enough, and so to succeed against Trump, one’s main focus should be on Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)

Rick Wilson writes How Donald Trump ate the nation: The President has inserted his toxic brand of politics into every last corner of American life:

….Some people like to say our nation is more divided than ever. Obviously that’s a laughable notion for a country that lost over a half-million of her sons in a bloody Civil War.

Still, there are sweeping, powerful forces pushing our society into Balkanized camps. The catalyst of today’s division isn’t royalists vs. patriots, freedom vs. slavery, or big government vs. small, or hippies vs. squares. Today’s cultural and political divisions are driven now by more potent forces: celebrity, and rage.

Trump hasn’t just infused every single aspect of our politics, but, like some Japanese movie-monster kaiju he’s furiously, inexorably consuming our culture, from entertainment to business to education and every other institution in between….

(This infusion is a consequence of Trump’s authoritarian character – he seeks to influence both political and cultural life, including even mundane matters. He’s without normal restraint.)

Maura Ewing reports A Judicial Pact to Cut Court Costs for the Poor (“The consensus that we would do this, that we would all do it, gives us cover that we wouldn’t be labeled as liberal or too soft on defendants”):

In North Carolina, it costs inmates $10 a day to stay in jail before they’re even found guilty of a crime. Yet most people jailed pretrial are there because they can’t afford bail. It’s a predicament Mecklenburg County Public Defender Kevin Tully points out time and again to judges: that those who can’t buy their own freedom are charged for their own confinement.

In North Carolina, as in other states, judges have the discretion to reduce or waive some fines and fees. But there, as elsewhere, they don’t often use it—thanks in part to legislation that makes doing so difficult. Now, district-court judges in Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte, are banding together to change how the courts impose fines and fees.

Starting last month, they committed to consulting a “bench card” during every case—a piece of paper they use to remind themselves to thoroughly assess a defendant’s ability to pay before setting a fine or fee, as well as which ones are waivable or can be reduced on a sliding scale. It’s a simple act, but one that could have significant consequences for low-income defendants and their families….

The judicial pact in Mecklenburg County was born of a working group; judges, public defenders, district attorneys, and court clerks had been strategizing since the spring of 2015 on how to reduce the county’s jail population. An analysis revealed that 18 percent were there because they failed to pay court costs, fines, or fees; and they stayed for roughly four to seven days, said district-court judge Becky Tin, who’s part of the working group. “A lot of these [legal financial obligations] that defendants were being arrested for not paying were set … without ever conducting an ability-to-pay hearing,” she said….

Amber Phillips lists 12 things we can definitively say the Russia investigation has uncovered so far:

To review everything we’ve learned about Russia this year, let’s rewind to May. That was a big month President Trump, who fired his FBI director because he thought “this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”

His own administration didn’t see it that way. A few weeks later, the No. 2 at the Justice Department, Rod J. Rosenstein, appointed a special counsel to ramp up the FBI’s existing investigation into “this Russia thing.”

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s mission: Look into how Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, whether it colluded with Trump’s campaign, and investigate anything else he sees fit to investigate….

So what have all these ongoing Russia investigations found so far?

A lot, but at the same time, no one big thing we can point to that indicates a sure direction of the investigation. “What we can take away is we are in the midst of a major investigation with foreign policy ramifications,” said Jeffrey Jacobovitz, a white-collar lawyer who has defended Clinton administration officials.

Here are all the things we know about the Russia investigation to date, ranked in order of their perceived magnitude [list follows]….

These 10 Robots Make Life A Lot Easier: