Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a probability of afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 22m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 84.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6:30 PM.

Recommended for reading in full —

Denise Clifton offers A Chilling Theory on Trump’s Nonstop Lies:

“26 hours, 29 Trumpian False or Misleading Claims.”

That was the headline on a piece last week from the Washington Post, whose reporters continued the herculean task of debunking wave after wave of President Donald Trump’s lies. (It turned out there was a 30th Trump falsehood in that time frame, regarding the head of the Boy Scouts.) The New York Timeskeeps a running tally of the president’s lies since Inauguration Day, and PolitiFact has scrutinized and rated 69 percent of Trump’s statements as mostly false, false, or “pants on fire.”

Trump’s chronic duplicity may be pathological, as some experts have suggested. But what else might be going on here? In fact, the 45th president’s stream of lies echoes a contemporary form of Russian propaganda known as the “Firehose of Falsehood.”

In 2016, the nonpartisan research organization RAND released a study of messaging techniques seen in Kremlin-controlled media. The researchers described two key features: “high numbers of channels and messages” and “a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

The result of those tactics? “New Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”

(I’ve posted the RAND study previously; it bears repeating that Trump’s techniques are almost identical to Soviet and Russian ones.)

As a particular example of a Russian-style talking point, Hannah Levintova observes that The Trump Administration and Kremlin Responses to the New Russian Sanctions Are Very Similar:

In a statement last week, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Congress’ nearly unanimous approval of the sanctions bill indicates that “in certain circles” of US politics “Russophobia and the course of open confrontation with our country have become entrenched.” The ministry added, “[T]he new law on sanctions clearly showed that relations with Russia have become hostage to the internal political struggle within the United States itself.”

Seva Gunitsky, a political-science professor at the University of Toronto and Russia commentator, notes that “by saying things like ‘certain circles’ in Congress are pushing for these sanctions, they are still trying to appeal to Trump. They are saying, ‘Look, these sanctions are not really Trump’s fault; they are the Congress’ fault or the deep state’s fault.’ They don’t say it in those words, but that’s sort of implicit.”

Writing on his Facebook page on Wednesday, Russian lawmaker Konstantin Kosachev also eased Trump’s responsibility for the bill he just signed: “The news is mainly that Trump has given up,” he wrote, noting that Trump’s other option was to go against Congress.

Daniel Fried describes Russia’s Back-to-the-80s Foreign Policy (“Moscow has reprised Cold War tactics against the United States. It’s worth remembering that they didn’t work out well for the Soviet Union last time.”):

“History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” The latest round of Russian-American embassy staff hits—Russia cut hundreds of U.S. Embassy employees in an escalatory response to U.S. expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats last December—recall the big Soviet-American embassy staff expulsions of 1986. Few recall the details of these Reagan-era fights. But many remember that the 1980s ended badly for the Soviet Union.

And that is the point: Moscow now, like then, has been going down a dark road of confrontation with the United States and aggression elsewhere. As with the Soviets and reactionary tsars, external confrontation coincides with, and may be compensation for, stagnation at home. Putin’s tactics, like the demonization of the United States in Russian official media, appear recycled from the Cold War. Russian cyber hacking and disinformation recall Soviet “active measures” of the 1980s. Russia’s low-grade war in Ukraine is different from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (for one thing, the Ukrainians are fighting for a European future), but both aggressions triggered resistance on the ground and from the West. Russia’s leaders can try to convince their people, and themselves, that their ability to bully neighbors, repress dissenters, and shake their fists at the United States, is a sign of strength. But, just like in the mid-1980s, this won’t work.

Despite the hopes of the Soviet regime then and Putin’s regime now, the West is not on its last legs. The anti-European, pro-Russian French nationalist whom Putin supported lost badly in France’s elections this spring. Whatever deal Putin sought or thought he had with President Trump, the power of American institutions and long-term American interests in the success of certain values—including the rule of law, human rights, democracy, and the prosperity these generate—is likely to prevail, which will not help Putin. Neither Putin’s aggression abroad nor his repression at home will fix a stalled Russian economy still dependent on oil, gas, and other raw material exports, or a political system rooted in staggering corruption organized from the top.

Eugene Rumer writes that We’ve Seen This Movie Before. In Russia:

Conventional wisdom holds that the present situation in Washington is unprecedented. The hyperpartisanship, the dysfunctional administration, the accusations of conflicts of interests, the embattled and erratic White House and the president’s reliance on a small circle of trusted insiders, first and foremost his family, have stunned Washington and much of the country and the world. But veteran Russia-watchers have seen this before. They remember Russia in the 1990s.

The president, Boris Yeltsin, a charismatic figure often unable to control his impulses, was a prisoner of the Kremlin, or his out-of-town residence near Moscow. A heavy drinker, he was frequently reported to be unable to perform the duties of his office. He ended up relying on a small group of advisers who became known in Moscow as the “family.” At the center of it was his immediate family, who controlled access to him and his flow of information. First daughter Tatyana was his chief adviser and gatekeeper. Yeltsin’s press spokesman, Valentin Yumashev, who later married Tatyana and became Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was another key figure in the “family.” At one time or another, members of the “family” were reported to be under investigation by various Russian law enforcement agencies on suspicion of corruption. None ever went to trial, but allegations of corruption and ethical violations by those closest to Yeltsin became virtually an everyday feature of Russian political life, and in 1999 Yeltsin sacked the man in charge of the investigation.

(It’s worth noting that Yeltsin, at the right moment, defied the Communist party; Trump has never defied authoritarianism, even for a moment. Indeed, he daydreams of it. Yeltsin was the better, and Trump is the worse, man.)

From NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, here’s What’s Up for August 2017:

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will see a likelihood of afternoon thundershowers and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1939, Leó Szilárd and Albert Einstein send a letter to Pres. Roosevelt urging Roosevelt to consider an atomic bomb project in response to possible Nazi work along those lines:

On July 12, 1939, Szilárd and [Hungarian physicist Eugene] Wigner drove in Wigner’s car to Cutchogue on New York’s Long Island, where Einstein was staying.^[9] When they explained about the possibility of atomic bombs, Einstein replied: Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht (I did not even think about that).^[10] Szilárd dictated a letter in German to the Belgian Ambassador to the United States. Wigner wrote it down, and Einstein signed it. At Wigner’s suggestion, they also prepared a letter for the State Departmentexplaining what they were doing and why, giving it two weeks to respond if it had any objections.^[9]

This still left the problem of getting government support for uranium research. Another friend of Szilárd’s, the Austrian economist Gustav Stolper, suggested approaching Alexander Sachs, who had access to PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt. Sachs told Szilárd that he had already spoken to the President about uranium, but that Fermi and Pegram had reported that the prospects for building an atomic bomb were remote. He told Szilárd that he would deliver the letter, but suggested that it come from someone more prestigious. For Szilárd, Einstein was again the obvious choice.^[6] Sachs and Szilárd drafted a letter riddled with spelling errors and mailed it to Einstein.^[11]

Szilárd set out for Long Island again on August 2. Wigner was unavailable, so this time Szilárd co-opted another Hungarian physicist, Edward Teller, to do the driving. Einstein dictated the letter in German. On returning to Columbia University, Szilárd dictated the letter in English to a young departmental stenographer, Janet Coatesworth. She later recalled that when Szilárd mentioned extremely powerful bombs, she “was sure she was working for a nut”.^[12] Ending the letter with “Yours truly, Albert Einstein” did nothing to alter this impression. Both the letter and a longer explanatory letter were then posted to Einstein.^[12]

Recommended for reading in full:

Yascha Mounk writes that The Past Week Proves That Trump Is Destroying Our Democracy:

Over just a few days last week, President Trump and his allies stepped up attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the campaign’s connections to Russia. They tried to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of office. They thought out loud about whether the president can pardon himself.

This all points to the same conclusion: Mr. Trump is willing to deal a major blow to the rule of law — and the American Republic — in order to end an independent investigation into his Russia ties.

It is tempting to picture the demise of democracy as a Manichaean drama in which the stakes are clear from the start and the main actors fully understand their roles: Would-be dictators rail against democracy, hire violent thugs to do their bidding and vow to destroy the opposition. When they demand expanded powers or attack independent institutions, their supporters and opponents alike realize that authoritarianism has arrived.

There have, in fact, been a few times and places when the villains were quite as villainous, and the heroes quite as heroic. (Think Germany in the 1930s.) But in most cases, the demise of democracy has been far more gradual and far easier to overlook….

(Dark those these times are, yet one can still reasonably believe that there are in America enough who see this, and from among them enough who will resist.)

Philip Bump has for readers A timeline of the explosive lawsuit alleging a White House link in the Seth Rich conspiracy:

NPR’s David Folkenflik reported Tuesday morning on a lawsuit filed by a man named Rod Wheeler that makes a remarkable claim: The Trump White House — or President Trump personally — may have been aware of or involved in a discredited Fox News story about the killing of a Democratic National Committee staffer last July.

It’s a complicated story that, we hasten to add, is based on allegations in a lawsuit filed by a person whose quotes in that discredited story were themselves discredited. But the lawsuit includes documentary evidence (like text messages), and Folkenflik was given access to recorded calls that bolster the story as presented. What’s more, the lawsuit is predicated on Wheeler’s assertion that he never said the quotes attributed to him.

Given the complexity of the story, we’ve taken the details in the lawsuit and arranged them as a timeline. First, though, it’s important to understand the cast of characters [charcaters and timeline follow]…

Margaret Sullivan observes that You don’t have to believe everything in that Seth Rich lawsuit. What’s been confirmed is bad enough:

Now, though, we know that Spicer [despite his denial on 5.16.17] was indeed aware that Fox News was cooking up a story that would eventually be amplified and twisted into a huge, baseless conspiracy theory.

And — if you choose to believe everything in the lawsuit by former police investigator and Fox contributor Rod Wheeler — President Trump himself encouraged the bogus story in advance. (Wheeler’s suit claims he was misquoted by the network.)

At its most outrageous, the conspiracy theory that grew out of that initial Fox story suggested that Hillary Clinton arranged to have Rich assassinated after he betrayed the DNC by sending internal information to WikiLeaks during the campaign. All of this was based on the idea that an internal mole betrayed the DNC and that Russian hackers had nothing to do with it.

Let’s be clear: There’s no basis for that craziness and never has been. Although the killing remains unsolved, D.C. police continue to view the shooting of 27-year-old Rich as part of a botched robbery attempt.

Garrison Keillor reassuringly believes that We will survive this:

So. We have a vulgar, unstable yo-yo with a toxic ego and an attention-deficit problem in the White House, and now we can see that government by Twitter is like trying to steer a ship by firing a pistol at the waves — not really useful — but what does it all add up to? Not that much, if you ask me, which you didn’t, but I’ll say it anyway.

 We will survive this. He will do what damage he can, like a man burning books out of anger that he can’t read, but there will still be plenty of books left….

Good morning.

A new month in Whitewater begins with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1790, the first United States Census finds just under four million people in the country. On this day in 1832, the steamboat Warrior blocks Black Hawk’s escape across the Mississippi.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ashley Parker, Carol D. Leonnig, Philip Rucker and Tom Hamburger report that Trump dictated son’s misleading statement on meeting with Russian lawyer:

Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”

Over the next three days, multiple accounts of the meeting were provided to the news media as public pressure mounted, with Trump Jr. ultimately acknowledging that he had accepted the meeting after receiving an emailpromising damaging information about Hillary Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father’s campaign.

The extent of the president’s personal intervention in his son’s response, the details of which have not previously been reported, adds to a series of actions that Trump has taken that some advisers fear could place him and some members of his inner circle in legal jeopardy.

David Folkenflik reports from Behind Fox News’ Baseless Seth Rich Story: The Untold Tale:

The Fox News Channel and a wealthy supporter of President Trump worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct a story about the murder of a young Democratic National Committee aide, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The explosive claim is part of the lawsuit filed against Fox News by Rod Wheeler, a longtime paid commentator for the news network. The suit was obtained exclusively by NPR.

Wheeler alleges Fox News and the Trump supporter intended to deflect public attention from growing concern about the administration’s ties to the Russian government. His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) writes My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump:

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion”….

(I’ll assume that Flake is sincere in his views, but much more will have to be done than for a conservative senator to write remorsefully about Trumpism. Flake’s party nominated Trump, and attended his inauguration; by contrast, many millions of us have opposed and resisted him all the while.)

Bret Stephens writes of The ‘No Guardrails’ Presidency:

Trumpism wasn’t just some bottom-up movement. It, too, had its professors, politicians and journalistic commentators — the theoreticians, enablers, sanctifiers, excuse makers and Never Never-Trumpers — who gave the movement a patina of intellectual respectability and moral seriousness that Trump himself had done nothing to earn.

They are our new Antinomians, who believe the president and his administration are bound by no law, even the Mosaic one, because they have already been saved by a new version of grace — in this case, the grace of defeating Hillary Clinton. Thought exercise for Trump’s media defenders: If the president were to sexually assault a woman in the Oval Office tomorrow, would you still justify your vote on the view that Neil Gorsuch’s elevation to the Supreme Court made it all worthwhile?

“The first duty of a revolutionist is to get away with it,” Abbie Hoffman said in Chicago in 1968. This might as well be the slogan of this administration and its supporters, too.

In the meantime, we have a “No Guardrails” presidency, in which Trump’s contempt for law, procedure and decorum are a license for the behavior of his minions and a model for future American demagogues and their apologists.

Man meets bears, narrates:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 8:15 PM, for 14h 29m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58,9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1930, The Shadow, the narrator of the Detective Story Hour, first goes on the air: “The narrator was initially voiced by James LaCurto,[6] who was replaced after four months by prolific character actor Frank Readick Jnr. The episodes were drawn from the Detective Story Magazine issued by Street and Smith, “the nation’s oldest and largest publisher of pulp magazines.” Although the latter company had hoped the radio broadcasts would boost the declining sales of Detective Story Magazine, the result was quite different. Listeners found the sinister announcer much more compelling than the unrelated stories. They soon began asking newsdealers for copies of “that Shadow detective magazine,” even though it did not exist.”

On this day in 1967, Lake Geneva bans go-go girls (“the Lake Geneva city government passed an ordinance banning go-go girls, dancers in bikinis, and swimsuit-clad waitresses from working in establishments that served alcohol”).

Recommended for reading in full —

The Washington Post editorial board observes that Russian propaganda has flooded U.S. airwaves. How about some reciprocity?:

The asymmetry is a problem. Mr. Putin’s government, intent on undermining liberal democracies by casting doubt on the very notion of truth, and sowing division and doubt about basic Western institutions, has become increasingly adept at weaponizing information. U.S. intelligence agencies have called attention to Moscow’s fake news campaign, as have U.S. allies in Europe.

Yet in the realm of U.S.-Russian international news, reciprocity seems absent from Mr. Trump’s radar. A 24/7 Russian-language television venture produced by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, called Current Time, has been up and running for several months, producing high-quality news, but is available only online.

The asymmetry is a problem. Mr. Putin’s government, intent on undermining liberal democracies by casting doubt on the very notion of truth, and sowing division and doubt about basic Western institutions, has become increasingly adept at weaponizing information. U.S. intelligence agencies have called attention to Moscow’s fake news campaign, as have U.S. allies in Europe.

Mattathais Schwartz reports that Internal Documents Show How the Nation’s Top Spy Is Instructed to Talk About Trump:

ProPublica has obtained internal talking points, apparently written by one of Coats’ aides, anticipating questions that [NBC’s Lester] Holt was likely to ask. They offer a window into the euphemisms and evasions necessary to handle a pressing issue for Coats: how to lead the intelligence community at a time when the president has insulted it on Twitter and denigrated its work while questions about Russian influence consume ever more time and attention in Washington. Sixteen of the 26 questions addressed by the talking points concerned internal White House politics, the Russia investigation, or the president himself. One question put the challenges facing Coats this way: “How can you work as DNI for a president that undermines your work?”

DNI spokesman Brian Hale told ProPublica that the 17-page document was a small, unclassified part of “a thick binder” of preparation documents for Coats’ interview. The other pieces, according to Hale, “had substantive material on Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea.” The talking points document, he said, “was designed to address the questions we anticipated being asked because of the news cycle.”

….In the talking points, Coats was advised to say that he and the president have “a trusted relationship,” framing any disagreements as constructive ones. “We may not always agree,” the document stated. “We must maintain an open dialogue … the relationship portrayed in the media between the president and the intelligence community is a far cry from what I have personally experienced and witnessed … there is a healthy dialogue and a good back and forth discussion.”

David Sanger writes that Putin’s Bet on a Trump Presidency Backfires Spectacularly:

President Vladimir V. Putin bet that Donald J. Trump, who had spoken fondly of Russia and its authoritarian leader for years, would treat his nation as Mr. Putin has longed to have it treated by the West. That is, as the superpower it once was, or at least a major force to be reckoned with, from Syria to Europe, and boasting a military revived after two decades of neglect.

That bet has now backfired, spectacularly. If the sanctions overwhelmingly passed by Congress last week sent any message to Moscow, it was that Mr. Trump’s hands are now tied in dealing with Moscow, probably for years to come.

Just weeks after the two leaders spent hours in seemingly friendly conversation in Hamburg, Germany, the prospect of the kinds of deals Mr. Trump once mused about in interviews seems more distant than ever. Congress is not ready to forgive the annexation of Crimea, nor allow extensive reinvestment in Russian energy. The new sanctions were passed by a coalition of Democrats who blame Mr. Putin for contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat and Republicans fearful that their president misunderstands who he is dealing with in Moscow.

Fred Hiatt asks readers to Behold the Trump boomerang effect:

Once you start looking, you find the boomerang at work in many surprising places. Trump’s flirting with a ban on Muslim immigration encouraged federal judges to encroach on executive power over visa policy. Firing FBI Director James B. Comey entrenched the Russia investigation far more deeply. Withdrawing from the Paris climate treaty spurred states from California to Virginia to toughen their policies on global warming. Threatening the research budget may have strengthened the National Institutes of Health’s hand in Washington. And so on.

The boomerang effect is no panacea. Trump can still do grave damage at home and abroad in the next 3½ years. If he undermined Obamacare, millions of people would suffer before we got to single-payer. Nationalist governments ensconced in parts of Eastern Europe could still draw strength from Trump. The absence of U.S. leadership in the world leaves ample ground for others to cause trouble.

But Trump’s policies are turning against him, and not only because his execution has been so ham-handed. The key factor is that so many of his policies run so counter to the grain of cherished values and ideals.

Tech Insider explains Why most planes are white:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 31m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1619, the first European-style legislative assembly in the Americas “convened for a six-day meeting at the church on Jamestown Island, Virginia. A council chosen by the Virginia Company as advisers to the governor, the Virginia Governor’s Council, met as a sort of “upper house,” while 22 locally elected representatives met as the House of Burgesses. Together, the House of Burgesses and the Council would be the Virginia General Assembly.”

Recommended for reading in full —

April Glaser observes that The New Wisconsin Foxconn Plant Will Probably Be Staffed By Robots—if It Ever Gets Built:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset is 8:18 PM, for 14h 33m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1588, the English defeat the Spanish Armada in the Battle of Gravelines. On this day in 1863, the 13th Wisconsin Infantry fights in a skirmish at Fort Donelson, Tennessee.

Recommended for reading in full —

Annie Lowrey assesses the economics of the Wisconsin’s latest corporate handout in Foxconned:

….tax incentives tend to sap state coffers without necessarily generating good jobs or creating positive spillovers in the regional economy—both things that would boost a state’s tax revenues and thus help justify the investment. “Incentives are still far too broadly provided to many firms that do not pay high wages, do not provide many jobs, and are unlikely to have research spin-offs,” argues Timothy J. Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a labor-market research organization, in a major analysis of such state and local tax breaks. “Too many incentives excessively sacrifice the long-term tax base of state and local economies. Too many incentives are refundable and without real budget limits. States devote relatively few resources to incentives that are services, such as customized job training.”

Plus, states rarely seem to consider whether the money they lavish on corporations might be better spent elsewhere—on public goods like bridges, say, or educational initiatives for their workforces. “If offering more tax incentives requires spending less on public education, congestion-relieving infrastructure projects, workforce development, police and fire protection, or high technology initiatives at public universities, the overall impact on a state’s economy could actually be negative,” argues the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research group. “While the long-term economic benefits of education and infrastructure investments may not be as flashy as incentive-backed ribbon-cutting ceremonies, these investments are even more fundamental to any successful economy.”

All of these things might be true of the Foxconn deal—and one way or another, 3,000 or 13,000 jobs does not a manufacturing renaissance make. If it even happens: Foxconn made a splashy and lavishly praised promise to build a new high-tech factory in central Pennsylvania a few years ago. It never followed through.

Molly Beck reports that a pending Bill significantly rolls back environmental rules for Foxconn:

Despite $3 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies, technology giant Foxconn would be given wide latitude to bypass state environmental regulations in building and operating its 1,000-acre electronics manufacturing plant in southeastern Wisconsin under a proposal from Gov. Scott Walker.

Walker unveiled the sprawling bill Friday as he called lawmakers to convene a special legislative session to pass the measure aimed at speeding up construction of Foxconn’s planned liquid-crystal display panel factory.

The bill lawmakers will consider as early as Tuesday allows the company to move or change the course of streams, build man-made bodies of water that connect with natural waterways and discharge materials in state wetlands without authorization from the state Department of Natural Resources. It exempts the company from being subject to an environmental impact statement.

Richard Engel reports that the Russian Kaspersky Lab faces new scrutiny, suspicion:

Much of Thursday’s hearing was spent getting at the bigger question: Why is the Russian president so fixated on the Magnitsky Act?

There are two reasons, according to Browder:

The first is purely financial. Browder believes Putin is the richest man in the world, with an assortment of assets worth what Browder estimates to be $200 billion at his disposal, but those assets are “held all over the world” including in America. When the accounts of Putin’s intermediaries are frozen because of the law, that is in effect, freezing some of Putin’s cash flow as well.

The second is that the banking sanctions imposed by the law devalue Putin’s promises, and so decrease his power. Putin gets his intermediaries to “arrest, kidnap, torture and kill” by promising absolute impunity, Browder said. But the law’s sanctions create a tangible consequence. Not only do the sanctions affect violators vis-a-vis their U.S. dealings, but, internationally, other banks abide by a sanctions list put out by the Treasury Department that includes those found to have violated the Magnitsky Act, Browder explained to lawmakers. “As a result, you basically become a financial pariah,” he said.

“This is a war of ideology between rule of law and criminality,” Browder also told the senators. “And if we allow all the corrupt money to come here, then it’s going to corrupt us until we end up like them.”

BBC Earth shows how Whales, Sharks, Dolphins and Sea Lions snack on sardines:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:43 AM and sunset 8:19 PM, for 14h 35m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1914, the First World War begins: “Over nine million combatants and seven million civilians died as a result of the war (including the victims of a number of genocides), a casualty rate exacerbated by the belligerents’ technological and industrial sophistication, and the tactical stalemate caused by gruelling trench warfare. It was one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and paved the way for major political changes, including revolutions in many of the nations involved and to the Second World War twenty-one years later.”

On this day in 1934, two are killed and dozens injured in a Kohler riot: “On this day, the “model industrial village” of Kohler became an armed camp of National Guard cavalrymen after deadly strike-related rioting. The July 27th violence, which killed two Sheboygan men and injured 40 others, prompted the summoning of 250 Guardsmen to join the 200 special deputy village marshals already present. After striking workers became agitated and began to destroy company property, deputies turned to tear gas, rifles, and shotguns to quell the stone-throwing crowd, resulting in the deaths and injuries. Owner Walter Kohler blamed Communists and outside agitators for the violence, while union leaders blamed Kohler exclusively. Workers at the Kohler plant were demanding better hours, higher wages, and recognition of the American Federation of Labor as their collective bargaining agent. Not settled until 1941, the strike marked the beginning of what was to become a prolonged struggle between the Kohler Company and organized labor in Wisconsin; a second Kohler strike lasted from 1954 to 1965.”

Recommended for reading in full —

James Hohlman writes that Trump’s hardball tactics backfire as ‘skinny repeal’ goes down:

THE BIG IDEA: President Trump’s attacks on Republican senators are finally catching up with him, and Lisa Murkowski will not be bullied….

Trump, who won Alaska by 15 points, ripped the state’s senior senator on Twitter Wednesday after she opposed a key procedural motion to open debate on health care….

Later that day, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called Murkowski and the state’s other Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, to threaten that the Trump administration may change its position on several issues that affect the state to punish Murkowski, such as blocking energy exploration and plans to allow the construction of new roads. “The message was pretty clear,” Sullivan told the Alaska Dispatch News….

This demonstrated the degree to which Zinke’s ham-handed phone call was political malpractice. The secretary, or whoever at the White House ordered him to make the calls, clearly doesn’t understand the awesome power that comes with being the chairman of a Senate committee. Only an amateur would threaten the person who has oversight over his agency! If she wants, Murkowski can make Zinke’s life so unbelievably miserable. He has no idea. (The Interior Department did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thomas Kaplan offers 5 Takeaways From the Failed Senate Effort to Repeal Obamacare:

The process matters.
Republicans grumbled about the secretive manner in which the majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, put together his repeal bill. There were no public hearings or formal bill-drafting sessions, and Republicans used a fast-track procedure meant for budget matters as they tried to enact complex health policy and avoid a filibuster….

The final hours of the repeal effort seemed worse than ever: Republican leaders unveiled their bill and then expected their members to vote for it hours later, and in the middle of the night, no less….

President Trump was no help.

Without the election of Mr. Trump last year, putting a Republican in the White House, the repeal effort would have been an academic exercise, ending in a certain veto. But Mr. Trump did not prove persuasive in recent days.

In public, he did not show much fluency in the basics of health policy, let alone the ability to persuade Republicans on complicated issues like the growth rate of Medicaid payments. And he did himself no favors by changing his demands about exactly what he wanted the Senate to do….

David A. Graham asks How Long Can This Go On?:

No one can be surprised by the antipathy between top Trump advisers—for months, the press has been full of reports about skirmishes between various, rotating cliques—but such fights have not been not discussed this openly. This was true even in the early days of the Clinton White House, the previous gold standard for early-term dysfunction. Though staffers were frequently stabbing each other in the back, including undercutting the then-chief of staff (sound familiar?), they were not calling up The New Yorker to speak about it on the record. (They were also living in a pre-internet era, though that would change by the second term, when Drudge Report first revealed the Monica Lewinsky scandal.)

But Scaramucci put it best on CNN Thursday morning: “The fish stinks from the head down.” President Trump has set the tone for making these fights public with his own bizarre, cruel treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In two newspaper interviews and in a series of tweets, Trump has lambasted Sessions—one of his earliest and most loyal supporters—as weak and ineffective, and has complained about his decision to recuse himself from investigations of Trump’s relations with Russia, calling it “unfair” to the president. Not since the Andrew Johnson administration has a president so viciously attacked one of his own Cabinet members.

(I’d answer Graham by saying that this will go on as long as Trump and his ilk hold power – they are manifestly unfit and their inadequacies are irremediable.)

Danielle Paquette calculates that Foxconn deal to build massive factory in Wisconsin could cost the state $230,700 per worker:

On the table is up to $3 billion in state tax breaks. The state legislature could approve the economic incentive package as early as August.

These payouts, Wisconsin officials said, come with lofty expectations. As long as Foxconn keeps hiring  U.S. workers at the new flat-screen manufacturing facility, Wisconsin would cut the company $200 million to $250 million a year for up to 15 years.

That works out to a rough cost to the state of about $230,700 per worker, assuming the factory goes on to generate 13,000 jobs.

(I’ll compile a post for next week with Wisconsin press coverage of the proposal, most of it positively gushing and credulous. It’s worth keeping in mind Foxconn’s sketchy pst promises: How Foxconn’s broken pledges in Pennsylvania cast doubt on Trump’s jobs plan.)

One reads with much sadness that June Foray, the voice of so many memorable animated characters, has passed away at the age of ninety-nine. Hers was a life well-lived, bringing happiness to so many people:

June Foray, the famed “first lady of voice actors” whose repertoire of characters include Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Pottsylvanian spy Natasha Fatale, Tweety Bird’s owner Granny and a sinister talking doll, has died. She was 99.

Foray, who worked alongside such animated legends as Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Stan Freberg and Jay Ward during her unseen yet spectacular eight-decade career, died Wednesday according to close friend Dave Nimitz who posted a notice of her passing on Facebook.…

When asked in a 2000 interview with the Archive of American Television to name her favorite cartoon character, she said: “I love the [Rocky and] Bullwinkle show because it’s so mordantly witty. … But I love everything I do with all of the parts that I do because there’s a little bit of me in all of them.

“We all have anger and jealousy and love and hope in our natures. We try to communicate that vocally with just sketches that you see on the screen and make it come alive and make it human.”