Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 5:53 PM, for 10h 28m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1787, the first of The Federalist Papers is published:

….The Federalist articles appeared in three New York newspapers: The Independent Journal, the New-York Packet, and the Daily Advertiser, beginning on October 27, 1787. Although written and published with haste, The Federalist articles were widely read and greatly influenced the shape of American political institutions.^[13]Between them, Hamilton, Madison and Jay kept up a rapid pace, with at times three or four new essays by Publius appearing in the papers in a week. Garry Wills observes that the pace of production “overwhelmed” any possible response: “Who, given ample time could have answered such a battery of arguments? And no time was given.”^[14] Hamilton also encouraged the reprinting of the essay in newspapers outside New York state, and indeed they were published in several other states where the ratification debate was taking place. However, they were only irregularly published outside New York, and in other parts of the country they were often overshadowed by local writers.^[15]….

It’s worth noting – today, tomorrow, forever – that from America’s earliest days on this continent, we have had a robust tradition of anonymous and pseudonymous speech. One does not embrace this tradition in the belief that one is anything like the great men who centuries ago embodied this tradition – one embraces it imperfectly and humbly as homage to the far greater men and women than oneself who have come before, and in the confident hope that far greater men and women than oneself are yet to come. 

On this day in 1864, Wisconsinite William Cushing serves the Union well and ably:

On this date William Cushing led an expedition to sink the Confederate ram, the Albermarle, which had imposed a blockade near Plymouth, North Carolina and had been sinking Union ships. Cushing’s plan was extremely dangerous and only he and one other soldier escaped drowning or capture. Cushing pulled very close to the Confederate ironclad and exploded a torpedo under it while under heavy fire. Cushing’s crew abandonded ship as it began to sink. The Albemarle also sunk. Cushing received a “letter of thanks” from Congress and was promoted to Lieutenant Commander. He died in 1874 due to ill health and is buried in the Naval Cemetery at Annapolis, Maryland.

Recommended for reading in full —

The National (a Canadian publication) has a short documentary on The Magnitsky Act: How Canada set out to punish Russia’s human rights abusers:

The death of tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in Russian prison inspired legislation in Canada and the United States to punish foreign officials responsible for gross human rights violations.

Erik Wemple observes The Hill’s flimsy Russia-uranium story lands with maximum effect:

None of this was news. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, did extensive stories about the investigation into Mikerin. So the Hill performed an elaborate and creative repackaging exercise — marshaling already-known information into a newsy-sounding headline: “FBI uncovered Russian bribery plot before Obama administration approved controversial nuclear deal with Moscow.” It worked, at least as far as Fox News was concerned. The leading cable-news network lent a great deal of programming to the Hill piece, all rigged to engineer further suspicion of Clinton. In an interview with Hill Editor in Chief Bob Cusack last Thursday, Fox News host Jon Scott said, “Obviously your outlet has done some digging but it seems like a huge story that ought to be blared from the mountaintops and it has not gotten a lot of attention.”

Maybe that’s because mainstream outlets have smoked out the preposterous conspiracy-mongering in the Hill’s story. Over a few paragraphs, the story managed to suggest that the Justice Department, which successfully prosecuted Mikerin for his crimes, somehow sought to play down its achievements on this front — perhaps to suppress the news and prevent Clinton from suffering embarrassment over the Uranium One transaction (and it appears she was not personally involved). Here is the astonishing passage from the Solomon-Spann story:

Bringing down a major Russian nuclear corruption scheme that had both compromised a sensitive uranium transportation asset inside the U.S. and facilitated international money laundering would seem a major feather in any law enforcement agency’s cap.

But the Justice Department and FBI took little credit in 2014 when Mikerin, the Russian financier and the trucking firm executives were arrested and charged.

The only public statement occurred a year later when the Justice Department put out a little-noticed press release in August 2015, just days before Labor Day. The release noted that the various defendants had reached plea deals.

Oh really! Pause for a second and ponder the illogic in the text here. The Hill is writing that the issuance of a press release counts as evidence that the Justice Department was taking “little credit” for its work. Wouldn’t the act of not issuing a press release be better evidence thereof? Or how about just not pursuing the case at all?

(Flimsy is the key description here: all this has been reported before, and better, elsewhere – The Hill’s offered by design a deceptive talking point for Fox, Trump, and the House GOP.)

Matthew Dallek writes of Gen. John Kelly’s authoritarian bent as WH chief of staff:

….But not everyone who puts on, and takes off, a general’s uniform is another George Washington. Indeed, Kelly’s performance makes it clear that those who have been placing their hopes in Trump’s trio of generals-turned-advisers are making a mistake.

Kelly’s strain of military thinking puts him at odds with a society in which, as he points out, only a tiny fraction serves, or even knows anyone who serves, and in which few men and women in uniform come from the ranks of the United States’ elite professions, which dominate the nation’s most influential institutions. Kelly, then, embodies a clash of cultures, a lifelong military man now playing a hotly contested political civilian role, who looks askance at the nation’s civilian democratic culture.

That is an unhealthy tendency, and, at times, Kelly’s remarks suggested an authoritarian streak that he seems to share with his boss, the president. He lamented the loss of a mythic time in which “women were sacred and looked upon with great honor,” a time, he reminisced, when Gold Star families and religion were treated as “sacred” topics to be upheld and venerated by all Americans.

Kelly conveyed the sense that because he and others in the military have worn the uniform, served in combat and risked their lives (and in Kelly’s case, sacrificed a son), he feels entitled to make up stories about a member of Congress, an African-American woman, and to exclude civilians in a setting, the White House briefing room, that is of course paid for by and meant to serve every citizen. Behind his calm demeanor, he showed the country a frustration, anger and grievance that complements Trump’s us-against-the-world mentality and political style.

Countless military commanders have been able to make the leap from uniform to serve in elective or appointed political office, and they have done so in ways that uphold and even enhance America’s civilian democratic traditions. Washington showed the way when he shed his uniform and embraced a civilian role, leading the United States as a democratic republic, with a healthy respect for liberty….

Reuters reports that Putin says Trump should be respected:

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday [10.17] President Donald Trump should be respected because he has a democratic mandate.

“He has been elected by the American people and at least because of this he should be respected, even if we disagree with his position,” Putin said at a forum with scholars.

(Putin – dictator, murderer, imperialist, and liar – thinks that we should respect the man he helped elect, Trump – authoritarian, nativist, ignoramus, and liar). The answer is no, and no again.

So, What Makes Peanut Butter Stick to the Top of Your Mouth?:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 5:54 PM, for 10h 31m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing cresent with 37% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM, and her Community Development Authority at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1881, the Earps and Doc Holliday battle the Clanton Gang at the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral:

…a 30-second shootout between lawmen and members of a loosely organized group of outlaws called the Cowboys that took place at about 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday, October 26, 1881 in Tombstone, Arizona Territory. It is generally regarded as the most famous shootout in the history of the American Wild West. The gunfight was the result of a long-simmering feud, with Cowboys Billy Claiborne, Ike and Billy Clanton, and Tom and Frank McLauryon one side and town MarshalVirgil Earp, Special PolicemanMorgan Earp, Special Policeman Wyatt Earp, and temporary policeman Doc Holliday on the other side. All three Earp brothers had been the target of repeated death threats made by the Cowboys, who objected to the Earps’ interference in their illegal activities. Billy Clanton and both McLaury brothers were killed. Ike Clanton claimed that he was unarmed and ran from the fight, along with Billy Claiborne. Virgil, Morgan, and Doc Holliday were wounded, but Wyatt Earp was unharmed. The shootout has come to represent a period of the American Old West when the frontier was virtually an open range for outlaws, largely unopposed by law enforcement officers who were spread thin over vast territories….

On this date in 1863, Wisconsin’s governor receives authority to recruit black soliders in the defense of the Union:

Wisconsin Governor Edward Salomon received authority from the War Department to raise a regiment of African-American soldiers from Wisconsin. Colonel John A. Bross of Chicago sent African-American recruiting agents from Chicago into Wisconsin and succeeded in enlisting about 250 African-American soldiers. The 29th U.S. Colored Troops were eventually organized at Quincy, Illinois in April 1864.

Recommended for reading in full —

Raphael Satter reports [Russian software mogul] Kaspersky: We uploaded US documents [from our National Security Agency] but quickly deleted them:

PARIS (AP) — Sometime in 2014, a group of analysts walked into the office of Eugene Kaspersky, the ebullient founder of Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, to deliver some sobering news.

Kaspersky’s anti-virus software had automatically scraped powerful digital surveillance tools off a computer in the United States and the analysts were worried: The data’s headers clearly identified the files as classified.

“They immediately came to my office,” Kaspersky recalled, “and they told me that they have a problem.”

He said there was no hesitation about what to do with the cache.

“It must be deleted,” Kaspersky says he told them.

The incident, recounted by Kaspersky during a brief telephone interview on Tuesday and supplemented by a timeline and other information provided by company officials, could not immediately be corroborated. But it’s the first public acknowledgement of a story that has been building for the past three weeks — that Kaspersky’s popular anti-virus program uploaded powerful digital espionage tools belonging to the National Security Agency from a computer in the United States and sent them to servers in Moscow.

The account provides new perspective on the U.S. government’s recent move to blacklist Kaspersky from federal computer networks, even if it still leaves important questions unanswered….

(Kaspersky would be nothing more than a ratcatcher without Putin’s approval. Nothing more. For it all, these are the men with whom Trump believes “we could have a good relationship.”)

Peter Baker reports Pitched as Calming Force, John Kelly Instead Mirrors Boss’s Priorities:

WASHINGTON — This past summer, the Trump administration debated lowering the annual cap on refugees admitted to the United States. Should it stay at 110,000, be cut to 50,000 or fall somewhere in between? John F. Kelly offered his opinion. If it were up to him, he said, the number would be between zero and one.

Mr. Kelly’s comment made its way around the White House, according to an administration official, and reinforced what is only now becoming clear to many on the outside. While some officials had predicted Mr. Kelly would be a calming chief of staff for an impulsive president, recent days have made clear that he is more aligned with President Trump than anticipated.

For all of the talk of Mr. Kelly as a moderating force and the so-called grown-up in the room, it turns out that he harbors strong feelings on patriotism, national security and immigration that mirror the hard-line views of his outspoken boss. With his attack on a congresswoman who had criticized Mr. Trump’s condolence call to a slain soldier’s widow last week, Mr. Kelly showed that he was willing to escalate a politically distracting, racially charged public fight even with false assertions….

(Kelly is, in meaningful measure, what Trump is – he wouldn’t be near Trump otherwise.)

Logan Wroge writes Wisconsin has largest well-being gap between white and black children, report says:

African-American children in Wisconsin are facing the biggest gap across the nation in well-being compared to their white counterparts, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Race for Results report, prepared by nonprofit The Annie E. Casey Foundation, used 12 indexes to determine the overall well-being of children across the United States based on a composite score of 1,000. Wisconsin had the biggest disparity between black and white children, the report said….

Of 44 states for which data was available, Wisconsin ranked 41st for African-American children with a score of 279. Across all states, white Wisconsin children ranked 10th with a well-being score of 762. The 483-point difference was the largest among the 44 states with data for white and black children…

Kevin Crowe and Ashley Luthern report The cost of police misconduct in Milwaukee: $21 million – and growing:

Police misconduct has cost Milwaukee taxpayers at least $17.5 million in legal settlements since 2015, forcing the city to borrow money to make the payouts amid an ever-tightening budget.

That amount jumps to at least $21.4 million when interest paid on the borrowing and fees paid to outside attorneys are factored in, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis found.

In some cases, the costs pile up as the city continues to fight the cases for months or years, even after officers have been fired or criminally convicted in the same misconduct case. The costs far outstrip the $1.2 million the city sets aside each year for settling all of the claims it faces.

And they likely will keep rising.

The price of police misconduct has come under scrutiny as city officials face a daunting budget and consider closing six fire stations and cutting jobs in the police and fire departments. At budget hearings, Common Council members have repeatedly pressed police officials and the city attorney’s office on what more could be done to ward off lawsuits.

“Better training, better screening of applicants, all kinds of factors that could enter into the picture,” Ald. Robert Bauman said in an interview.

“But clearly, for acts that have already occurred, we’re on the hook,” he said. “Just have the police stop violating civil rights, and we’d have plenty of money for fire houses”….

What did fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them? Like this —

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 5:55 PM, for 10h 34m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 28.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM.

On this day in 1760, George William Frederick becomes king of Great Britain and Ireland. On this day in 1836, the first legislative session of the Wisconsin territory takes place: “At this time, the Territory of Wisconsin included all of present-day Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, and part of the two Dakotas.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Matthew DeFour reports WEDC board member offers more detail on why Foxconn vote delayed:

In an interview Tuesday with the State Journal, Carpenter offered more detail, saying Hogan told board members last week that the way the deal was structured the agency couldn’t guarantee it could protect taxpayers if the company violated the agreement.

“We could have given them all this money and we wouldn’t have been able to get it back,” Carpenter said.

The state is planning to give the company $3 billion in refundable tax credits in exchange for a $10 billion LCD-screen factory in Racine County, creating up to 13,000 jobs.

Carpenter said Tuesday he decided to discuss the issue in greater detail after Alan Marcuvitz, a lawyer advising the village of Mount Pleasant, discussed the matter with the village board Monday night. Marcuvitz said there were “technical issues” with the contract “because one of the companies is from overseas” and the issue had been resolved, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Carpenter said the problem was “more than a technical issue”….

Erica Orden and Nicole Hong report Former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort Faces Another Money-Laundering Probe (“Manhattan U.S. attorney’s inquiry comes as President Donald Trump is weighing candidates to run the office’):

The Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office is pursuing an investigation into possible money laundering by Paul Manafort, said three people familiar with the matter, adding to the federal and state probes concerning the former Trump campaign chairman.

The investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is being conducted in collaboration with a probe by special counsel Robert Mueller into Mr. Manafort and possible money laundering, according to two of these people….

This is what POTUS calls a 10! Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today. pic.twitter.com/5pnK5dkkE6

— Alejandro (@agarciapadilla) October 21, 2017

Eleanor Cummins writes Sometimes All It Takes Is One Horrible Photo to Summarize a Catastrophe. This is Puerto Rico’s (“Surgery by flashlight is just the beginning of the public health crisis there”):

On Friday, former Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla tweeted a photo from inside a hospital, in which scrubbed-up doctors leaned over an operating table performing surgery lit only by a flashlight. “This is what POTUS calls a 10!” García Padilla wrote in the English version of his post. “Surgery performed with cellphones as flashlights in Puerto Rico today.”

The image quickly made the rounds on the internet; it currently has almost 9,000 retweets. That’s probably because this blurry picture feels like it’s worth a good deal more than 1,000 words. Closely cropped and the dictionary definition of “bleak,” it illuminates just a small sliver of the public health crisis Puerto Rico is currently facing.

Some 33 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Puerto Rico, only 23 percent of residents have electricity, according to Status.pr, which provides daily updates on basic services on the island. While there are other, somewhat unrelated problems at play—gas stations have been slow to reopen, and roads are badly damaged—the power grid’s utter annihilation in the category 4 winds is not just a temporary inconvenience. A month later, the ways that lack of electricity can set off a cascade of other crises is becoming increasingly clear.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy and windy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM, for 10h 36m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1861, California Chief Justice Stephen Field sent “one of the first [transcontinental telegraph] messages from San Francisco to Abraham Lincoln, using the occasion to assure the president of California’s allegiance to the Union.^[6] ” On this day in 1933, Amelia Earhart visits Janesville: “Amelia Earhart spoke to the Janesville Woman’s History Club as part of the group’s 57th anniversary celebration. Four years later, Earhart disappeared as she attempted to fly across the Pacific Ocean.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jack Nicas reports Russia State News Outlet RT Thrives on YouTube, Facebook (“U.S. intelligence labels RT a top Kremlin propaganda tool; social media’s open approach to content enabling unreliable and highly partisan content to reach large audiences”):

Google, Facebook Inc. FB -2.12% and Twitter Inc. TWTR -2.80% have spent months trying to ferret out covert Russian influence on their sites.

Meanwhile, RT, the Russian state news organization that federal intelligence officials call “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet,” uses Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as the main distributors of its content.

RT’s main English-language YouTube channel has amassed 2.1 billion views and 2.2 million subscribers, roughly the same figures as CNN’s primary YouTube channel. Fox News’s main channel has 600 million views. RT has drawn an additional 3.3 billion views across roughly 20 other channels, making it among YouTube’s most-watched news networks. YouTube, by running ads before RT’s videos, also gives the Russian-government outlet ad revenue.

Twitter named RT in a report last month on alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, and the company noted that RT spent $274,100 to promote tweets to U.S. users. The Twitter dossier, submitted to a congressional committee investigation into Russian influence in the election, cited a federal intelligence report released earlier this year that claimed RT was a primary tool in Russia’s alleged efforts to swing the U.S. election toward President Donald Trump —a charge RT has denied. Yet RT maintains a thriving presence on Twitter with 10 million followers….

(Key point: RT’s speech is the speech from a foreign dictatorship’s propaganda tool. Americans who support it are, depending on the level of their support, either fellow travelers or fifth-columnists. At the least, this foreign state tool should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). See generally A Primer on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA doesn’t prohibit speech – it merely requires registration and reporting for specified foreign entities.)

Katie Zavadski, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, Spencer Ackerman report Russian Propaganda Hosted by Man on Staten Island, New York:

Russia’s propaganda campaign targeting Americans was hosted, at least in part, on American soil.

A company owned by a man on Staten Island, New York, provided internet infrastructure services to DoNotShoot.Us, a Kremlin propaganda site that pretended to be a voice for victims of police shootings, a Daily Beast investigation has found.

Every website needs to be “hosted”—given an Internet Protocol address and space on a physical computer—in order to be publicly viewed. DoNotShoot.Us is a website run out of the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” according to two sources familiar with the website, both of whom independently identified it to The Daily Beast as a Russian propaganda account. It was hosted on a server with the IP address 107.181.161.172.

That IP address was owned by Greenfloid LLC, a company registered to New Yorker Sergey Kashyrin and two others. Other Russian propaganda sites, like BlackMattersUs.com, were also hosted on servers with IP addresses owned by Greenfloid. The company’s ties to Russian propaganda sites were first reported by ThinkProgress.

The web services company owns under 250 IP addresses, some of which resolve to Russian propaganda sites and other fake news operations. Others are sites that could not be hosted at other providers, like “xxxrape.net.” There’s also a Russian trinket site called “soviet-power.com.” (The IP address that pointed to DoNotShoot.Us now resolves to a botnet and phishing operation, and is currently owned by Total Server Solutions LLC.)

(Any American owning or knowingly working for  Greenfloid LLC would be a true fifth columnist – that is, someone within America actively working for our foreign enemies, including Russian government-backed websites.)

Nicholas Fandos reports Hopes Dim for Congressional Russia Inquiries as Parties Clash:

….All three committees looking into Russian interference — one in the House, two in the Senate — have run into problems, from insufficient staffing to fights over when the committees should wrap up their investigations. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry has barely started, delayed in part by negotiations over the scope of the investigation. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while maintaining bipartisan comity, have sought to tamp down expectations about what they might find.

Nine months into the Trump administration, any notion that Capitol Hill would provide a comprehensive, authoritative and bipartisan accounting of the extraordinary efforts of a hostile power to disrupt American democracy appears to be dwindling….

From Fandos’s story, here’s Trey Gowdy:

WASHINGTON — In a secured room in the basement of the Capitol in July, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, fielded question after question from members of the House Intelligence Committee. Though the allotted time for the grilling had expired, he offered to stick around as long as they wanted.

But Representative Trey Gowdy, who spent nearly three years investigating Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was growing frustrated after two hours….

“Congressional investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,” said Mr. Gowdy, who made his name in Congress as a fearsome investigator of Democrats….

(Years investigating Benghazi, but now even two hours’ time to investigate Russia is too much for Gowdy….)

Here’s a time-lapse video of the installation of the Milwaukee Bucks replica floor (in the UWM Panther Arena):

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM, for 10h 39m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated.  Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission is scheduled to meet at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board is scheduled to meet in-office at 7 PM.

On this day in 1941, Disney Productions and RKO Pictures release Dumbo. On this day in 1921, the Packers play their first NFL game: “[t]he Packers defeated the Minneapolis Marines 7-6, for a crowd of 6,000 fans and completed their inaugural season with 3 wins, 2 losses, and 2 ties.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Rosie Gray reports from Steve Bannon’s ‘Season of War’ Roadshow:

ANAHEIM, Calif.—Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon continued his campaign against the Republican establishment in a speech to the California Republican Party convention on Friday—while also calling for greater unity within the party. His targets included the current party leadership, but also the previous Republican president of the United States.

Bannon, who rarely spoke publicly during his time as White House chief strategist, has made a series of appearances in recent weeks promoting primary Republican senators in the 2018 election cycle. Boosted by former judge Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate primary win over the establishment’s (and President Trump’s) pick Luther Strange, Bannon is spearheading an intra-party war with the aim of removing Mitch McConnell as majority leader. He has said that he wants to challenge every Republican incumbent apart from Ted Cruz. He personally campaigned for Moore and for Kelli Ward, who is running a primary challenge to Jeff Flake in Arizona. Last week he promised a “season of war” against the establishment in a speech to the Values Voter Summit in Washington….

David Von Drehle contends The party is over:

With control of Congress, the White House and a majority of state governments, the Republican Party can claim to be stronger than at any time since 1928. On the other hand, many Democrats believe that their party’s edge among younger voters and growing nonwhite demographic groups has them on the brink of a new reign of power.

The truth is, both parties are in crisis — and may be headed for worse.

The Republican ascendancy is riddled with asterisks. The party’s control of Congress has only exposed deep and bitter divisions, as the pirates of Breitbart and talk radio turn their guns on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Too riven to redeem its oft-sworn pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, the fractured majority is now struggling to unite around tax cuts, the golden calf of the GOP. As the saying goes, power is what power does — in this case, not much….

Jenna Johnson reports Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should:

….The divide in the Maddox household is one playing out across the country, as those who voted for the president debate how much support the federal government should give Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory without a voting member of Congress that is not allowed to vote in presidential elections.

Some supporters of the president, like Fred Maddox, agree with Trump that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was frail before the storm; that the crisis was worsened by a lack of leadership there; and that the federal government should limit its involvement in the rebuilding effort, which will likely cost billions of dollars. But others, like Mary Maddox, are appalled by how the president talks about Puerto Rico and say the United States has a moral obligation to take care of its citizens.

A survey released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans believe that the federal government has been too slow to respond in Puerto Rico and that the island still isn’t getting the help it needs. But the results largely broke along party lines: While nearly three-quarters of Democrats said the federal government isn’t doing enough, almost three-quarters of Republicans said it is….

Lawrence Summers writes Trump’s top economist’s tax analysis isn’t just wrong, it’s dishonest:

Kevin Hassett, the White House’s chief economist, accused me of an ad-hominem attack against his analysis of the Trump administration’s tax plan. I am proudly guilty of asserting that it is some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd. Television does not provide space to spell out the reasons why, so I am happy to provide them here….

Hassett throws around the terms scientific and peer-reviewed, yet there is no peer-reviewed support for his central claim that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would raise wages by $4,000 per worker.

The claim is absurd on its face. The cut in corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent would cost slightly less than $200 billion a year. There is a legitimate debate among economists about how much the cut would benefit capital and how much it would benefit labor. Hassett’s “conservative” claim that the cut would raise wages by $4,000 in an economy with 150 million workers is a claim that workers would benefit by $600 billion — or 300 percent of the tax cut! To my knowledge, such a claim is unprecedented in analyses of tax incidence. Hassett doubles down by holding out the further possibility that wages might rise by $9,000.

Tech Insider reports Scientists predict an unusually warm winter this year in most of the US — here’s why:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 6 PM, for 10h 42m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1962, Pres. Kennedy spoke to the nation about the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, stating “It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Kenedy’s imposition of a blockade sought – and successfully did achieve – America’s policy goal without loss of life. (“To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba, from whatever nation or port, will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.”)

On this day in 1938, Dick Post of Footville wins yet again: “Dick Post of Footville won his sixth county title by husking a record 24.5 bushels of corn in 80 minutes. Two days later, he husked 1,868 pounds in 80 minutes to win the state championship. Post finished fourth in the nationals at Sioux Falls, S.D.”

Recommended for reading in full —

The team of Marco Chown Oved, Robert Cribb, Jeremy Blackman, Sylvia Varnham O’Regan, Micha Maidenberg, and Susanne Rust report How every investor lost money on Trump Tower Toronto (but Donald Trump made millions anyway) (“Donald Trump called himself a “genius” for investing in Toronto’s Trump Tower. Behind the scenes, he had no money on the line. The inside story of an unlikely bankruptcy, and the investors who lost everything when they bet on the Trump brand”):

Let’s say you’re Donald Trump.

It’s 2002 and you’ve agreed to have your name emblazoned across the top of the tallest residential tower in Canada, a $500-million, five-star condo-hotel in downtown Toronto.

Here’s the thing: Only months into the project, your lead developer is publicly exposed in the pages of the Toronto Star as a fugitive fraudster on the run from U.S. justice. Your major institutional partner — the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company — bails shortly after.

Your remaining partners in the deal — a group of investors assembled by the criminal who was just outed — include a New York camera store owner, a former Chicago nursing-home administrator, two small-time landlords in Britain and a little-known Toronto billionaire who earned a fortune in the former Soviet Union.

The one thing they all have in common — no experience in condo tower development.

Do you pull out? For Trump, the answer was no. The billionaire dug in, repeatedly told the world he was investing his own money in the project — claims that would prove false — and gushed about its spectacular promise, knowing his profits were guaranteed.

“Nothing like this has ever been built in Toronto,” Trump said in 2004 as he relaunched the stalled project. “It is going to be the ultimate destination for business, pleasure and entertainment.”

Fast forward to 2016 and Trump’s Toronto tower is built but bankrupt — a rare failure in Toronto’s booming downtown condo market….

Emily Steele and Michael Schmidt report O’Reilly Settled New Harassment Claim, Then Fox Renewed His Contract (“In January, the Fox News host was said to have agreed to a $32 million settlement with a former network analyst, the largest of his known payouts”):

Last January, six months after Fox News ousted its chairman amid a sexual harassment scandal, the network’s top-rated host at the time, Bill O’Reilly, struck a $32 million agreement with a longtime network analyst to settle new sexual harassment allegations, according to two people briefed on the matter — an extraordinarily large amount for such cases.

Although the deal has not been previously made public, the network’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, acknowledges that it was aware of the woman’s complaints about Mr. O’Reilly. They included allegations of repeated harassment, a nonconsensual sexual relationship and the sending of gay pornography and other sexually explicit material to her, according to the people briefed on the matter.

It was at least the sixth agreement — and by far the largest — made by either Mr. O’Reilly or the company to settle harassment allegations against him. Despite that record, 21st Century Fox began contract negotiations with Mr. O’Reilly, and in February granted him a four-year extension that paid $25 million a year….

(Key elements of the reporting on the newly-disclosed settlement are the amount, that O’Reilly agreed himself to pay that amount over time, that Fox knew of O’Reilly’s private settlement Lis Wiehl, and that Fox thereafter renewed his network contract despite knowledge of a settlement between O’Reilly & Wiehl.)

Susan Hennessy and Benjamin Wittes write Jeff Sessions Just Confessed His Negligence on Russia (“The attorney general is aware of the threat Moscow poses to American elections — he just hasn’t done anything about it”):

With Midwestern gentility, the Nebraska senator [Sasse] told Sessions that he wasn’t going to grill him about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Rather, he said, “I would like to continue talking about the Russians but in the context of the long-term objectives that Vladimir Putin has to undermine American institutions and the public trust.… We face a sophisticated long-term effort by a foreign adversary to undermine our foreign policy and our ability to lead in the world by trying to undermining confidence in American institutions.”

Russia will be back in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Sasse argued. “We live at a time where info ops and propaganda and misinformation are a far more cost-effective way for people to try to weaken the United States of America than by thinking they can outspend us at a military level.… So as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and as a supervisor of multiple components of our intelligence community … do you think we’re doing enough to prepare for future interference by Russia and other foreign adversaries in the information space?”

You’d think this question would be a golden opportunity for Sessions. After all, if you’re a man who has had some — ahem — inconvenient interactions with former Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, you might relish the chance to answer a question about what you are doing to prevent Russian interference in the future, as a chance to go on offense and show how serious you are about tackling a problem that has undermined your reputation.

But Sessions’s answer did not inspire confidence: “Probably not. We’re not. And the matter is so complex that for most of us, we are not able to fully grasp the technical dangers that are out there.”

Sessions acknowledged “disruption and interference, it appears, by Russian officials” and noted that it “requires a real review.” But he said nothing about what the department is doing to ready itself.

Sasse followed up, giving him an explicit chance to spell it out. “So what steps has the department taken,” or should it take, “to learn the lessons of 2016 … in fighting foreign interference?” he asked.

Crickets from Sessions….

Matthew DeFour reports WEDC threatens legal action against Kestrel Aircraft as another deal goes south:

A day before Democrats submitted a petition to recall him in 2012, Gov. Scott Walker flew to Superior to announce a $20 million award for an aviation start-up promising to create 665 jobs and to invest more than $50 million in the state.

Five years later, Kestrel Aircraft has defaulted on its loan repayments after investing $1.4 million and creating 25 jobs, and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. says it is initiating legal action against the company.

The sour Kestrel deal is the latest reminder of how hasty decision-making and loose financial controls in WEDC’s early days have cost taxpayers. And though the agency has put in place several safeguards since 2013, the early missteps continue to dog WEDC as it negotiates the largest taxpayer-backed corporate incentive deal in U.S. history.

Last week the WEDC board delayed a scheduled vote on the nearly $3 billion award to Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn when an unspecified problem with the contract was identified shortly before the vote was to occur….

What was The Bloop? The Loudest Underwater Sound Ever Recorded Has No Scientific Explanation:

In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration discovered an unusual, ultra-low-frequency sound emanating from a point off the southern coast of Chile. It was the loudest unidentified underwater sound ever recorded, detected by hydrophones 5,000 miles apart. It lasted for one minute and was never heard again.

The Bloop, a mesmerizing short documentary by Cara Cusumano, investigates this unknown phenomenon with Dr. Christopher Fox, Chief Scientist of the Acoustic Monitoring Project of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. “I took it to the very classified innards of the United States Navy intelligence,” says Dr. Fox in the film. “It wasn’t theirs. It’s captivating because we don’t know what it was. I am glad there are still mysteries on earth and in the universe.”