More than one small town has struggled for years under the debilitating influence of political & economic conflicts of interest, misguided priorities, and dodgy or grandiose claims. These conditions where those that That Which Paved the Way for Trumpism. Those locally who carried on this way made Trumpism more likely, the way a moderate illness might weaken one’s immunity and make a deadly illness more likely.
Trumpism’s national champions contended – falsely – that America in 2016 faced an existential crisis. On the contrary, America’s existential crisis began not with Hillary Clinton’s campaign but with Donald Trump’s minority-vote victory. One might have had conventional, normal politics with Clinton; there was never a possibility of that with Trump.
Trumpism didn’t then face and existential threat – it created an existential threat.
On their own, many of these local problems would have lessened, slowly but inevitably; those who created these problems would have faded, slowly but inevitably. There’s little energy left in the dwindling ranks of those carrying on this way. I was right – then and now – when I once wrote in reply to a prominent social & political figure in town, predicting that ‘not one of those practices will endure to this city’s next generation.’
And yet, Trump’s national success will probably embolden more than one local man or woman to carry on a bit longer than he or she might otherwise have. Their political end will come, nonetheless.
What to do about all this?
First, Trump and his ilk himself will have to go, through whatever lawful means is available.
Second, America will have to assure both full adult access to the ballot, and the integrity of elections against foreign interference (both as foreign propaganda on domestic media and as hacking). One would prefer few laws to many, but even we’ve now many states legislating against easy ballot access. Better a single standard assuring access. We’ll need a policy of automatic voter registration. No one should be required to vote; no one should have to struggle to register to vote.
Third, and the most difficult of all, we’ll have to carry out a long period of a third reconstruction (the first being after the Civil War, the second being during the civil rights era) to assure that we do not again find ourselves in the situation that now plagues us: forces domestic and foreign united to undermine the American constitutional order. That’s a long project, and I’d imagine – or at least hope – that the Rev. Dr. Barber, and so many other men & women, will guide us through that new, necessary reconstruction.
Previously: The Erosion of Political Norms, Parts 1, 2, 3.
When residents of a neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas, heard tiny meows coming from behind an abandoned house, they knew just what to do.
Judy Obregon, founder of a local animal rescue called The Abandoned Ones (TAO), routinely rescues abandoned dogs and needy strays in the area. The people who heard the meows called
At first, there was no mother cat around at all. And Obregon became concerned that the tiny kittens might not survive if she didn’t find their mom.
Luckily, that worry didn’t last long — when the mother cat came back to check on her kittens, Obregon could take the whole family to a safe place to recover….
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 6:38 PM, for 11h 47m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1957, the Packers dedicate a new stadium: “On this date the Green Bay Packers dedicated City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeated the Chicago Bears, 21-17. In the capacity crowd of 32,132 was Vice president Richard Nixon.”
SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter said Thursday that it had shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, but the effort frustrated lawmakers who said the problem is far broader than the company appeared to know.
The company said it also found three accounts from the news site RT — which Twitter linked to the Kremlin — that spent $274,100 in ads on its platform in 2016.
Despite the disclosures, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) questioned whether the company is doing enough to stop Russian operatives from using its platform to spread disinformation and division in U.S. society.
Warner said Twitter’s presentation to a closed-door meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers Thursday morning was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.” Twitter also made a presentation to House Intelligence Committee staffers in the afternoon.
The company “showed an enormous lack of understanding .?.?. about how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions,” a visibly frustrated Warner said….
(Honest to goodness, Twitter executives must think every senator is a dolt – there’s no reputable analyst anywhere who thinks the number of Russian propaganda accounts is in the hundreds – the number is surely far larger, by orders of magnitude.)
Here’s what we know so far about how the Russians used one of the biggest tech companies in the world to energize and influence American voters:
They created Facebook events for rallies in several states.Russia-linked Facebook groups like Heart of Texas and SecuredBorders tried to organize anti-immigrant rallies in Texas and Idaho in the months leading up to the election. Another group, Being Patriotic, organized pro-Donald Trump flash mobs across Florida in August 2016, according to The Daily Beast.
They purchased ads that promoted outsider candidates and exploited racial tensions. The ads boosted Trump, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, and at least one ad centered on the Black Lives Matter movement. A group impersonating a California-based Muslim organization was also set up to push fake stories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
They created accounts to amplify emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Members of the hacking group connected to the GRU created the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts in June 2016 to help spread the emails stolen in late 2015, The Post reported.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized by those who say he shrugged off warnings about the fake-news epidemic on the platform. The Post reported that President Barack Obama asked him just after the election to take it seriously, but that Zuckerberg replied that the company’s power to control the spread of information was limited.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump, while with a small group of advisers in the dining room of his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., asked a few members what they thought of his attack on Mr. Kaepernick. The response, according to one Trump associate, was polite but decidedly lukewarm.
Mr. Trump responded by telling people that it was a huge hit with his base, making it clear that he did not mind alienating his critics if it meant solidifying his core support.
“The president’s critics have it wrong,” Kellyanne Conway, a White House adviser who served as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager and pollster in 2016, said Monday. “They call him impulsive. He is intuitive.”
(On the contrary, Conway has it wrong: we don’t think he’s impulsive, we think he’s a bigoted American autocrat under the thumb of a Russian autocrat.)
I started to share a bit of insight I’d learned from my son, who studied environmental science in college. He told me, “Daddy, if you ever get lost in mountainous terrain, it’s important to know that there’s something called a snake line. Below the snake line, you might run into a copperhead or a rattlesnake sunning on the rocks of our Blue Ridge Mountains. But if you can get above the snake line, you’re safe, because those venomous creatures can’t live up there.” Moral Mondays were exposing the extremism of venomous politics in our state and helping folk see what dangerous terrain we had gotten ourselves into. But I kept telling them that there was a snake line somewhere on the mountain. If we could just move together toward higher ground, we’d be all right. The important thing was not to give up. The important thing was to keep on climbing. Every week I cried out against the nightmare we were witnessing to hold out the hope of higher ground.
This public proclamation was essential to our liturgy, but it was not the end. Every week when I was finished preaching, I invited people to come forward and make a public profession of their faith in a new North Carolina by exercising their constitutional right to petition their legislators in the General Assembly. They knew, of course, that they were risking arrest. Each person who had decided to make this public witness wore an armband to signify that they’d spent the afternoon doing nonviolence training at a local church. But it was an awe-inspiring sight, week after week, to watch the crowd part and make way for these nonviolent foot soldiers who were ready to sacrifice their own freedom to put our proposed future into practice. A Presbyterian minister from Charlotte, attending his first Moral Monday, said, “Never in my life have I seen the proclaimed Word put on flesh and move into such a direct action.” Some of us who’d been doing liturgy all of our lives began to realize its power in the public square….
One sometimes hears good news, but occasionally, through others’ hard work, one fortunately hears the very best news. Today, for Whitewater, there’s the very best news:
National Blue Ribbon Honors Announced for 342 Schools
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos today recognized 342 schools as National Blue Ribbon Schools for 2017. The recognition is based on a school’s overall academic performance or progress in closing achievement gaps among student subgroups. Whitewater’s Washington Elementary School has been named as a 2017 National Blue Ribbon School. In a statement after being notified, Principal Tom Grosinske commented, “This is a very special day for our students, their families, and our staff. To be recognized as a National Blue Ribbon School by the U.S. Department of Education is amazing. This award is a testament to our school family’s energy and dedication in building a school culture that embraces all students and helps them achieve success.”
“National Blue Ribbon Schools are active demonstrations of preparing every child for a bright future,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to the honorees. “You are visionaries, innovators and leaders. You have much to teach us: some of you personalize student learning, others engage parents and communities in the work and life of your local schools and still others develop strong and forward-thinking leaders from among your teaching staff.”
The National Blue Ribbon Schools Program honors public and private elementary, middle and high schools where students achieve very high learning standards or are making notable improvements in closing the achievement gap.
This coveted award affirms the hard work of educators, families and communities in creating safe and welcoming schools where students master challenging and engaging content.
Now in its 35th year, the National Blue Ribbon Schools Program has bestowed recognition on more than 8,500 schools. On Nov. 6-7, the Secretary and the Department of Education will celebrate with these honorees at an awards ceremony in Washington, D.C.
All schools are honored in one of two performance categories, based on all student scores, subgroup student scores and graduation rates:
Exemplary High Performing Schools are among their state’s highest performing schools as measured by state assessments or nationally normed tests.
Exemplary Achievement Gap Closing Schoolsare among their state’s highest performing schools in closing achievement gaps between a school’s subgroups and all students over the past five years.
Up to 420 schools may be nominated each year. The Department invites National Blue Ribbon School nominations from the top education official in all states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Department of Defense Education Activity and the Bureau of Indian Education. Private schools are nominated by The Council for American Private Education (CAPE).
Se anuncian honores nacionales de Blue Ribbon para 342 escuelas
El Secretario de Educación de los Estados Unidos Betsy DeVos reconoció hoy a 342 escuelas como Escuelas Nacionales de “Cinta Azul” para el 2017. El reconocimiento se basa en el rendimiento académico general de la escuela o el progreso en el cierre de las brechas de logro entre los subgrupos estudiantiles. La escuela primaria Washington de Whitewater ha sido nombrada como una Escuela Nacional de Cinta Azul (Blue Ribbon) del 2017. En un comunicado después de haber sido notificado, el director Tom Grosinske comentó: “Este es un día muy especial para nuestros estudiantes, para sus familias y para nuestro personal, al haber sido reconocidos como una Escuela Nacional Blue Ribbon por el Departamento de Educación de los Estados Unidos. Este reconocimiento es testimonio de la energía y la dedicación de nuestra escuela hacia la construcción de una cultura escolar que abarca a todos los estudiantes y les ayuda a alcanzar el éxito.”
“Las wscuelas nacionales de Cinta Azul (Blue Ribbon) son demostraciones activas de preparar a cada niño para un futuro brillante”, dijo el Secretario de Educación de los Estados Unidos, Betsy DeVos, a los homenajeados. “Ustedes son visionarios, innovadores y líderes. Tienen mucho que enseñarnos: algunos de ustedes personalizan el aprendizaje de los estudiantes, otros involucran a los padres y las comunidades en el trabajo y la vida de sus escuelas locales y otros desarrollan líderes fuertes y avanzados de entre su personal docente “.
El programa nacional de escuelas de Cinta Azul (Blue Ribbon) honra a las escuelas primarias, secundarias y secundarias públicas y privadas donde los estudiantes han alcanzado estándares de aprendizaje muy altos o están haciendo mejoras notables en el cierre de la brecha de logros.
Este codiciado premio afirma el arduo trabajo de los educadores, las familias y las comunidades en la creación de escuelas seguras y acogedoras en donde los estudiantes dominan contenidos desafiantes y atractivos.
Ahora en su año número 35, el programa nacional de escuelas de Cinta Azul (Blue Ribbon) ha otorgado reconocimiento a más de 8.500 escuelas. El 6 y 7 de noviembre, el Secretario y el Departamento de Educación celebrarán con estos homenajeados en una ceremonia de premiación en Washington, D.C.
Todas las escuelas se honran en una de dos categorías de desempeño, basadas en todas las calificaciones de los estudiantes, en los subgrupos de los estudiantes y en las tasas de graduación:
Las escuelas ejemplares de alto rendimiento están entre las escuelas de mayor desempeño del estado según las evaluaciones estatales o las pruebas nacionales. ·
Las escuelas ejemplares de cierre de la brecha de logro están entre las escuelas de mayor desempeño del estado en el cierre de las brechas de logro entre los subgrupos de una escuela , y todos los estudiantes durante los últimos cinco años.
Hasta 420 escuelas pueden ser nominadas cada año. El departamento invita a las escuelas nominadas para la premiación nacional de Cinta Azul a todas las escuelas de todos los estados, del Distrito de Columbia, de Puerto Rico, de las Islas Vírgenes, del Departamento de Educación de la Defensa y de la Oficina de Educación Indígena. Las escuelas privadas son nominadas por el Consejo para la Educación Privada Americana (CAPE).
Consider the childhood experience of Kristina Rizga:
When I was about 10, a classmate in my small-town school in Latvia liked to tell me in between classes that he hated Jews. I was the only Jewish kid in school, and one day as I walked home I heard steps behind me. My eyes caught his, and we stood there for a moment. I still remember his face—hazel eyes, closely cropped blond hair—and his navy uniform jacket over a white shirt. Suddenly, I heard a crunch as his fist landed on my left cheekbone, and I fell backward on a sidewalk damp with melting snow. I still remember the hollow ringing in my left ear. I looked around to scream for help, but the streets were empty. I’ve never felt more terrified and alone.
“There is nothing we can do to change him,” my father said in our garage the next day. He wore a large black boxing glove on his left hand that he made me practice hitting late into the night. “You have to throw the punch from your shoulder, and pack the weight of your entire body into it,” he said. “As soon as you show any fear, you’ve already lost.”
My mother and I eventually left Latvia, and bullying was a big reason for me. It’s been 22 years since I’ve thought about this particular incident—but the recent surge of media reports about xenophobic language and harassment across the United States brings those old fears roaring back. And now that we have an administration that has welcomed into the White House advisers with a long history of promoting Islamophobia and boosting white nationalists, I find myself wondering what that means for today’s bullies and their victims….
Such behavior is a far cry from the ideals of American public schools, which were founded to maintain a pluralistic democracy and protect citizens against the tyranny of the majority. Advocates for the public education system argued that the unique American experiment wouldn’t work without it—that schools were the most effective mechanism for instilling civic values such as abandoning unrestrained self-interest and opposing bigotry.
Until the late ’60s, three different courses in civic studies were common in American high schools, and they often focused on helping students apply the dry mechanics of government to solving problems in their own communities. Many social studies classes also aimed to highlight the fragility of the democratic process and the historic importance of civic engagement….
I’m neither Latvian nor Jewish, and I never had the experience of bullying in school. On the contrary, like others from my childhood, I grew up in an old family, with the kind of positive American schooling that Rizga describes (what one might call a good-government curriculum).
It was the right sort of curriculum, but we were naïve to think that – without constant vigilance – it would carry the day against narrower, alternative views. We failed to protect this society against dangerous forces within and without.
[Consider, even, the matter of standardized scores. I’ve written more than once about touting scores of a few – as this district’s former principal and former district administrator did – while concealing a lower participation rate in Whitewater than that of other communities.
The participation rate always mattered more, fundamentally – (1) as a commitment of a public district to reach all students (teaching subjects not just as a college preparatory exercise but as a measure of informed citizenship) and (2) as the commitment of administrators to present accurately the measurement of their students’ progress, without concealment for marketing purposes.]
Before scores, participation; before accomplishment, inclusion. That’s the foundation of a commitment to American civics in a public program. Although one may happily have a mix of public schools and private alternatives, it’s self-evident to me that public institutions should – indeed, must – function inclusively.
When I have sometimes mentioned a consideration of the curriculum, I’ve always considered it the way Rizga does, broadly. Broadly, twice over – as civics added to other substantive subjects, and as a foundation for the many, not merely the few.
Previously: The Erosion of Political Norms, Parts 1 and 2.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset is 6:40 PM, for 11h 50m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three 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 1787, the Articles Congress (Congress under the Articles of Confederation) submitted the draft of a new constitution for states’ ratification. On this day in 1862, the 16th Wisconsin Infantry protect civilians: “[t]he 16th Wisconsin Infantry arrived at Redbone Church, 11 miles from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to protect civilians as they fled the city (Source: E.B. Quiner’s Military History of Wisconsin (Chicago, 1866), page 638).”
Several anti-immigrant messages with an explicit pro-Trump slant are included among the 3,000 pieces of Russian-linked political content Facebook plans to turn over to Congressional investigators, ABC News has learned.
Posts that circulated to a targeted, swing-state audience on the social media site railed against illegal immigrants and claimed “the only viable option is to elect Trump.” They were shared by what looked like a grassroots American group called Secured Borders, but Congressional investigators say the group is actually a Russian fabrication designed to influence American voters during and after the presidential election.
“Their goal was to spread dissension, was to split our country apart, and they did a pretty good job,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee….
The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.
New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.
These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.
“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” Steve Hall, the former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst, said. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues”…
The Facebook group United Muslims of America was neither united, Muslim, nor American.
Instead, sources familiar with the group tell The Daily Beast, it was an imposter account on the world’s largest social network that’s been traced back to the Russian government.
Using the account as a front to reach American Muslims and their allies, the Russians pushed memes that claimed Hillary Clinton admitted the U.S. “created, funded and armed” al-Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State; claimed that John McCain was ISIS’ true founder; whitewashed blood-drenched dictator Moammar Gadhafi and praised him for not having a “Rothschild-owned central bank”; and falsely alleged Osama bin Laden was a “CIA agent”….
Dissecting Roger Stone’s statement was a very different exercise than my prior dissections of statements by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and Michael Cohen. Stone’s statement is a strident piece of political rhetoric meant to politicize his interview, attack members of Congress on the committee, and distract from problematic activities he engaged in throughout the election. It is unclear to me why Stone’s lawyers are permitting him to continue to make aggressive, wide-ranging assertions about his activity. Nonetheless, there is a method to what appears to be “madness.” If you put aside Stone’s distractions and political attacks, his factual assertions are carefully written to exclude things that perhaps he cannot deny. Take a look below and read between the lines [Atty. Mariotti’s analysis follows]….
Whitewater, as with other Wisconsin cities and towns, has a Planning Commission. Like some towns (but not others), Whitewater by practice places a member of one commission (let’s say, Parks & Rec) on another commission (let’s say, Planning): a representative of one commission to another. So a person might be appointed to serve on the Parks & Rec Board, but then also be the representative of Parks & Rec on the Planning Commission. (In this way, the resident then serves on two commissions.)
What happens, though, when a resident appointed to Parks & Rec, who then becomes the representative to the Planning Commission, requests to become the representative from Planning (on which he was never appointed) to the Community Development Authority (a third board)?
A second question: if the Parks & Rec board member was formerly head of the city’s neighborhood services department, should he even be able to serve on the Planning Board (as Planning oversees neighborhood services)? (Other cities would not allow the former neighborhood services leader to serve on Planning – neither directly nor by jumping from one board to another).
Those are questions that a member of the Planning Commission presented in June, before the Planning Commission made its choice for its representative to another board (the Community Development Authority). SeePlan Commission 6/12/17 & 6/19/17, preliminary discussion & commissioner’s remarks from 1:30 to 3:50 on the video.
I view of this discussion with distance and detachment, with clear and cold eyes. In the months since I first heard it, it has now & again returned to my mind. (One may read and hear much, but write less, and even then only at a later, more suitable time.)
Could the French ambassador to the United States, upon his arrival on these shores, then and there become the American ambassador to Brazil? Could a marketing manager at Ford Motor Company, upon becoming the marketing representative to an engineering team, then and there become the engineering representative to the accounting group?
It’s notable – and not to Whitewater’s credit – that not a single commissioner offered a word in reply to these concerns. Not a word of support, not a word of opposition: nothing.
The only commissioner who addressed this concern was the commissioner who raised it. “So shines a good deed….”
There is the erosion of political norms: so eroded that nothing is said in reply.
Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:41 PM, for 11h 53m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Fire Department has a business meeting scheduled for 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1862, the 29th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “It would go on to participate in the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, the Sieges of Vicksburg and Jackson, the Red River Campaign, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely, Alabama.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Adam Serwer sees A Nation of Snowflakes (“The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses”):
The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts….
In this sense, Trump’s views on free speech, exemplified by his threat to cut off federal funding to Berkeley on free-speech grounds, and his later demand that NFL team owners fire players who protest police brutality, perfectly exemplify the strain of conservatism that insists those on the left are sensitive snowflakes who cannot sustain a dissenting view, and that simultaneously angrily demands that the state and society sanction the left for the expression of political views it finds distasteful….
(Trumpists insist others are snowflakes, but they are, themselves, the first ones to melt when the temperature rises.)
MADISON – The federal Department of Homeland Security reversed itself Tuesday and told Wisconsin officials that the Russian government had not tried to hack the state’s voter registration system last year.
Instead, Homeland Security said, the Russians had attempted to access a computer system controlled by another state agency.
The development — disclosed during a meeting of the Wisconsin Elections Commission — came four days after federal officials told the state that Russians had tried to hack systems in Wisconsin and 20 other states….
(The Trump Administration cares so little about Russian interference in the American electoral process that it cannot even produce an accurate accounting hundreds of days after Trump’s poorly-attended inaugural.)
Steve Bannon plotted to plant a mole inside Facebook, according to emails sent days before the Breitbart boss took over Donald Trump’s campaign and obtained by BuzzFeed News.
The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign’s central figures. And it also shows the lengths to which the brawling new American right is willing to go to keep tabs on and gain leverage over the Silicon Valley giants it used to help elect Trump — but whose executives it also sees as part of the globalist enemy.
The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights.
“There is one for a DC-based ‘Public Policy Manager’ at Facebook’s What’s APP [sic] division,” Gacek, the senior fellow for regulatory affairs at the group, wrote on Aug. 1, 2016. “LinkedIn sent me a notice about some job openings.”
“This seems perfect for Breitbart to flood the zone with candidates of all stripe who will report back to you / Milo with INTEL about the job application process over at FB,” he continued….
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was the beneficiary of at least one of the Russian-bought political ads on Facebook that federal government officials suspect were intended to influence the 2016 election.
Other advertisements paid for by shadowy Russian buyers criticized Hillary Clinton and promoted Donald Trump. Some backed Bernie Sanders and his platform even after his presidential campaign had ended, according to a person with knowledge of the ads.
The pro-Stein ad came late in the political campaign and pushed her candidacy for president, this person said.
“Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein,” the ad reads. “Trust me. It’s not a wasted vote. … The only way to take our country back is to stop voting for the corporations and banks that own us. #GrowaSpineVoteJillStein.”
The ads show a complicated effort that didn’t necessarily hew to promoting Trump and bashing Clinton. Instead, they show a desire to create divisions while sometimes praising Trump, Sanders and Stein. A number of the ads seemed to question Clinton’s authenticity and tout some of the liberal criticisms of her candidacy….
(This is predictable: Putin’s primary aims were to undermine the American constitutional order generally, and Sec. Clinton specifically. Trump wasn’t the only candidate by which Putin sought to weaken Clinton – Trump was simply the best means by which to damage America.)
President Trump’s approach to governance is unlike that of his recent predecessors, but it is also not without antecedents. The groundwork for some of this dysfunction was laid in the decades before Trump’s emergence as a political figure. Nowhere is that more true than in the disappearance of the norms of American politics.
Norms are defined as “a standard or pattern, especially of social behavior, that is typical or expected of a group.” They are how a person is supposed to behave in a given social setting. We don’t fully appreciate the power of norms until they are violated on a regular? basis. And the breaching of norms often produces a cascading effect: As one person breaks with tradition? and expectation, behavior previously considered inappropriate is normalized and taken up by others. Donald Trump is the Normless President, and his ascendancy threatens to inspire a new wave of norm-breaking.
This would be bad enough if he were entirely a one-off, an amoral figure who suddenly burst onto the scene and took advantage of widespread discontent and an electoral system that tilts outcomes in the direction of his politics. But Trumpism has long been in gestation. His own party, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, has been undercutting the norms of American politics for decades. As the traditionalist conservative Rod Dreher has written, “Trump didn’t come from nowhere. George W. Bush, the Republican Party, and movement conservatism bulldozed the field for Trump without even knowing what they were doing.”
(Needless to say, this excerpt leaves aside the particular – and particularly destructive – role that Russia has played in undermining American norms.)
There’s more – and so worse – even than what Messrs. Dionne, Ornstein, and Mann see nationally: a rot of local norms in towns and cities across this country, sometimes conservative, but more often nonpartisan. A decline in local standards (of insightful analysis, accurate data, honest presentations, and open government) has afflicted communities like Whitewater. See That Which Paved the Way and Whitewater, Cultures & Communications, June 2017 (Part 13: That Which Paved the Way).
No one contributes to a decline while declaring that he does. Instead, those responsible declare that their (actually) lower standards are what it means to be a ‘Whitewater Advocate,’ community booster, etc. In this way, they elevate what’s base, and make base what should be elevated.
Tomorrow: An Unanswered Local Concern About Conflicts.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see a likelihood of afternoon thundershowers with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:43 PM, for 11h 55m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater municipal government has scheduled a public information meeting today on Construction and Resurfacing of WIS 59/Reconstruction Newcomb Street Intersection from 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM.
On this day in 1937, Orson Welles’s The Shadow radio program begins on the Mutual Broadcasting System. On this day in 1864, the 11th Wisconsin Infantry participates in an expedition from Napoleonville to Grand River and Bayou Pigeon, Louisiana.
A comprehensive study released today suggests how many missing votes can be attributed to the new law. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison surveyed registered voters who didn’t cast a 2016 ballot in the state’s two biggest counties—Milwaukee and Dane, which is home to Madison. More than 1 out of 10 nonvoters (11.2 percent) said they lacked acceptable voter ID and cited the law as a reason why they didn’t vote; 6.4 percent of respondents said the voter ID law was the “main reason” they didn’t vote.
The study’s lead author, University of Wisconsin political scientist Kenneth Mayer, says between roughly 9,000 and 23,000 registered voters in the reliably Democratic counties were deterred from voting by the ID law. Extrapolating statewide, he says the data suggests as many as 45,000 voters sat out the election. “We have hard evidence there were tens of thousands of people who were unable to vote because of the voter ID law,” Mayer told me.
The study, which was funded by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, provides some of the firmest evidence yet that new restrictions on voting lead to voter disenfranchisement. It’s a strong rebuke to supporters of voter ID laws like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has claimed that the notion the voter ID law reduced participation is a “load of crap.” (Wisconsin saw its lowest turnout since 2000, and there were 41,000 fewer voters in Milwaukee compared with 2012.)
After the study’s release, McDonell and Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson joined together in calling for an immediate suspension of the law. “It is completely unacceptable that thousands of voters were deterred from exercising their sacred right to vote due to this law. Citizens’ basic belief in their democracy is seriously eroded when those in power target some for exclusion from self-government,” said McDonell….
The batch of more than 3,000 Russian-bought ads that Facebook is preparing to turn over to Congress shows a deep understanding of social divides in American society, with some ads promoting African American rights groups, including Black Lives Matter, and others suggesting that these same groups pose a rising political threat, say people familiar with the covert influence campaign.
The Russian campaign — taking advantage of Facebook’s ability to send contrary messages to different groups of users based on their political and demographic characteristics — also sought to sow discord among religious groups. Other ads highlighted support for Democrat Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.
These targeted messages, along with others that have surfaced in recent days, highlight the sophistication of an influence campaign slickly crafted to mimic and infiltrate U.S. political discourse while also seeking to heighten tensions between groups already wary of one another.
(Putin’s bots and trolls aim to divide Americans, turning members of our free society against each other; Trump tries the same each day, ceaselessly fomenting tension within our society.)
WASHINGTON — At least six of President Trump’s closest advisers occasionally used private email addresses to discuss White House matters, current and former officials said on Monday.
The disclosures came a day after news surfaced that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, used a private email account to send or receive about 100 work-related emails during the administration’s first seven months. But Mr. Kushner was not alone. Stephen K. Bannon, the former chief White House strategist, and Reince Priebus, the former chief of staff, also occasionally used private email addresses. Other advisers, including Gary D. Cohn and Stephen Miller, sent or received at least a few emails on personal accounts, officials said.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, who is married to Mr. Kushner, used a private account when she acted as an unpaid adviser in the first months of the administration, Newsweek reported Monday. Administration officials acknowledged that she also occasionally did so when she formally became a White House adviser. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter with reporters.
Officials are supposed to use government emails for their official duties so their conversations are available to the public and those conducting oversight. But it is not illegal for White House officials to use private email accounts as long as they forward work-related messages to their work accounts so they can be preserved.
During the 2016 presidential race, Mr. Trump repeatedly harped on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private account as secretary of state, making it a centerpiece of his campaign and using it to paint her as untrustworthy. “We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office,” Mr. Trump said last year. His campaign rallies often boiled over with chants of “Lock her up!”….
(Trump does what he accuses others of doing; Trump takes what he insists others should not take.)
Consider a woman who walks into an auto dealer to buy a new car. She asks him about the price of one of his cars, and he tells her that it’s a great bargain. She asks the dealer why it’s a great bargain, and he tells her he can prove it, handing her a piece of paper with twelve words in bright red type:
I can assure you that this is a great bargain, believe me!
What would one say about this? Reasonably, one would say that the prospective buyer should (and would) ask fundamental questions about the purchase — no one would expect her to make a major choice simply in reliance on a few words in large, red type. Indeed, no one would teach a child to make purchases simply in reliance on a seller’s printed, but unsupported, assertion.
And yet, and yet, policy and policymaking in Whitewater over the last generation often falls below the standard one would expect – and hope – of a competent young adult.
If a student in our high school produced a story of a company’s prospects with little more than that company’s press release selectively highlighted in red type, he or she would reasonably expect a poor grade. Whitewater’s policymakers think so little of quality that when a longtime politician-publisher-school-board member does the same, the effort passes for a news story.
These many years have yielded an embarrassing legacy of weak thinking and weak projects.
When residents of Whitewater – and other small towns in this state – look out at empty shops, cracked streets, and above-average child poverty, perhaps some will console themselves that they endured all this for an aged generation’s pride, so that a few could proclaim themselves visionaries, movers and shakers, influencers, dignitaries, whatever.
Although some may console themselves this way, Whitewater – and other small towns in this state – inauspiciously see each year an exodus of many of their best, most creative young people to other places, convinced that they’d rather not live their lives stagnantly under a few aged residents’ false, self-serving claims.
Here one encounters a sad irony: those who fancy themselves ‘Whitewater advocates’ have repeatedly pushed policies, and an unchecked boosterism, that have only reduced Whitewater’s appeal to a new generation.
This Tuesday, September 26th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Shack @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
The Shack (2017) tells of a “grieving father who is drawn to an abandoned shack, where he meets and receives counsel from a woman who calls herself Papa — the name his wife uses to describe God. The faith-based drama stars Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer and Tim McGraw.”
Stuart Hazeldone directs the two hour, twelve-minute film, carrying a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 58m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twentieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the School Board at 7:00 PM.
Video above is from the 50th anniversary of the school’s integration; it’s now sixty years on.
On this day in 1957, federal soldiers escort nine black students to assure the legally-required and morally-necessary beginning of integration at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”
MADISON, Wis. — Behind the locked doors of a “map room,” in a politically connected law firm’s offices across from the historic Capitol, three men worked in secret to ensure the future of the state’s newly triumphant Republican Party.
They were drawing the legislative districts in which members of the Wisconsin Senate and State Assembly would be elected. When the men — two aides to legislative leaders and a lobbyist brought in to help — finished in the early summer of 2011, they headed across the street to present their work.
“The maps we pass will determine who’s here 10 years from now,” read the notes for the meeting, which were made public as part of a lawsuit. “We have an opportunity and an obligation to draw these maps that Republicans haven’t had in decades.”
The maps are now at the center of a Supreme Court case to be argued next month that could change the dynamics of American politics — if the justices decide for the first time that a legislative map is so infected with political favoritism that it violates the Constitution….
Josh Dawsey reports that Kushner used private email to conduct White House business (“The senior adviser set up the account after the election. Other West Wing officials have also used private email accounts for official business”):
Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, part of a larger pattern of Trump administration aides using personal email accounts for government business.
Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”….
Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.
For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.
Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race….
Although President Donald Trump insists otherwise, most Americans say it’s likely that Russian-backed content on social media did affect the outcome of the 2016 election, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS.
The poll result comes on the heels of Facebook’s announcement that it would turn over to Congressional investigators information related to more than 3,000 ads the company says were sold to accounts linked to a Russian troll farm between June 2015 and May 2017. And Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr said he’s planning to hold a public hearing next month on Russian election interference through Facebook and other social media platforms.
Overall, 54% say it’s very or somewhat likely that such Russian-backed content on Facebook or other social media affected the 2016 presidential vote, 43% say that’s not too or not at all likely. More appear to see this social media effort as having affected the outcome of the election than said so about information released due to Russian hacking. According to a CNN poll back in January, just 40% said that information was significant enough to change the outcome of the election….
In America, beef accounts for 37 percent of all human-induced methane released into the air. Methane is 23 times as warming to the climate as carbon dioxide. In a recent article, The Atlantic writer James Hamblin shows how one dietary change—replacing beef with beans—could get the U.S. 74 percent of the way to meeting 2020 greenhouse-gas emission goals. As Hamblin notes, it’s worth being reminded that individual choices matter.
More than one small town has struggled for years under the debilitating influence of political & economic conflicts of interest, misguided priorities, and dodgy or grandiose claims. These conditions where those that That Which Paved the Way for Trumpism. Those locally who carried on this way made Trumpism more likely, the way a moderate illness might weaken one’s immunity and make a deadly illness more likely.
