Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three, and a likelihood of scattered afternoon thundershowers. Sunrise is 5:21 AM and sunset 8:36 PM, for 15h 15m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 64.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, Union and Confederate forces fight for a second day at the Battle of Gettysburg:

On the second day of battle, most of both armies had assembled. The Union line was laid out in a defensive formation resembling a fishhook. In the late afternoon of July 2, Lee launched a heavy assault on the Union left flank, and fierce fighting raged at Little Round Top, the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard. On the Union right, Confederate demonstrations escalated into full-scale assaults on Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill. All across the battlefield, despite significant losses, the Union defenders held their lines.

On the night of July 2nd, “Union Major General George Meade held a council of leaders to decide what to do next. Lieutenant Frank Haskell, of Madison, was present when they voted to “allow the Rebel to come up and smash his head against [their position] to any reasonable extent he desired, as he had to-day. After some two hours the council dissolved, and the officers went their several ways.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jeremy Kryt reveals Inside Trump’s Disastrous ‘Secret’ Drug War Plans for Central America:

Gang violence is one of the driving factors behind the Central American migrant crisis, which has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing northward, many of them children.

All that mayhem finally caught the attention of the Trump regime. But, as usual when it comes to narcotics interdiction efforts under Trump, the proffered solution seems to be more show than substance—all at the expense of American taxpayers.

A shadowy summit last month in Miami brought together Vice President Mike Pence, high-powered cabinet members like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the leaders of all three Triangle nations, and officials from at least nine other countries. The plan they espoused? Spend untold millions more dollars on a strategy that, according to experts, is guaranteed to fail. So what’s not to like about that?

Krishnadev Calumar describes How Russian Journalists Dealt With Fake News:

Alexey Kovalev, a Russian journalist who was also at the Aspen panel, said he didn’t like the term “fake news.” It’s a problem, he said, but it’s not the whole problem.

“Fake news is completely made up pieces of information, concocted with a clear intention to deceive,” he said. “It’s not so much a problem as genuine news that has no informational value at all: endless repetition of every nonsensical statement.”

He said part of the problem in Russia is that few publications can afford full-time fact-checkers. “It’s extremely easy to put out anything you want because there will be no one to challenge you,” he said. “Very few people will care and speak out publicly.”

Russian state TV often broadcast segments of completely fake news—such as stories on Russian military operations against the U.S., he said. These events are then discussed on TV as if they happened. Part of the problem, he said, is that independent media organizations like his are “competing against a state-owned industry funded to the tune of $1.5 billion a year.”

“I’ll never in my life be able to commit one-tenth” of that, he said.

Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews of the Rand Corporation outline The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model:

Gregory S. Schneider and Alex Horton report on how Von Spakovsky riled Fairfax with voter fraud efforts; Trump just elevated him:

From pursuing voter fraud in the George W. Bush Justice Department to policing polling places on the Fairfax County Electoral Board, Hans von Spakovsky has been a national lightning rod on the issue of voter integrity.

Now that President Trump has named the Virginia lawyer to the new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, the man the New Yorker magazine called the source of “the voter-fraud myth” has perhaps his greatest chance to influence Americans’ access to the polls….

Over the years, von Spakovsky has been accused of masterminding widespread efforts to suppress voting by marginalized populations, particularly African Americans and immigrants, who tend to vote for Democrats.

Von Spakovsky argued against renewing the Voting Rights Act while serving in Bush’s Justice Department. Bush later named him to the Federal Election Commission with a recess appointment, but so many senators objected that von Spakovsky eventually withdrew.

Similarly, after he served as vice chairman of the three-member Fairfax County Electoral Board between 2010 and 2012, Democrats objected to his reappointment. Local judges, who name the panel based on recommendations from the party of the current governor — who at the time was Republican Robert F. McDonnell — took the unusual step of not renewing von Spakovsky’s appointment.

Renata Flores is Saving an Ancient Language Through Pop Music:

Renata Flores is a 16-year-old singer from Peru who is using her voice to save an ancient Incan language. Though Quechua is the second-most spoken language in Peru, native speakers have suffered from discrimination and social stigma for generations, and today, many young people aren’t learning the language at all. But with her powerful vocals to covers of pop songs by Michael Jackson and Alicia Keys in her native tongue, Flores is sparking a renewed celebration of Quechuan language and culture.

Good morning.

A new month begins for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg begins:

After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863, Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even Philadelphia. Prodded by PresidentAbraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved of command just three days before the battle and replaced by Meade.

Elements of the two armies initially collided at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, and soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the streets of the town to the hills just to the south.^[14]

Recommended for reading in full —

Two days ago, I posted a story from Dan Friedman describing how, as a matter of law, collusion with Russia could be a crime: Sorry, Fox News: Legal Experts Say Trump Collusion With Russia Could Be a Crime. Yesterday, I posted Shane Harris’s  of the Wall Street Journal’s story that  GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn. Another story from Harris and a post from Matt Tait now advance one’s understanding of possible election-related collusion with Russia.

Sean Harris follows up with GOP Activist Who Sought Clinton Emails Cited Trump Campaign Officials:

WASHINGTON—A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort.

The activist, Peter W. Smith, named the officials in a section of the document marked “Trump Campaign.” The document was dated Sept. 7, 2016. That was around the time Mr. Smith said he started his search for 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton deleted from the private server she used for official business while secretary of state. She said the deleted emails concerned personal matters. She turned over tens of thousands of other emails to the State Department.

As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith and people he recruited to his effort theorized the deleted emails might have been stolen by hackers and might contain matters that were politically damaging. He and his associates said they were in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia they suspected were tied to the Moscow government, in a bid to find any stolen emails and potentially hurt Mrs. Clinton’s prospects.

Matt Tait describes The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians:

I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”….

Over the course of our conversations, one thing struck me as particularly disturbing. Smith [the GOP operative] and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States. I explained that if someone had contacted him via the “Dark Web” with Clinton’s personal emails, he should take very seriously the possibility that this may have been part of a wider Russian campaign against the United States. And I said he need not take my word for it, pointing to a number of occasions where US officials had made it clear that this was the view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.

Smith, however, didn’t seem to care. From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.

Peter Beinart contends that Trump’s Grudges Are His Agenda:

On policy, Trump is inattentive and inconsistent. Where he’s attentive and consistent is in his personal attacks on his adversaries. Trump’s presidency will have vast and frightening policy implications, most which he doesn’t understand. But Trump’s primary goal as president does not appear to be enacting a set of policies; his behavior suggests that his real goal is feeding his ego and vanquishing his enemies. He’s only truly interested in his presidency’s impact on himself. Calling Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky a diversion made sense because Clinton was genuinely committed to certain policy goals, which he undermined by his personal recklessness. With Trump, personal recklessness is all there is.

That’s why Trump will launch attacks like the one he launched against Mika Brzezinski for as long as he’s president, and likely after that. Saying he attacks people viciously because he lacks impulse control is like saying a professional boxer lacks impulse control because he punches people in the ring. For Trump, this is the true purpose of politics, if not life itself.

Jack Shafer writes of Pravda on the Checkout Line:

All the hallmarks of classic propaganda appear in the newly politicized tabloids. First, there is the pure volume of the malicious bunk they churn out. The tabs construct wild story after wild story that “entertains, confuses, and overwhelms the audience,” as one recent report described modern Russian propaganda technique. Like the Enquirer, propagandists are rarely content to push a single fabrication. The greater the number, the greater likelihood one will take root. The Enquirer’s harping on Clinton’s health is a good example. Had she suffered from half of the conditions and ailments the Enquirer had claimed, she would have been in intensive care instead of on the campaign trail. But classic propaganda makes little attempt to be consistent with observable facts, relying instead on volume and insistence to overwhelm its subjects and on their willingness to believe what’s spread.

Like propagandists, tabs make up bizarre yet plausible stuff faster than the fact-checkers can knock it down—assuming that the fact-checkers care about tracking tabloid outrageousness in the first place. In a Rand Corporation study of Russian propaganda published last year, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews write about the “rapid, continuous and repetitive” quality of the propaganda, which is a good descriptor of the kinds of bogus campaign stories the Enquirer and Globe published. Effective propaganda, they tell us, drowns out other messages, and repeated exposure increases the acceptance among the receptive over time.

Kif Leswing describes the upcoming iOS 11 in I’ve been using the new iOS on my iPhone — here’s what I think:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will see afternoon thunderstorms and a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On the morning of this day in 1908, the Tunguska event, a large explosion near Stony Tunguska River, in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai) in Russia takes place:

The explosion over the sparsely populated Eastern Siberian Taiga flattened 2,000 km² (770 sq mi) of forest yet caused no known human casualties. The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a meteoroid. It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than hit the surface of the Earth.^[3]

The Tunguska event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. Studies have yielded different estimates of the meteoroid’s size, on the order of 60 to 190 metres (200 to 620 feet), depending on whether the body was a comet or a denser asteroid.^[4]

Recommended for reading in full — 

Shane Harris reports that GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn:

WASHINGTON—Before the 2016 presidential election, a longtime Republican opposition researcher mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clinton’s private server, likely by Russian hackers.

In conversations with members of his circle and with others he tried to recruit to help him, the GOP operative, Peter W. Smith, implied he was working with retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, at the time a senior adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump.

“He said, ‘I’m talking to Michael Flynn about this—if you find anything, can you let me know?’” said Eric York, a computer-security expert from Atlanta who searched hacker forums on Mr. Smith’s behalf for people who might have access to the emails.

Shane Harris, national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, talked with Rachel Maddow “about his new reporting about Peter Smith, a Republican activist who sought the help of Russian hackers who may have found Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and implied he was working with Donald Trump aide Mike Flynn”:

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough state the obvious when they write that Donald Trump is not well:

More significant is Mr. Trump’s continued mistreatment of women. It is disturbing that the president of the United States keeps up his unrelenting assault on women. From his menstruation musings about Megyn Kelly, to his fat-shaming treatment of a former Miss Universe, to his braggadocio claims about grabbing women’s genitalia, the 45th president is setting the poorest of standards for our children. We were heartened to hear a number of Republican lawmakers call out Mr. Trump for his offensive words and can only hope that the women who are closest to him will follow their examples. It would be the height of hypocrisy to claim the mantle of women’s empowerment while allowing a family member to continue such abusive conduct.

We have known Mr. Trump for more than a decade and have some fond memories of our relationship together. But that hasn’t stopped us from criticizing his abhorrent behavior or worrying about his fitness. During the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, Joe often listened to Trump staff members complain about their boss’s erratic behavior, including a top campaign official who was as close to the Republican candidate as anyone.

We, too, have noticed a change in his behavior over the past few years. Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack. The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check.

The Washington Post editorial board writes that Trump clearly won’t change. Here’s what the rest of us can do:

We’ve given this some thought in the context of international relations, because the world had become accustomed to looking to the United States as a defender of democracy, human rights and liberal values. Admittedly the nation has played this role imperfectly, with dollops of hypocrisy and inconsistency along the way. But from World War II until now, the United States had not been led by anyone espousing selfishness as a lodestar. And that has made it crucial for others to fill the gap — crucial for Congress, civil society and citizens across the nation to stand up for freedom and for the United States remaining a beacon of freedom across the globe.

We’d say the same now about plain old courtesy and decorum. It may be beyond the power of any other politician to change Mr. Trump’s behavior. But all of us can model a different way of acting and interacting.

What gives us hope is the conviction that the American people are better than the misogyny and rudeness we see spewing from the White House. Our politics have always been rough-and-tumble, but most of us don’t want to see this kind of ugliness become the dominant trait. We should all be focused on preserving a little flame of decency so that, whenever the Trump era ends, that flame can be rekindled into the kind of discourse that would make the country proud again.

Practical Engineering asks How Do Sinkholes Form?

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of eighty-five, and a likelihood of evening thunderstorms. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 17m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 34.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

The Downtown Whitewater Board meets at 8:00 AM, the CDA Board at 5:30 PM, and the Parks & Recreation Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 2007, the iPhone first went on sale. On this day in 1862, the 5th Wisconsin Infantry and Co. G of the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters take part in the Battle of Savage’s Station, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full —

Dan Friedman writes Sorry, Fox News: Legal Experts Say Trump Collusion With Russia Could Be a Crime:

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump’s defenders have been pushing a curious new line: Even if Trump and his presidential campaign colluded with Russia’s secret operation to subvert the 2016 campaign, that would not be illegal. Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume made this argument during a panel Sunday, saying, “Collusion, while it obviously would be alarming and highly inappropriate for the Trump campaign…it’s not a crime.” He added, “Can anyone identify the crime?”

Well, yes, somebody can. Ten lawyers queried, including academics, former prosecutors, and defense attorneys familiar with federal election and hacking laws, cite more than a dozen federal statutes that prosecutors could use to charge someone who collaborated with Russian intelligence to influence the 2016 election.

“There is a whole plethora of areas of potential criminal liability,” says Tor Ekeland, a defense attorney who has represented clients in high-profile hacking cases in federal and New York courts. “To say that there is none is just willful ignorance in the service of propaganda.”

Kevin Delaney writes that Sally Yates says the US needs more than a special counsel to get to the bottom of the Trump-Russia affair:

Sally Yates, the former acting US attorney general, says she has deep confidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between president Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. But she cautions that Mueller’s team has a narrow remit.

“Bob Mueller is going to be deciding whether or not crimes were committed, to be used for prosecution or impeachment,” Yates said onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival today. “Surely that’s not our bar. That’s not the standard of conduct we’re looking for from our president or our administration. It shouldn’t just be whether you committed a felony or not. It should also be whether or not you’re observing the kind of norms that we’ve been talking about that are so essential to really the fabric of the rule of law.”

Philip Bump reports that Trump’s pledge to keep the world from laughing at us hits another setback:

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross was supposed to attend this week’s Economic Council of the Christian Democratic Union meeting in Berlin, but suddenly canceled his travel plans on Tuesday. Ross was scheduled to give an address at the conference immediately before German Chancellor Angela Merkel, so he instead gave his remarks by teleconference from Washington.

Ross was allotted 10 minutes to speak. After he spoke for more than 20, the conference organizers cut his feed mid-sentence. The audience “laughed and clapped” in response, according to Bloomberg News. Merkel then rose and, during her remarks, disagreed with one of Ross’s points….

Nicole Perlroth and David Sanger report that Hacks Raise Fear Over N.S.A.’s Hold on Cyberweapons:

Twice in the past month, National Security Agency cyberweapons stolen from its arsenal have been turned against two very different partners of the United States — Britain and Ukraine.

The N.S.A. has kept quiet, not acknowledging its role in developing the weapons. White House officials have deflected many questions, and responded to others by arguing that the focus should be on the attackers themselves, not the manufacturer of their weapons.

But the silence is wearing thin for victims of the assaults, as a series of escalating attacks using N.S.A. cyberweapons have hit hospitals, a nuclear site and American businesses. Now there is growing concern that United States intelligence agencies have rushed to create digital weapons that they cannot keep safe from adversaries or disable once they fall into the wrong hands.

Here’s an answer to the odd but intriguing question Does the UK Really Experience Massive Power Surges When Soap Operas Finish from People Making Tea?

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy, with scattered thunderstorms, and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:19 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 24.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1914, an assassin kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose death leads to a spiraling of war declarations plunging the world into a global conflict. On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson and his Second Army travel into Wisconsin in a campaign against Black Hawk.

Recommended for reading in full:

I’m a subscriber to both the Washington Post and the New York Times, and Sarah Kendzior’s reply to a Trump tweet rings true. (Indeed, beyond the NYT, there’s a well-circulated theory that Trump is most aggressive against publications that give him partially favorable coverarge or allow his mendacious surrogates more access – that Trump pushes against those who have already yielded in part.)

Only thing fake here is this feud, which benefits both as NYT churns out Trump puff pieces. Note Trump doesn’t go at WaPo, b/c they dig deep https://t.co/UHylFMvM0I

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) June 28, 2017

Kevin Urmacher reports that Half of Trump’s major federal agencies still only have one Senate-confirmed appointee:

President Trump has a major staffing problem. He has been president for five months, and yet his agencies are severely understaffed at the highest levels. And, no, it’s not all Senate Democrats’ fault.

In the all-important State Department, the Senate has confirmed only one-third of positions that President Barack Obama had at the same point in his presidency. And that’s not because, as Trump claims, Senate Democrats are blocking his nominees. (Democrats can slow-walk committee hearings, but they can’t actually block votes.) Trump is way behind other recent presidents in nominating people for the Senate to vote on.

Russ Choma explains Here’s What Trump’s Latest Failure Tells Us About His Business Empire:

Toronto has had enough of Donald Trump. After more than a decade of drama, Trump’s name is being stripped from a 65-story hotel and condo building in downtown Toronto, following years of financial failure and lawsuits. In the end, the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto has become yet another symbol of the flaws of the Trump business empire: construction setbacks, strange financing, angry investors, and empty hotel rooms….

The Toronto tower he leased his name to never lived up to the hype. On Tuesday morning, the Trump Organization and the building’s current owner announced that the president’s name will be removed from the hotel.

Trump spent years promoting the property as a total success and an extension of his brand. His original partners in the project were two Russian-Canadian businessmen, neither of whom had any experience with building a skyscraper. As the building went up, construction delays and other problems—including pieces of the building falling off—set the project back.

Aaron C. Davis and Shawn Boburg report that Trump attorney Jay Sekulow’s family has been paid millions from charities they control:

Before Trump hired him, Sekulow had built a powerful charity empire, leading a team of ACLJ attorneys who jump into high-profile court battles over such hot-button conservative issues as religious liberties and abortion. The ACLJ [American Center for Law and Justice] promotes its work zealously, noting that its representation is free of charge and dependent on the donations of supporters.

That brought in nearly $230 million in charitable donations from 2011 to 2015 — and millions of those dollars ended up going to the members of the Sekulow family or their companies, a Washington Post analysis of IRS tax filings and business records in five states and the District found.

David Welsford explains The Pros and Cons of Living on a Sailboat in the Caribbean:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset is 8:37 PM, for 15h 18m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1950, in response the communist invasion of South Korea, the United Nations Security Council adopts “S/RES/83: Complaint of aggression upon the Republic of Korea and decided the formation and dispatch of the UN Forces in Korea. Twenty-one countries of the United Nations eventually contributed to the UN force, with the United States providing 88% of the UN’s military personnel.” On this day in 1837, Solomon Juneau founds the Milwaukee Sentinel.

Recommended for reading in full —

Molly McKew urges readers to Forget Comey. The Real Story Is Russia’s War on America:

Since the January intelligence report, the public’s understanding of the threat has not expanded. OK, Russia meddled in the election — but so what? Increasingly, responsibility for this is borne by the White House, which in seeking to minimize the political damage of “Trump/Russia” is failing to craft a response to the greatest threat the United States and its allies have ever faced.

Even if the president and his team were correct, and the Comey testimony definitively cleared the president of potential obstruction of justice or collusion charges — even if that were true, that does not also exonerate Russia. Nonetheless, this is a line the president seems to want drawn.

So here are the real issues — about Russia; about the brutal facts we have yet to face; and about some hard questions we need to ask ourselves, and our political leaders, and our president….[listing in detail three key points…1. No matter what is true or not, we have moved toward the fractured, inward-looking, weakened America that President Putin wants to see…2. Russia has altered American policies, our relationships with our allies and our view of our place in the world…3. It will happen again; it is still happening now.

(Even considering Cold War setbacks against the Soviets, Putin’s success against America in 2016 – and dependent as it is on fellow travelers within America – is persuasively the most significant Russian victory over the United States in history.)

Ali Watkins reports that Intelligence officials worry State Dept. going easy on Russian diplomats:

Intelligence officials and lawmakers are concerned that the State Department is dragging its feet in implementing a crackdown on Russian diplomats’ travel within the U.S., despite evidence that Moscow is using lax restrictions to conduct intelligence operations.

The frustration comes amid bipartisan concern that the Trump administration is trying to slow down other congressional efforts to get tough on Russia. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a House committee last week that a new Senate sanctions package designed to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 election would limit Trump’s “flexibility” and impede possible U.S. “dialogue” with Moscow.

At issue separately is a provision already signed into law, as part of Congress’ annual Intelligence Authorization Act, approved in May, which requires the State Department to more rigorously enforce travel rules for Russian diplomats inside the U.S. The Kremlin’s U.S.-based diplomatic corps, according to several U.S. intelligence sources, has been known to skip notification rules and use the lax restrictions to roam around the country, likely engaging in surveillance activities.

Elias Grol writes that House Speaker Ryan Punts on Tough Senate Sanctions Bill:

On Tuesday [6.20] Ryan fell back on a constitutional technicality to stall the measure. The bill, which significantly ratchets up sanctions on both Russia and Iran, violates the origination clause of the Constitution, he argued, referring to the requirement that any bill raising revenue originate in the House.

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Ryan, told Foreign Policy that the bill cannot be considered by the House in its current form and that the speaker will “determine the next course of action” after consulting with the Senate.

Sarah Kendzior writes, mocking Trump’s grandiose style of speech, that Trump is the best autocrat. The best. Nobody has a better autocrat than we do:

The administration’s mix of brazenly thwarting laws and maintaining opaqueness on policy was predictable. It mirrors the structure of Trump’s campaign, which vacillated between spectacle (the rallies, the insults) and secrets (the long trail of financial and personal misdeeds left under-covered by reporters due to a mix of NDAs and reporter apathy.) In his first four months, this dynamic persisted as the Trump administration pulled the US toward autocracy through abuse of executive power.

That is, until May, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey. The President’s firing of the man investigating the President’s campaign set forth a chain of events culminating in an investigation into obstruction of justice – and raising the troubling question of whether, in an administration this corrupt, evidence of obstruction of justice will even result in repercussions.

The issues at the heart of the Russian interference crisis go beyond the standard uncertainty that arises when democracy declines. Never before has “to which country does the greatest loyalty of the president lie?” been the central question of a US federal investigation.

It is clear that the greatest loyalties of Trump’s team lie not with the constitution, but with Trump, as Attorney General Jeff Sessions made clear in a hearing in which he danced around perjury. The same holds for the rest of the GOP, who have failed to function as a check on Trump’s autocratic impulses or investigate his foreign ties.

What’s the carbon footprint of one sandwich? Adam Cole explains:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a forty-percent chance of afternoon showers and a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirtieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s school board meets tonight, in closed session at 6:30 PM, thereafter to continue in open session beginning at about 7 PM.

On this day in 1963, Pres. Kennedy delivers his Ich bin ein Berliner speech to the people of West Berlin, in the face of Soviet & East German construction of a wall to prevent free emigration into the West:

Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum [“I am a Roman citizen”]. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is “Ich bin ein Berliner!”… All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

Recommended for reading in full —

Jack Balkin of Yale Law School recently wrote of Trumping the Constitution (from notes he talk he gave):

Trump is a demagogue. We might even say that he is straight out of central casting for demagogues: unruly, uncouth, mendacious, dishonest and cunning. His rise is a symptom of constitutional rot and constitutional dysfunction. Constitutional rot not only allowed Trump to rise to power; he also has incentives to increase and exacerbate constitutional rot to stay in power. Many of his actions as president—and his media strategy—make sense from this perspective.

Polarization helps keep Trump in power, because it binds his supporters to him. He exacerbates polarization by fomenting outrage and internal division. He also confuses and distracts people, keeping them off balance and in a state of emotional upheaval. Emotional upheaval, in turn increases fear and fear enhances mutual distrust.

Trump doesn’t care if his opponents hate him, as long as his base hates and fears his political opponents more. Because his supporters hate and fear his enemies, they are more likely to cling to him, because they are quite certain that his enemies are even worse.

Polarization also helps keeps most professional politicians in his party from abandoning him. Many Republican politicians do not trust Trump and many regard him as unqualified. But if Republican politicians turn on Trump, they will be unable to achieve anything during a period in which they control both Congress and the White House. This will infuriate the base and anger the wealthy group of donors who help keep Republicans in power. Republican politicians who oppose Trump may face primary challenges. Finally, Republican politicians can’t be sure that enough of their fellow politicians will follow them if they stick their necks out. In fact, they may provoke a civil war within the Republican Party, in which Trump’s supporters accuse them of stabbing Trump (and the party) in the back.

John Hudson reports that Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak Is Going Home To Russia:

Ending one the most turbulent tenures of a Washington-based ambassador in recent memory, the Kremlin has decided to recall Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, three individuals familiar with the decision told BuzzFeed News.

The decision to bring Kislyak back to Russia rather than appoint him to a senior position at the United Nations in New York, as several outlets previously reported, comes amid investigations by the FBI and Congress into the 66-year-old diplomat’s contacts with President Donald Trump’s top aides during the 2016 presidential campaign….

As Kislyak’s associations came under intensifying scrutiny in recent weeks, an array of politicians in both parties tripped over themselves in trying to deny any past contacts with Kislyak, whose meetings with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and former national security adviser Michael Flynn have become a central source of intrigue in the broader Russia probe. All three men failed to report their meetings or conversations with the Russian ambassador at various times. At one point, the intrigue spread beyond the Trump camp — in late April, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi claimed she’d never met Kislyak shortly before photos surfaced of her meeting with him alongside other lawmakers in 2010.

As a result, Kislyak has been labeled everything from “spymaster,” to “typhoid Mary,” to “the most radioactive man in Washington.”

Dana Priest and Michael Birnbaum report that Europe has been working to expose Russian meddling for years:

RIGA, Latvia — As the United States grapples with the implications of Kremlin interference in American politics, European countries are deploying a variety of bold tactics and tools to expose Russian attempts to sway voters and weaken European unity.

Across the continent, counterintelligence officials, legislators, researchers and journalists have devoted years — in some cases, decades — to the development of ways to counter Russian disinformation, hacking and trolling. And they are putting them to use as never before.

Four dozen officials and researchers interviewed recently sounded uniformly more confident about the results of their efforts to counter Russian influence than officials grappling with it in the United States, which one European cyber-official described as “like watching ‘House of Cards.’?”

“The response here has been very practical,” observed a senior U.S. intelligence official stationed in Europe. “Everybody’s looking at it.”

Sonia Saraiya describes NBC’s Megyn Kelly Problem:

By all measures, her “Sunday Night” effort been a disaster: Her interviews have been either ridiculed or loathed by the rest of the press, and the ratings reflect a distinct lack of interest. To be sure, newsmagazines around one anchor have a high failure rate, even for respected names like Bryant Gumbel, Connie Chung, and Jane Pauley. But Kelly’s problems go beyond ratings. Her June 18 episode, an interview with InfoWars’ Alex Jones, began as a problematic decision and snowballed into a PR nightmare. Kelly couldn’t handle either the interview or its fallout….

Kelly’s cachet is that she is a thoughtful conservative woman — a kind of unicorn. Her demeanor carries with it a lot of posh worldliness; she’s tony and she knows it. On Fox News, her maternal concern about this newfangled world aligned her with her peers. But at the same time, her reasonably fair-minded consideration stood out; she offered a veneer of respectability in opposition to the at times crass politicking of its conservative pundits. She was centrist enough that some of the network’s most faithful despised her; her skepticism about Trump further alienated her from the network’s bread-and-butter base. Even colleague Sean Hannity got into a spat with her — a spat later mended, cheekily, on Twitter. But the division between her and her former colleagues was clear — enough that for liberal viewers peering at Fox News in frustration, Kelly became an occasional hero.

But outside of that context — a context which magnified her strengths and talents, because of how different she was from the network that nurtured her — Kelly has to rely not on the power of contrast but on her own resources. And so far, what we’re seeing is disappointing. On NBC, Kelly is didactic without being trustworthy; patronizing without being impressive. Her voiceover suggests doom without really proving it; there’s a scare-mongering side to her reportage. And, most importantly: She’s alienated everyone….

Astonishing creatures live deep below:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 5:18 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twenty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1950, the Korean War begins as communist North Korea invades South Korea. Millions died during the three-year-long conflict. Over 132,000 Wisconsinites served during the war.

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Lieb reports that an AP Analysis indicates partisan gerrymandering has benefited GOP:

The AP scrutinized the outcomes of all 435 U.S. House races and about 4,700 state House and Assembly seats up for election last year using a new statistical method of calculating partisan advantage. It’s designed to detect cases in which one party may have won, widened or retained its grip on power through political gerrymandering.

The analysis found four times as many states with Republican-skewed state House or Assembly districts than Democratic ones. Among the two dozen most populated states that determine the vast majority of Congress, there were nearly three times as many with Republican-tilted U.S. House districts.

Traditional battlegrounds such as Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Virginia were among those with significant Republican advantages in their U.S. or state House races. All had districts drawn by Republicans after the last Census in 2010.

The AP analysis also found that Republicans won as many as 22 additional U.S. House seats over what would have been expected based on the average vote share in congressional districts across the country. That helped provide the GOP with a comfortable majority over Democrats instead of a narrow one.

Nada Bakos writes that This is what foreign spies see when they read President Trump’s tweets:

Every time President Trump tweets, journalists and Twitter followers attempt to analyze what he means. Intelligence agencies around the world do, too: They’re trying to determine what vulnerabilities the president of the United States may have. And he’s giving them a lot to work with….

Trump’s tweets offer plenty of material for analysis. His frequent strong statements in reaction to news coverage or events make it appear as if he lacks impulse control. In building a profile of Trump, an analyst would offer suggestions on how foreign nations could instigate stress or deescalate situations, depending on what type of influence they may want to have over the president.

Sonam Sheth and Natasha Bertrand report that Evidence is mounting that Russia took 4 clear paths to meddle in the US election:

Now, as FBI special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional intelligence committees continue to investigate Russia’s election interference, evidence is emerging that the hacking and disinformation campaign waged at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin took at least four separate but related paths.

The first involved establishing personal contact with Americans perceived as sympathetic to Moscow — such as former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and early Trump foreign-policy adviser Carter Page — and using them as a means to further Russia’s foreign-policy goals.

The second involved hacking the Democratic National Committee email servers and then giving the material to WikiLeaks, which leaked the emails in batches throughout the second half of 2016.

The third was to amplify the propaganda value of the leaked emails with a disinformation campaign waged predominantly on Facebook and Twitter, in an effort to use automated bots to spread fake news and pro-Trump agitprop.

And the fourth was to breach US voting systems in as many as 39 states leading up to the election, in an effort to steal registration data that officials say could be used to target and manipulate voters in future elections.

Timothy O’Brien exhorts Hey, Mueller, You Should Check Out Iceland:

Earlier this week I wrote about the Bayrock Group, a property developer that did business deals for a decade with President Donald Trump.

Felix Sater — a Bayrock principal who was a career criminal with American and Russian mob ties and who has remained in the Trump orbit — helped reel in funds of murky origin that Bayrock and Trump used for projects such as the Trump Soho hotel in Manhattan. And one of Bayrock’s biggest financial backers was an Icelandic investment bank, the FL Group.

Iceland would seem like an unlikely place for U.S. Justice Department investigators to look as they probe Trump connections with Russia and related matters. Yet there are trails to pursue there.

When Sater convinced FL to invest in Bayrock in 2007, Iceland was a font of easy money caught up in a financial binge so frenzied that it would cause the country’s economy to implode in 2008.

Red pandas dig in:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 19m 48s of daytime. The moon is new, with .3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twenty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1948, the Soviets begin the Berlin Blockade of access to West Berlin (those portions of the city under Allied control). June 24th, 1948 sets a Wisconsin record for the most precipitation: “Mellen, Wisconsin received 11.72 inches of rain within a single day. This set a record for Wisconsin for precipitation received within 24 hours.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Patrick Marley reports on federal litigation over Lincoln Hills in Judge: ‘Ted Kaczynski has less restrictive confinement’ than Lincoln Hills teen inmates:

MADISON – A federal judge on Friday issued a sweeping decision to curb the use of solitary confinement, pepper spray and use of restraints at Wisconsin’s teen prison complex, saying some substantial changes would need to be made quickly.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson said the use of isolation as a form of punishment at Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls is “acute, immediate and enduring.”

“Ted Kaczynski has less restrictive confinement than the youth at Lincoln Hills,” Peterson said, referring to the Unabomber who is held at a federal supermax prison in Colorado.

Peterson, who questioned the abilities of top leaders at Lincoln Hills, made his ruling from the bench on the second day of a hearing in a lawsuit brought by teen inmates over operations at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. The inmates are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin and the Juvenile Law Center.

Greg Miller reports that Putin denied meddling in the U.S. election. The CIA caught him doing just that:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly — and often tauntingly — denied that his government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Earlier this month he said that the cyber campaign might have been the work of “patriotically minded” Russian hackers he likened to “artists” who take to canvases to express their moods and political views.

New details reported Friday by The Post reveal the extent to which the Russian meddling bore Putin’s own signature and brushstrokes.

U.S. intelligence officials have been pointing at Putin since October, when the Obama administration released a statement declaring that the stream of embarrassing emails and other material being posted online by WikiLeaks and other sites were tied to Russian hacking efforts that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized.”

….The latest revelations center on a critical piece of evidence that led U.S. intelligence agencies to that conclusion. In particular, the CIA had obtained intelligence from sources inside the Russian government by early August that captured the Russian leader’s specific instructions to subordinates on the operation’s objectives: disparage and seek to defeat the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton while helping to deliver the White House to Trump.

Neera Tanden contends that The Kremlin’s Investment in Trump Is Paying Off:

Fifty-four years ago this month, former President John F. Kennedy delivered the “Strategy of Peace,” a powerful address that captured America’s indispensable leadership at the height of the Cold War. Kennedy knew that our country could not guard against the Soviet Union alone, for he believed that “genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts.”

Incredibly, the man who now leads the United States seems to find himself locked in an alarming and perilous embrace with the Russian government. These ties threaten to weaken a system of alliances that have held Russia—and countless other threats to the international community—at bay since the conclusion of the Second World War.

David Frum asks What Happens When a Presidency Loses Its Legitimacy?:

Day by day, revelation after revelation, the legitimacy of the Trump presidency is seeping away. The question of what to do about this loss is becoming ever more urgent and frightening.

The already thick cloud of discredit over the Trump presidency thickened deeper Friday, June 23. The Washington Post reported that the CIA told President Obama last year that Vladimir Putin had personally and specifically instructed his intelligence agencies to intervene in the U.S. presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump….

The U.S. government is already osmotically working around the presidency, a process enabled by the president’s visible distaste for the work of governance….

In their way, these workarounds are almost as dangerous to the American system of government as the Trump presidency itself. They tend to reduce the president to the status of an absentee emperor while promoting his subordinates into shoguns who exercise power in his name. Maybe that is the least-bad practicable solution to the unprecedented threat of a presidency-under-suspicion. But what a terrible price for the failure of so many American institutions—not least the voters!—to protect the country in 2016 from Russia’s attack on its election and its democracy.

Great Big Story reveals The Alien Beauty of Socotra Island:

The Alien Beauty of Socotra Island from Great Big Story on Vimeo.