This Tuesday, January 30th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Battle of the Sexes @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Simon Beaufoy directs the two-hour, one-minute film. Battle of the Sexes is a historical comedy-drama: “The true story of the 1973 tennis match between women’s world champion Billie Jean King (Emma Stone) and ex-men’s champ Bobby Riggs (Steve Carell), in the wake of the sexual revolution and the rise of the women’s movement. A biography/comedy/drama of an event watched by over 100 million people worldwide.”
The movie carries a rating of PG-13 from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:04 PM, for 9h 53m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fifth 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.
On this day in 1845, Edgar Allan Poe publishes The Raven. On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites fight in South Carolina in defense of the Union: “The 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fought a skirmish at the Combahee River on the coast of South Carolina, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fought another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, South Carolina.”
A Trump administration proposal to nationalize a portion of the nation’s wireless network in order to combat threats from China in 5G raises many technical, logistical and political concerns, including a fierce debate over the proper role of government in business.
The bottom line: The proposal calls for aggressive government involvement in the private wireless market, representing a significant shift in U.S. industrial policy that would hugely disrupt the business plans of America’s largest telecom and technology companies.
As first reported by Axios, a proposal circulated by Trump’s National Security Council proposes building a national 5G network in a chunk of airwaves, known as mid-band spectrum.
While the security of the wireless network and competition with China are both real threats, experts doubt the feasibility of this approach and question whether it would actually lead to a faster, more secure path to 5G connectivity.
(It’s just as likely that China’s being used as bogeyman to justify a Trump Administration proposal to nationalize an incipient next-generation communications network.)
President Donald Trump pressed senior aides last June to devise and carry out a campaign to discredit senior FBI officials after learning that those specific employees were likely to be witnesses against him as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, according to two people directly familiar with the matter.
In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8, recently fired FBI Director James Comey disclosed that he spoke contemporaneously with other senior bureau officials about potentially improper efforts by the president to curtail the FBI’s investigation of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Mueller is investigating whether Trump’s efforts constituted obstruction of justice.
Not long after Comey’s Senate testimony, Trump hired John Dowd, a veteran criminal defense attorney, to represent him in matters related to Mueller’s investigation. Dowd warned Trump that the potential corroborative testimony of the senior FBI officials in Comey’s account would likely play a central role in the special counsel’s final conclusion, according to people familiar with the matter.
In discussions with at least two senior White House officials, Trump repeated what Dowd had told him to emphasize why he and his supporters had to “fight back harder,” in the words of one of these officials.
In a brief conversation Friday afternoon, Dowd denied the accounts of administration officials contained in this story as “flat-out wrong,” but he also refused to discuss what details were incorrect. “My advice to the president is confidential,” he told Foreign Policy.
“You don’t know me,” Dowd added. “You don’t how I lawyer,and you don’t know what I communicated to the president and what I did not.”
MOSCOW — Protesters across Russia braved icy temperatures on Sunday to demonstrate against the lack of choice in the March election that is virtually certain to see President Vladimir V. Putin chosen for a fourth term.
“What we are being offered right now are not elections, and we must not participate in them,” Yevgeny Roizman, the mayor of the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg and a rare elected official from an opposition party, told a crowd of hundreds that had gathered in protest.
The protests in scores of cities — from Vladivostok in the east to Kaliningrad in the west — were called by Aleksei A. Navalny, the charismatic, anticorruption opposition leader, after he was barred from running for the presidency because of legal problems that he said had been manufactured to prevent his candidacy.
“You have your own life at stake,” Mr. Navalny said in a recorded message urging protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where the rallies were banned, to turn out. “Every additional year of Putin staying in power is one more year of decay.”
Attacking the government as thieves, he said: “How many more years will you keep getting a lower salary than you are due? For how many more years will your business receive less revenue than it is due?”
Mr. Navalny was detained before he reached the several thousand demonstrators gathered in Pushkin Square in central Moscow and other main avenues closer to the Kremlin. Video footage showed police officers, who over all were far more restrained than during previous demonstrations, tackling him and dragging him onto a bus.
Capitalism has worked out really well for Jay-Z. So well in fact, that he recently dedicated an entire song to promoting capitalism as a tool of black empowerment. But even with promises of lowered taxes, and financial incentives for the wealthy—things that a wealthy capitalist should in theory love— Sean “Jay-Z” Carter still doesn’t think that President Trump is doing that much good for the black community.
In an interview with the CNN* host Van Jones on Saturday, Jones brought up reports that Trump referred to a number of countries, including many in Africa, as “shithole countries” and then asked if it was okay for Trump to “say terrible things but put money in our pockets.” Carter unequivocally said no, adding “it’s not about money at the end of the day. Money doesn’t equate to happiness. It doesn’t. That’s missing the whole point.”
Trump took umbrage at the remarks, tweeting, “Somebody please inform Jay-Z that because of my policies, Black Unemployment has just been reported to be at the LOWEST RATE EVER RECORDED!” As I’ve written before, Trump touting the black unemployment rate ignores some crucial context about the economy: First, the black unemployment rate has been dropping for the past eight years. Trump has only been president for one of them. Second, even at 6.8 percent, the black unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high as that of whites.
Trump’s response to Carter confirms precisely what the rapper was trying to say in the first place—that the president fundamentally misunderstands the aims of the black capitalism and the needs of the black community. Jay-Z, and many before him, have espoused capitalism and economic empowerment as a means to an end: racial equality. Being rich is a secondary benefit to the power, stability, and peace of mind that money can provide in a country that has forced blacks into poverty and segregation.
➤ Pow Surf 101 shows the beauty of nature and the beauty of snowboarding through nature:
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 51m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1986, the space shuttle Challenger explodes 73 seconds after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, killing all seven crew members, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. (“Challenger was named after HMS Challenger, a British corvette that was the command ship for the Challenger Expedition, a pioneering global marine research expedition undertaken from 1872 through 1876.”) On this day in 1959, Lombardi becomes Packers coach: “He had been the offensive backfield coach of the New York Giants for the previous five seasons. Lombardi went on to coach the Packers for nine years, winning five NFL Championships and victories in Super Bowls I and II. ”
New federal court data shows the Western District of Wisconsin had the highest number of farm bankruptcies in the country last year.
The Western District had 28 Chapter 12 bankruptcy cases filed in 2017, a chapter specifically for family farmers or fishermen. The district includes 44 counties and covers more than half of the geographic area of the state.
The Eastern District of Wisconsin had 17 cases and the Minnesota District had 19 cases. There are 94 federal court districts in the United States.
“The increase in Chapter 12 bankruptcies is certainly an anomaly when you compare it to the other types of bankruptcies,” said Christopher Seelen, an Eau Claire attorney who represents creditors in bankruptcy court. “People seem to have jobs, and the economy seems to be going well for most folks. Unfortunately for some of these farmers who are suffering through these low grain prices, the economy is not going as well for them.”
(All those Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation grants & loans, eight years of bold declarations of being ‘open for business,’ and yet rural Wisconsin remains a struggling afterthought.)
Instead of taking Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election seriously and leading an impartial and bipartisan inquiry, Nunes has colluded with the White House. Last March, Nunes said he’d seen secret intelligence reports backing Trump’s claims that President Barack Obama had “wiretapped” his offices, but it turned out the documents came from the administration.
Now, he’s being celebrated in Trumpworld with the four-page memo that accuses the FBI of political bias and misdeeds. Drafted by Nunes staffers, it apparently summarizes classified material and alleges abuse of the surveillance process by the FBI and Justice Department to target the Trump campaign. Conservative media and some Republicans in Congress are calling for it to be released publicly and using it to call for Mueller’s investigation to be shut down.
New evidence suggests that the damage he is doing to the culture is bigger than the man. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found that two-thirds of Americans say Trump is not a good role model for children. Every component of society feels that way — men and women, old and young, black and white, highly educated or not — except for one: Republicans. By 72 to 22 percent, they say Trump is a good role model.
In marked contrast to the rest of the country, Republicans also say that Trump shares their values (82 percent) and that — get this — he “provides the United States with moral leadership” (80 percent).
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No doubt some of those Republicans now condoning Trump’s behavior will give the standard rebuttal: What about the Clintons? Well, Quinnipiac didn’t poll nationally during the Clinton presidency, but Gallup, during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in January 1999, asked a similar question. The number of Republicans back then saying Clinton did not provide good moral leadership, 91 percent, was similar to the 96 percent of Democrats who say Trump does not provide moral leadership today. The difference: Democrats disapproved of Clinton’s morality by 2 to 1 (65 to 33 percent), even as they overwhelmingly approved of his job performance. Only 16 percent of Republicans today say Trump does not provide moral leadership.
The triumph of partisanship over morality starts at the top. Franklin Graham excused Trump’s alleged sexual encounter, and Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, declared that Trump gets a “mulligan” — a do-over — for his behavior.
Such normalizing of Trump’s behavior makes the seediest elements feel safe to crawl out from under their rocks. The FBI reported in November that hate crimes were up again in 2016 after rising in 2015. And the Anti-Defamation League reported that anti-Semitic incidents were “significantly higher” through the first nine months of 2017 — a time in which Trump said there were “very fine people” among a march of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. (This month, as Trump was whipping up loathing of the “fake news” media, a young man was arrested for threatening to gun down CNN journalists.)
Naked mole rats feel no pain. They’re exceptionally long-lived. They frequently enter reversible comas, and a single queen mole rat rules over her colony with totalitarian authority. They can also survive without oxygen for extended periods of time—a feat that almost no other animal can accomplish. In this episode of “Animalism,” Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, explains why the naked mole rat is one of the strangest animals in the kingdom..
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 5:02 PM, for 9h 49m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1943, an all-American force of fifty-five bombers strikes the German port city of Wilhelmshaven. 9th Wisconsin Light Artillery Battery musters in: ” It spent most of the war in the far West guarding forts and trains in Colorado, New Mexico, and Kansas. In 1864 it returned east to Missouri and Arkansas and saw limited combat. In three years it lost only six men, all to disease.”
It is this question of corrupt intent that makes the Times’srecent blockbuster scoop so important. According to the article, the President tried to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, last June, but he stopped when Don McGahn, the White House counsel, threatened to resign if Trump insisted on the dismissal. Trump apparently offered three justifications to fire Mueller—that Mueller had left one of Trump’s golf clubs in a dispute about dues; that Mueller’s former law firm had represented Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law; and that Trump had interviewed Mueller as a possible interim replacement for Comey as F.B.I. director. McGahn’s threat to resign shows that he saw these purported reasons as pretexts. The golf-dues matter was obviously trivial; the law firm’s representation of Kushner, which did not involve Mueller at all, could only have biased the special counsel in favor of the President’s family; and Trump’s willingness to interview Mueller for the F.B.I. position showed how much the President trusted Mueller, not that he believed the former F.B.I. director harbored any animosity toward him.
McGahn recognized the key fact—that Trump wanted to fire Mueller for the wrong reasons. Trump wanted to fire Mueller because his investigation was threatening to him. This, of course, also illuminates the reasons behind Trump’s firing of Comey, which took place just a month before the President’s confrontation with McGahn regarding Mueller. Trump and his advisers have offered various tortured rationalizations for the firing of Comey—initially, for example, on the ground that Comey had been unfair to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign. Trump himself came clean in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt and in a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister. In both, Trump acknowledged that he fired Comey to stall or stop the Russia investigation—that is, the investigation of Trump himself and his campaign.
This was an improper purpose, and McGahn clearly saw that the same improper purpose underlay Trump’s determination to fire Mueller. So McGahn issued the ultimatum that prompted the President to back down.
Mueller and his team surely have evidence on obstruction of justice that has not yet been made public. But even on the available evidence, Trump’s position looks perilous indeed. The portrait is of a President using every resource at his disposal to shut down an investigation—of Trump himself. And now it has become clear that Trump’s own White House counsel rebelled at the President’s rationale for his actions.
(Yes. Perhaps one might say increasingly clear, as Trump’s own words have brought about already the foundation of a case.)
Before it came out that President Trump sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller last June, Trump and his aides repeatedly said he wasn’t giving “any thought” to dismissing him.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.
The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”
Reached by The Verge, Vigilant declined to confirm any contract with ICE. “As policy, Vigilant Solutions is not at liberty to share any contractual details,” the company said in a statement. “This is a standard agreement between our company, our partners, and our clients.”
While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.
The Paris Zoological Park has been evacuated and closed after dozens of baboons escaped their enclosure.
As zookeepers raced to round up the animals, armed police surrounded the popular attraction and sealed off nearby roads.
About 50 baboons were reported to have got out and congregated around the Grand Rocher, the fake rock centrepiece of the zoo, on Friday morning. Most had been rounded up and sent back to their shelters a few hours later, but four remained on the loose.
Officials at the zoo said the animals had not come in contact with the public as they had remained in areas inaccessible to visitors.
Members of the public had been evacuated as a precaution because baboons could be unpredictable “especially when stressed”. “They’re stronger than us,” they added.
The emergency services were called, and keepers, vets and a team carrying tranquilliser darts were on the scene in minutes and surrounded the animals.
Musher Richard Morgan with his husky during a training session at Feshiebridge ahead of the The Siberian Husky Club of Great Britain’s 35th Aviemore Sled Dog Rally being held this upcoming weekend on forest trails around Loch Morlich, in the shadow of the Cairngorm mountains.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 5:00 PM, for 9h 46m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On the other side of the world, Australians are celebrating Australia Day: “Celebrated annually on 26 January, it marks the anniversary of the 1788 arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Port Jackson, New South Wales and the raising of the Flag of Great Britain at Sydney Cove by Governor Arthur Phillip. In present-day Australia, celebrations reflect the diverse society and landscape of the nation and are marked by community and family events, reflections on Australian history, official community awards and citizenship ceremonies welcoming new members of the Australian community.” On this day in 1925, fire destroys the Whitewater Hospital.
First, the Times’s reporting demonstrates just how out of control the president had become in June, less than a month after firing James Comey as FBI director. A few of his tweets from that time offer a stark reminder that the special counsel’s investigation—and Rosenstein’s appointment of Mueller—weighed heavily even in his public statements.
…
Second, Trump’s apparent willingness to fire the special counsel in a fit of rage—even after experiencing the blowback that followed his dismissal of Comey—drives home the fact that his hints about firing other senior members of federal law enforcement are far from idle. Indeed, the Times broke this story only days after Axios reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had pressured FBI Director Christopher Wray to dismiss Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. As with McGahn, Wray reportedly threatened resignation and the attorney general ultimately backed off. So when Trump hints about firing Sessions or Rosenstein, it should be clear that they may be in real danger. On the other hand, as Jack Goldsmith argued on an upcoming special edition of the Lawfare Podcast, the fact that Trump could not get his own White House counsel to execute his will on this point shows that the president really is constrained in his apparent desire to shut down the Russia investigation. Particularly in combination with the Axios story about Wray, the incident paints a picture of a president who desperately wants to corrupt the justice system but just can’t get it done: malevolence tempered by incompetence, one might call it.
…
Third, in contrast to the many valid reasons to criticize McGahn’s White House tenure, this episode illustrates—at least in this instance—the White House counsel’s deft performance of his duties under difficult circumstances, perhaps even skillful management of a particularly ornery client. McGahn has not always behaved so admirably; he reportedly was willing to carry out Trump’s earlier instruction to pressure Attorney General Jeff Sessions not to recuse himself from this investigation. But in this instance, he allegedly managed to ride out a presidential temper tantrum, both offering the president reasonable advice and declining to carry out a presidential order clearly not made in good faith.
…
Fourth, the story also shows rather vividly how successful Ty Cobb has been in calming the president in the months since and persuading him to take a less adversarial posture—at least publicly—toward Mueller and the Russia investigation generally. Consider the difference between Trump in June, who actually gave an order to fire Mueller, and today’s Trump, who has turned over material the special counsel wants and allowed interviews with White House witnesses and has said he is even willing to be interviewed himself. Cobb seems to have convinced Trump that the path to making the Russia investigation go away lies in cooperation. If Cobb is correct that the Mueller investigation will end well for a cooperative Trump, this is all a laudable example of excellent client management. Cobb’s strategy, however, seems to rely on convincing Trump that the investigation is going to conclude in the near future if he just plays along. If Cobb is wrong on this point, and the investigation isn’t, in fact, close to wrapping up, then he may have simply deferred the June explosion to the date when Trump realizes that the end is not in sight. Thursday night’s story shows that this explosion, whenever it happens, can be pretty big.
It’s the summer of 2014. A hacker from the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has penetrated the computer network of a university building next to the Red Square in Moscow, oblivious to the implications. One year later, from the AIVD headquarters in Zoetermeer, he and his colleagues witness Russian hackers launching an attack on the Democratic Party in the United States. The AIVD hackers had not infiltrated just any building; they were in the computer network of the infamous Russian hacker group Cozy Bear. And unbeknownst to the Russians, they could see everything.
That’s how the AIVD becomes witness to the Russian hackers harassing and penetrating the leaders of the Democratic Party, transferring thousands of emails and documents. It won’t be the last time they alert their American counterparts. And yet, it will be months before the United States realize what this warning means: that with these hacks the Russians have interfered with the American elections. And the AIVD hackers have seen it happening before their very eyes.
The Dutch access provides crucial evidence of the Russian involvement in the hacking of the Democratic Party, according to six American and Dutch sources who are familiar with the material, but wish to remain anonymous. It’s also grounds for the FBI to start an investigation into the influence of the Russian interference on the election race between the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Russian operatives used Facebook to publicize 129 phony event announcements during the 2016 presidential campaign, drawing the attention of nearly 340,000 users — many of whom said they were planning to attend — according to a company document released by the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday.
It’s not possible to know how often people gathered in response to the sham announcements, but the numbers highlight how Russian operatives were successful in prompting Americans to express a willingness to act. In some cases, Russians allegedly working in an office building in St. Petersburg motivated at least some people to mobilize behind various causes, a striking accomplishment for a foreign influence campaign.
“Not only did they influence how people viewed Russian policy, they got people to take physical action. That’s unprecedented,” said Clinton Watts, a former FBI agent who studies Russian disinformation for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “They just did it persistently, and they did it well.”
➤ Watch Sean Hannity switch gears from denying Trump tried to fire Mueller to acknowledging the truth of that attempt:
Sean Hannity: The New York Times is trying to distract you. They say Trump tried to fire Mueller, but our sources aren’t confirming that!
Sean Hannity, minutes later: Alright, yeah, maybe our sources confirm Trump wanted to fire Mueller. But so what? That’s his right. Anywho… pic.twitter.com/yUIt7Un56d
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:59 PM, for 9h 44m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM. Whitewater’s Fire Department meets at 6:30 PM, in closed session not to reconvene.
On this day in 1945, the Battle of the Bulge ends in an Allied victory as German forces are pushed back to lines held before their offensive began. On this day in 1932, dancing on Sunday in Janesville remains prohibited as that city’s council deadlocks 3-3 on permitting that entertainment.
The Natural Resources Board approved long-awaited new rules Wednesday aimed at keeping dairy manure out of drinking water in 15 eastern Wisconsin counties.
But board members acknowledged that elected officials haven’t supplied the money needed to put the rules into action.
The board heard testimony about “brown water events” — manure- and pathogen-tainted water flowing from faucets — that have been going on for more than a decade in Kewaunee and Door counties where farms spread dairy waste on shallow topsoil.
Department of Natural Resources staff members said new limits on spreading over vulnerable aquifers would take five years to work into pollution permits of all factory farms and the department hasn’t discussed moving more quickly, said Mary Anne Lowndes, DNR runoff management section chief.
There have been reductions in financial assistance needed to ensure smaller farms follow the rules, and decreased staffing levels at the DNR and at the county level where implementation and monitoring of compliance would take place.
Yet Sessions appears to have backtracked on his pledges, and Democrats say he is violating his recusal. This criticism comes as, last week, Sessions became the first Cabinet member to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.
Questions about Sessions’ recusal came early on, when he played a role in the May 2017 firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, whose ouster Trump acknowledged was directly related to the bureau’s investigation of his campaign’s contacts with Russia. But more recently, Sessions appears to have directed prosecutors to look into matters connected to Clinton’s campaign.
Sessions’ recusal infuriated Trump, and multiple White House staffers, including the president’s chief lawyer, Don McGahn, tried to talk him out of giving up oversight of the Russia investigation. Trump publicly rebuked Sessions’ decision in an interview with the New York Times. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump said. Democrats say Sessions is now bowing to political pressure from the White House and Trump, who has tweeted attacks on his own Justice Department and called on Sessions to go after Clinton, and they accuse Sessions of participating in an all-out effort to politicize his agency. This week, Axiosreported that Sessions had pressed FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire his deputy, Andrew McCabe, who had also been Comey’s No. 2. Trump, and his Republican allies have relentlessly targeted McCabe, whose wife was a Democratic candidate for state Senate in Virginia, to advance a narrative of anti-Trump bias within the FBI.
Republican senator Ron Johnson highlights a text of Strzok expressing reluctance to join Robert Mueller’s team, because “my gut sense and concern is there’s no big there there.” Johnson told a conservative talk-show host that this “jaw-dropping” comment amounted to a confession that Strzok knew that Trump was innocent and joined Mueller’s investigation to smear him. But maybe Strzok simply had an open mind and thought Mueller’s probe stood a strong chance of clearing Trump. Another Strzok “scandal” grew out of a text he sent expressing the opinion that Clinton would not be charged in the email investigation. The text “suggests they knew and, in turn, believed Loretta Lynch knew, that no charges would be brought against Hillary Clinton, even before the FBI had interviewed her over her unauthorized private email server,” reports Breitbart.
They knew! The fix was in! Or maybe they simply knew that the evidence of the private email server did not amount to a plausible federal case against Clinton.
Note that a Strzok text expressing his view that Trump would not be charged over Russia became evidence of a nefarious plot against Trump, and another Strzok text expressing a view that Clinton would not be charged over the emails became evidence of a nefarious plot to help Clinton. If Strzok had expressed a belief that Clinton or Trump were guilty, those messages would become scandals, too. This is the way the game works. When you begin with a suspicious of nefarious intent, a captured expression of candid thought can be turned into devastating evidence.
Hannity did not respond to a request for comment about his rising popularity among the network of Russian-linked accounts.
“Because Russian accounts promote a certain political position is not evidence of coordination” between the trolls and Trump partisans advocating for the release of the memo, Schafer notes. The key takeaway with #releasethememo, he says, “is that Kremlin-oriented trolls have used that hashtag to promote divisiveness, distrust, and to negatively influence our public discourse.”
Former FBI special agent Clint Watts pointed out Tuesday that attacks on the FBI have been increasing as the Russian investigation continues to accelerate. After reports Tuesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and James Comey had been interviewed by Mueller’s team, Watts tweeted: “Interviews are getting closer to the top & suddenly attacks by @GOP on FBI have increased.”
(The Hamilton 68 dashboard is available online, as a service of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is currently funded by a group of American private individuals and small family foundations from across the political spectrum and housed at The German Marshall Fund of the United States)
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 4:58 PM, for 9h 42m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 46.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1935, the first canned beer goes on sale: “Krueger’s Cream Ale and Krueger’s Finest Beer were the first beers sold to the public in cans. Canned beer was an immediate success. The public loved it, giving it a 91 percent approval rating. Compared to glass, the cans were lightweight, cheap, and easy to stack and ship. Unlike bottles, you didn’t have to pay a deposit and then return the cans for a refund. By summer Krueger was buying 180,000 cans a day from American Can, and other breweries decided to follow.” (Draft or bottled seems – to me – preferable to canned, but the practicality of cans is understandable.)
An undisclosed number of employees at Aurora Sinai Medical Center in downtown Milwaukee were suspended Tuesday after reports that a mentally ill homeless patient was discharged and left on a cold, wet sidewalk outside the hospital.
A photo and video of a shoeless man – clad in pants and what appears to be a hospital gown and sitting on a sidewalk outside the hospital –began circulating on social media and television stations after the incident allegedly occurred Monday.
Eva Welch, director of Street Angels Milwaukee Outreach, said the person who took the video told her the man was rolled across the street from the hospital in a wheelchair and left on the sidewalk outside the facility, 945 N. 12th St.
Welch said the man is mentally ill and was brought to a shelter two weeks before by West Allis police after being treated at a different hospital for frostbite to his right foot.
About half of Americans are concerned that President Trump might launch a nuclear attack without justification, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
This worry comes as Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continue to provoke each other on Twitter and follows a previous Post-ABC poll that found a large majority of Americans are concerned about the United States going to war with North Korea.
Overall, 38 percent of Americans trust Trump to handle the authority to order nuclear attacks on other countries, while 60 percent do not. Among those who distrust Trump, almost 9 in 10 are very or somewhat concerned the president might launch an attack.
Combining those results, the poll finds 52 percent of the public overall is concerned the president might launch a nuclear attack without reason, including one-third who say they are “very” concerned, according to the poll.
Shortly after President Trump fired his FBI director in May, he summoned to the Oval Office the bureau’s acting director for a get-to-know-you meeting.
The two men exchanged pleasantries, but before long, Trump, according to several current and former U.S. officials, asked Andrew McCabe a pointed question: Whom did he vote for in the 2016 election?
McCabe said he didn’t vote, according to the officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about a sensitive matter.
Trump, the officials said, also vented his anger at McCabe over the several hundred thousand dollars in donations that his wife, a Democrat, received for her failed 2015 Virginia state Senate bid from a political action committee controlled by a close friend of Hillary Clinton.
(There’s almost no political, ethical, or cultural norm Trump won’t violate.)
But if the share of today’s whites who regard black NFL players as uppity ingrates significantly shrinks; if fear of Muslim immigrants wanes; if native-born Americans bear less animosity toward undocumented Mexican immigrants, regardless of their views on border security or illegal immigration; then all of those wins for American unity would be blows to the political prospects of Trump, Pence, the GOP in the 2018 midterms, and the foreign adversaries who want to weaken the United States.
Thus, they divide Americans as a means to an end, and the GOP as a whole is implicated. The deal with the devil that Republicans made by embracing a charlatan birther, sticking with him through a bigoted campaign, and propelling him to a victory that thrilled the likes of Richard Spencer has a clause that does ongoing harm to our country: One of America’s two political parties now benefits politically, in the short term, from the polarization of the country along racial and ethnic lines, just as surely as the Republican Party of 1968 and 1972 benefited from that era’s tumult and division.
Not all or even most Trump supporters are racists or authoritarians, but the 2018 midterms will go better for the GOP if turnout among racists and authoritarians is strong, and it will go poorly for the party if anti-authoritarians turn out in record numbers. That is the unenviable incentive structure that Trumpism creates.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a few flurries, and a high of thirty-one. Wet snow last night means a two hour delay for Whitewater’s schools this morning, but Midwesterners are resilient and bounce back quickly. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:57 PM, for 9h 40m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred thirty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1957, Wham-O purchases the rights to a toy fling disc, later to be renamed the Frisbee. On this day in 1864, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry continued its reconnaissance mission on the Matagorda Peninsula, Texas.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions — at the public urging of President Donald Trump — has been pressuring FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, but Wray threatened to resign if McCabe was removed, according to three sources with direct knowledge.
Wray’s resignation under those circumstances would have created a media firestorm. The White House — understandably gun-shy after the Comey debacle — didn’t want that scene, so McCabe remains.
Sessions told White House Counsel Don McGahn about how upset Wray was about the pressure on him to fire McCabe, and McGahn told Sessions this issue wasn’t worth losing the FBI Director over, according to a source familiar with the situation.
Why it matters: Trump started his presidency by pressuring one FBI Director (before canning him), and then began pressuring another (this time wanting his deputy canned). This much meddling with the FBI for this long is not normal.
First, we should underscore what a difficult situation Wray is in. As Jack wrote in a related context, Wray is in the extraordinary position of “dealing with a president who is attacking the integrity of the Justice Department and the FBI in a truly unprecedented fashion at a time when many of the president’s associates, and probably the president himself, are under investigation by the Justice Department and FBI.”
…
Second, it is clear from this episode that Wray has chosen this path—that is, that his ultimate commitment lies with the FBI and the preservation of its institutional integrity. This is exceptionally good news. It is also unsurprising. Wray, after all, is an old-time Justice Department hand who was prepared to resign under President George W. Bush during the warrantless wiretapping controversy. (Wray and Jack worked together in the Justice Department during this episode, in which Jack was involved.)
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Finally, a word about Attorney General Sessions. It says a lot about the man that he was willing to pressure Wray to remove McCabe—and that he was willing to put sufficient pressure on him to provoke a conflict. Of course, in theory, the attorney general—who supervises the FBI director—should be able to discuss with the FBI director who the deputy director should be. But in context, when the president is attacking McCabe and explicitly tying the attacks to the Russia investigation, and when Sessions is recused from that investigation, the proper role for Sessions is actually the one that Wray played here. The job of the attorney general here was to try to uphold and defend the FBI’s independence. Not only did Sessions not do that, at least according to Axios, but Wray had to do it, to protect the FBI from the attorney general himself.
Donald Trump’s relationship with John Kelly, his chief of staff, fraught from the beginning, may finally have gone past the point of no return. Two prominent Republicans in frequent contact with the White House told me that Trump has discussed choosing Kelly’s successor in recent days, asking a close friend what he thought about David Urban, a veteran Washington lobbyist and political operative who helped engineer Trump’s victory in Pennsylvania. Ivanka is also playing a central role in the search, quietly field-testing ideas with people. “Ivanka is the most worried about it. She’s trying to figure who replaces Kelly,” a person who’s spoken with her said.
Kelly’s departure likely isn’t imminent, sources said. “He wants to stay longer than Reince [Priebus],” an outside adviser said. Trump can also hardly afford another high-level staff departure, which would trigger days of negative news cycles. “This could be like [Jeff] Sessions,” one of the Republicans explained, referring to Trump’s festering frustration about not being able to replace his attorney general.
But the prospect of a Trump-Kelly rupture became more probable as news of their clashes over immigration leaked. Last week, Kelly reportedly infuriated Trump when he told Fox News that Trump had “evolved” on his position to build a southern border wall. Kelly further catalyzed Trump’s ire when he told Democratic lawmakers that Trump was “uninformed” when he made his campaign promise to build the wall. The next morning Trump rebutted his chief of staff with a tweet: “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.”
(Trump conveniently overlooks that these are the men he’s hired, given vast powers…)
President Trump’s voting commission asked every state and the District for detailed voter registration data, but in Texas’s case it took an additional step: It asked to see Texas records that identify all voters with Hispanic surnames, newly released documents show.
In buying nearly 50 million records from the state with the nation’s second-largest Hispanic population, a researcher for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity checked a box on two Texas public voter data request forms explicitly asking for the “Hispanic surname flag notation,” to be included in information sent to the voting commission, according to copies of the signed and notarized state forms.
White House and Texas officials said the state’s voter data was never delivered because a lawsuit brought by Texas voting rights advocates after the request last year temporarily stopped any data handoff.
In this reel, we delve deep into how it’s made. We hold our breathe at the world’s smelliest factory, throwback to the analog age at the last place in the U.S. producing cassette tapes, and travel to an archaeological factory where a team of experts are trying to rebuild nature’s largest creatures.
This Tuesday, January 23rd at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Fort McCoy @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Kate Connor and Michael Worth co-direct the one hour, forty-minute film. Fort McCoy is a drama based on the true story of the Stirn family, who lived next to Fort McCoy (Monroe County) when it was used as a detention center for Japanese, German, and Italian POWs during World War 2. Shot on location in La Crosse, the film stars Eric Stoltz, Kate Connor, and Lyndsy Fonseca.
The drama carries a rating of R (violence) from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:55 PM, for 9h 38m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred thirty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
The Whitewater School Board meets tonight in closed session beginning at 6:15 PM, and then open session at 7 PM.
On this day in 1964, the World’s Largest Block of Cheese [at the time] is made in Wisconsin: “The block of cheddar was produced from 170,000 quarts of milk by the Wisconsin Cheese Foundation specifically for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It weighed 34,665 pounds (17.4 tons). The cheese was consumed in 1965 at the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Cheesemakers Association at Eau Claire. A replica is displayed in Neilsville in the specially designed “Cheesemobile“, a semi-tractor trailer in which the original cheese toured. [Source: American Profile, December 16, 2001]”
Miller’s driving obsession is immigration, an area where he has long pushed hard-line positions going back to his days as a combative conservative activist at Duke University. In Washington, as an aide to then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), he was instrumental in helping to kill a bipartisan effort in 2013 for a broad immigration deal. He and Sessions helped galvanize House conservatives to block the bill passed by the Senate, including distributing a handbook of talking points aimed at undercutting the compromise.
Now working in the White House, Miller — who is known for his natty attire, long-winded conversations and distinctive heavy-lidded appearance on television — has told colleagues that his “consuming focus is to make what I know the president wants in an immigration deal a legislative reality,” a senior White House official said. He has few hobbies outside of work, and his spacious second-floor West Wing office is sparsely decorated, with a stack of “Make America Great Again” hats and invitations to inauguration events framed on the wall.
The official said Miller chats frequently with the president about immigration, both formally and informally, during scheduled meetings, on board Air Force One, after bill signings in the Oval Office and during rides in the presidential motorcade. He prizes loyalty to Trump above all else and speaks often of the president with reverence, a stark contrast with some eye-rolling aides.
There are so many bombshells in Michael Wolff’s new book, “Fire and Fury,” that smaller anecdotes are going largely unremarked upon, even if they offer disturbing insight into the presidential psyche. One of them is Mr. Trump’s penchant for hiring women into often vaguely defined but closely held roles.
“Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men,” Mr. Wolff writes. “Men might be more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.” Mr. Trump, the author continued, “needed special — extra-special — handling. Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext — which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard — got this.”
The term “emotional labor” gets vastly overused, but this is a textbook example. The women who work for Mr. Trump aren’t just required to perform their professional tasks; they also have to coddle and care for a volatile patriarch.
Todd Tanner has a pretty sweet offer for his fellow Montanans: a new shotgun in exchange for science-based evidence that he’s wrong about climate change.
The conservationist uses the challenge in an attempt to raise awareness about our warming planet. A lot of people where Tanner lives in Bigfork, Montana, would probably like to take him up on his offer: The state has one of the highest rates of outdoor recreationists in the country, and Tanner is no exception. He was planning on going hunting after we finished our interview. “You wouldn’t know it,” he said over the phone, “but I’m literally walking around in a pair of wool pants.”
Tanner is sure he’ll never have to hand over that new shotgun, though he says he would love to find out that anthropogenic climate change isn’t real. “If someone shows me the error of my ways they can have their choice,” he said. “They can have any rifle, shotgun, pistol, or rod I own, and I’ll walk away feeling like I got the better end of the bargain.”
Since 2011, Tanner has harnessed his prominent position in Montana’s hunting and fishing communities to get people engaged. After wildfires incinerated forests and droughts desiccated rivers in Big Sky Country this year, agitated sportsmen and women have become easier to find. Tanner’s nonprofit, Conservation Hawks, is part of a coalition of grassroots organizations trying to pull conservatives into the conversation about rising temperatures.
For the better part of 20 years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has engaged in a relentless assault against democratic institutions abroad, universal values and the rule of law. He has carried out these attacks with an asymmetric arsenal: cyberattacks; disinformation; support for fringe political groups; the weaponization of energy resources, organized crime and corruption; and even military aggression.
Putin has used such techniques because he has operated from a position of weakness, hobbled by a faltering economy, a substandard military and few followers on the world stage. And his attacks have grown in intensity and complexity over the past few years, driven by a desire to also repress democratic aspirations among his own citizens. While our European partners have taken steps to better defend themselves, the United States has done little to protect its institutions.
Despite the efforts of some in national security leadership, as well as dedicated career public servants across the executive branch, one person is preventing a strong, government-wide response that holds Russia accountable for its destabilizing activities: the president of the United States. Never before has the White House so clearly ignored a national security threat.
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The Russian president’s rap sheet of meddling in Europe is long and sordid. Some of the most egregious examples include:
– A coup attempt in Montenegro to storm the nation’s parliament and capture or kill the prime minister ahead of that nation’s attempt to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
– Russian media propaganda, especially Internet trolls and bots, which were discovered in the public debate ahead of recent major referendums such as “Brexit” in Britain and the Catalonia independence movement in Spain, as well as national elections in France and Germany. Indications are that Italy may well be next.
– The murder of a number of Russian opposition figures and critics across Europe.
– The violation of international law by invading Russia’s neighbors, such as Georgia and Ukraine.
Sunday in Whitewater will be occasionally foggy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:54 PM, for 9h 36m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 17.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred thirty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
In the days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, a wealthy Russian pharmaceutical executive named Alexey Repik arrived in Washington, expressing excitement about the new administration.
He posted a photo on Facebook of a clutch of inauguration credentials arranged next to a white “Make America Great Again” hat, writing in Russian: “I believe that President Donald Trump will open a new page in American history.”
Throughout his trip, Repik had prime access. He wrote on Facebook that he got close enough to the president-elect at a pre-inaugural event to “check the handshake strength of Donald Trump.” He and his wife, Polina Repik, witnessed Trump’s swearing-in from ticketed seats in front of the U.S. Capitol. And he posed for a photo shoulder-to-shoulder with Mike Pompeo, the president’s nominee to head the CIA, although Repik later said he was not aware of Pompeo’s intended role at the time.
The attendance of members of Russia’s elite at Trump’s inauguration was evidence of the high anticipation in Moscow for a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations following a campaign in which Trump stunned U.S. foreign-policy experts by repeatedly praising Russian President Vladimir Putin.
There are the Kremlin-connected campaign aides — Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. On a single campaign. There are the Trump team members who repeatedly failed to “recall” Russia contacts — Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Jared Kushner. There is the money trail that ran through and around Trump properties, described in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson; the trail tangles up the Bayrock Group (with which the mysterious Felix Sater was associated) and the Russian oligarchs who purchased Trump properties (pp. 36-41).
What Simpson calls “a well-established pattern of surreptitious contacts that occurred [in 2016] that supports the broad allegation of some sort of an undisclosed political or financial relationship between The Trump Organization and people in Russia” (p. 54) is what, in part, special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his top-flight team of financial-crime attorneys are investigating. Mueller is trying to determine whether these were all random, innocent and coincidental (though the only campaign in history we know to have had any) or whether they establish a cooperative relationship between the official Trump campaign and the “active measures” campaign in Russia to help elect Trump (as the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting — attended by Natalia Veselnitskaya, Kaveladze and Rinat Akhmetshin, among others — to relay “dirt” on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton would suggest).
The nagging question remains, however, why Trump would so vehemently deny any business dealings with Russia and why so many people would go to such lengths to disguise their assorted Russian contacts. What was it they were trying so hard to keep hidden?
WASHINGTON — Representative Patrick Meehan, a Pennsylvania Republican who has taken a leading role in fighting sexual harassment in Congress, used thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to settle his own misconduct complaint after a former aide accused him last year of making unwanted romantic overtures to her, according to several people familiar with the settlement.
A married father of three, Mr. Meehan, 62, had long expressed interest in the personal life of the aide, who was decades younger and had regarded the congressman as a father figure, according to three people who worked with the office and four others with whom she discussed her tenure there.
But after the woman became involved in a serious relationship with someone outside the office last year, Mr. Meehan professed his romantic desires for her — first in person, and then in a handwritten letter — and he grew hostile when she did not reciprocate, the people familiar with her time in the office said.
Life in the office became untenable, so she initiated the complaint process, started working from home and ultimately left the job. She later reached a confidential agreement with Mr. Meehan’s office that included a settlement for an undisclosed amount to be paid from Mr. Meehan’s congressional office fund.
(The alleged conduct would be wrong, and the undisputed use of Congressional funds to settle the matter is wrong.)
In the 1980s, TV producer Terry Heaton was at the helm of one of the most influential media properties of the decade. As executive producer for the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN)’s Pat Robertson — one of the world’s most famous televangelists — Heaton spent the 1980s and early ’90s transforming the network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, into a pioneer of conservative opinion journalism.
But decades after The 700 Club’s massive success paved the way for an alliance between the Christian right and GOP party politics, Heaton has more mixed feelings about his role in the “culture wars.” In his new book The Gospel of the Self: How Jesus Joined the GOP, Heaton reflects on his years working alongside Robertson, and how the advertising strategies he brought to CBN helped transform and politicize a generation of Christians. Heaton presents Robertson and his team as well-meaning idealists whose desire to use the power of the media to bring people to Jesus morphed into a need to hold on to power for its own sake.
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“First of all, regarding Pat and his relationship with Donald Trump — I think that’s very, very scary. As smart as Pat Robertson is, and as good as he is at marketing, he is also highly susceptible to his own hype. In that way, Trump plays him like a piano. If you watch his most recent interview, some of the things that Trump says to Pat are really way out there in terms of manipulating Pat. He builds him up like a salesman would, and Pat is susceptible to that, I think. But he wouldn’t be susceptible if Trump didn’t speak the language that Pat wants.
There is such fear on the right about the Supreme Court. I remember one show that we were taping in which Pat prayed that God would kill the Supreme Court justices. We had to stop the tape and advise him that he couldn’t say that on TV. But that’s the way he felt. Trump really sings Pat’s tune when it comes to the Supreme Court, also on the issue of religious liberty. When Trump starts talking about how Christianity is going to be “great again,” people like Pat sit up at listen. And they’ll support him whenever necessary — even if it means blowing up North Korea!
We’re a divided people. That’s why I wonder if it’s a good thing that Donald Trump’s president — at least we’re getting it all out on the table. In my mind, that’s the only righteous reason to put a guy like Trump in the White House. We’ll go through some stuff — but I hope on the other side, it’ll be better than it is today.
(One needn’t believe that it’s a good thing Trump’s president, but yet believe getting it all out on the table is necessary. In any event, Robertson represents only a part of a much larger religious community.)
It’s a remote control. It’s a tracking device. It can deliver shocks of up to 600 volts. You think the electric eel is shocking? You haven’t seen anything yet.
In this episode of Animalism hosted by The Atlantic science writer Ed Yong, we investigate the subtle and sinister ways of the electric eel.
