Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of sixty-five, and a probability of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 6:14 PM, for 11h 07m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 38.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Today is the two hundred forty-second birthday, from 1775, of the United States Navy (initially the Continental Navy). On this day in 1862, the Wisconsin Minute Men muster in: “Company B of the 28th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment was mustered into service by Captain J. M. Trowbridge. Known as the “Waukesha Minute Men,” this company was part of the 28th Regiment, recruited during the summer of 1862 in Waukesha and Walworth Counties and organized at Camp Washburn in Milwaukee under the command of Colonel James M. Lewis of Oconomowoc. They spent the next nine weeks training at Camp Washburn before heading south on December 20, 1862.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Josh Barro writes Trump has been lying a lot about his ‘small business’ tax cut:

President Donald Trump pitched his tax plan on Wednesday in front of a crowd of truckers. He wanted them to know his business tax cuts aren’t just for rich people — benefits would also flow to regular Americans, including truckers.

“The more than 30 million Americans who have small businesses will see — listen to this — a 40% cut in their marginal tax rate,” he said. “Forty percent.”

This was a lie.

Under Trump’s plan, only 1.8% of small-business owners — about 670,000 people, all with family incomes over $400,000 — would enjoy this 40% tax cut….

Denise Clifton reports Twitter Bots Distorted the 2016 Election—Including Many Likely From Russia (“1 in 5 election-related tweets weren’t from real people, research shows”):

The day Donald Trump was elected president, nearly 2,000 Twitter accounts that had pumped out pro-Trump messages in the run-up to the vote suddenly went dark. Then, in spring 2017, these bot-controlled accounts reemerged to campaign en français for Marine Le Pen in the French election, and then once again this fall, to tweet auf Deutsch on behalf of the far-right party in Germany’s election.

The bots were part of a larger group tracked over a month-long period before the US election by University of Southern California researchers, who discovered that bots were deeply entwined in political conversation on Twitter—accounting for 1 in 5 election-related tweets. And the bots were just as effective at spreading messages as human-controlled accounts were, says USC professor and lead researcher Emilio Ferrara, who has studied the influence of bot networks since 2012. “Botnets accrued retweets at the same rate as humans,” he says of the pre-election activity. His most recent research explores how bots are particularly effective at getting a message to go viral among authentic human users.

Ferrara has found that up to 15 percent of all Twitter accounts are run by automated bots. He focuses on understanding bots’ effectiveness, though he doesn’t track their provenance. But researchers for the cybersecurity firm FireEye told the New York Times recently they had determined that possibly thousands of Twitter accounts that campaigned against Hillary Clinton likely were controlled by Russian interests, including many automated by bots….

Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report Facebook takes down data and thousands of posts, obscuring reach of Russian disinformation:

Social media analyst Jonathan Albright got a call from Facebook the day after he published research last week showing that the reach of the Russian disinformation campaign was almost certainly larger than the company had disclosed. While the company had said 10 million people read Russian-bought ads, Albright had data suggesting that the audience was at least double that — and maybe much more — if ordinary free Facebook posts were measured as well.

Albright welcomed the chat with three company officials. But he was not pleased to discover that they had done more than talk about their concerns regarding his research. They also had scrubbed from the Internet nearly everything — thousands of Facebook posts and the related data — that had made the work possible.

Never again would he or any other researcher be able to run the kind of analysis he had done just days earlier….

Trevor Timm contends Trump’s threats amount to a First Amendment violation:

Many have commented on the First Amendment implications if Trump were to actually go after NBC’s license (or really, the licenses of local affiliates since NBC itself doesn’t need a license) or the NFL’s tax status. But Trump need not act on his threats for his actions to be considered a First Amendment violation. There’s a compelling argument Trump is in violation of Constitution right now—after he crossed the line from criticism of protected speech to openly threatening government action.

There’s plenty of case law on this subject from the Supreme Court to appeals courts around the country. Most recently, in a case in the Seventh Circuit called BackPage LLC vs. Thomas Dart, Sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, just-retired Judge Richard Posner articulated exactly why Trump may already be running afoul of the First Amendment merely through his threats.

In Backpage, Dart embarked on a one-man campaign to get Visa and Mastercard to cut off credit card donations to Backpage.com because of its adult section. Instead of prosecuting Backpage for any specific violation, he sent letters pressuring the credit card companies to cut off any payments to Backpage.com for any reason, since some of the Backpage ads, as Posner wrote, “might be for illegal sex-related products or services.”

Posner, citing several decades of case law, made it clear that if the Sheriff can’t sue or prosecute Backpage for legitimate violations of the law, he can’t then turn around and use his power as a government official to make threatening statements in an attempt to censor them in other ways:

a public official who tries to shut down an avenue of expression of ideas and opinions through “actual or threatened imposition of government power or sanction” is violating the First Amendment. American Family Association, Inc. v. City & County of San Francisco, 277 F.3d 1114, 1125 (9th Cir. 2002).

When Trump veers into actual threats of government action for speech he doesn’t like, he is arguably crossing that same line that the Seventh Circuit, and the Supreme Court before it, has condemned.

Tech Insider explains porgs from Star Wars: The Last Jedi:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 6:16 PM, for 11h 10m 06s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter, with 49.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets today at 5 PM.

On this day in 2000, seventeen sailors are killed in an attack on the USS Cole. On this day in 1783, Henry Dodge is born: “On this date Territorial Governor Henry Dodge was born in Vincennes, Indiana. The son of Israel Dodge and Nancy Hunter, Henry Dodge was the first Territorial Governor of Wisconsin. Prior to this position, he served as Marshall and Brigadier General of the Missouri Territory, Chief Justice of the Iowa County (Wisconsin) Court. During the Black Hawk War of 1832 he led the Wisconsin militia who ultimately brought the conflict to its tragic end. He served as Territorial Governor from July 3, 1836 to October 5, 1841 and again from May 13, 1845 to June 7, 1848. He also served as U.S. Territorial Senator from 1841 to 1846. When Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as a State, dodge was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate; he was reelected in 1851 and served from June 8, 1848, to March 3, 1857. He was also twice nominated for President and once for Vice President, all of which he declined. Henry Dodge died on June 19, 1867 in Burlington, Iowa.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Robert Kagan writes Faster, Steve Bannon. Kill! Kill!:

Rarely has a political party more deserved the destruction the Republican Party may be about to suffer at the hands of President Trump’s former strategist, ideological guru and onetime puppeteer Steve Bannon. It was obvious during the earliest days of the campaign that Trump never intended to be either the leader or the protector of the Republican Party. He had contempt for the party. For one thing, it was a proven loser. For another, it crumpled like stick figures under his steamroller. Who could respect people who fell so easily, and so willingly?…

Should we have rooted for Republican leaders to fight back? Sure. And we did. The party would be worth saving if it contained even a dozen women and men of courage. But of course if it did contain such people, it wouldn’t need saving. Today the definition of a brave Republican is someone who is not running for reelection. So rooting for them is no longer an answer. The best thing for the country may be to let the party go. Let it become the party of Trump and Bannon, and as fast as possible. Let the 35 percent of the country who believe Trump is a suitable president, or who hate Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama so much that they would elect Mussolini to the White House, have their party.

The rest of Republican voters should leave the party until it earns back the right to their support. They should change their registration and start voting for Democratic moderates and centrists, as some Republicans did in Virginia recently, to give them a leg up in their fight against the party’s left wing. A third party of “good Republicans” is a fantasy. This is a two-party country. To defeat one, you have to support the other, either directly or indirectly. Right now the country’s best hope is for a moderate Democratic Party that speaks for that sizable majority of Americans who recognize the peril of seven more years of Trump in the White House. Bannon is doing his part to make that happen. It’s time for Republican voters who care about this country to do theirs.

Betsy  Woodruff and Spencer Ackerman report Russia Probe Now Investigating Cambridge Analytica, Trump’s ‘Psychographic’ Data Gurus:

A data firm backed by some of Donald Trump’s closest allies is now facing scrutiny as part of an investigation into possible collusion between the president’s team and Russian operatives, The Daily Beast has learned.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) is looking at Cambridge Analytica’s work for President Donald Trump’s campaign as part of its investigation into Russian efforts to meddle in the 2016 race, according to sources familiar with the probe.

The company is in the process of turning over documents to HPSCI, according to a source familiar with the committee’s work. Another source close to the investigation said that the probe’s focus on Cambridge Analytica is “fruitful.”

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had holdings in Cambridge Analytica worth between $1 million and $5 million as recently as April of this year, Bloomberg reported. Bannon, now back as the chairman of the pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart, hasn’t been publicly mentioned as a potential witness for or target of Russia investigators. He previously sat on the board of Cambridge Analytica….

Jennifer Rubin observes Evangelical conservatives are proving their harshest critics right:

For years, Democrats accused Christian conservatives of being closet theocrats, seeking to impose Christianity on the country and refusing to accept, let alone embrace, American diversity. That was a generalization, but it turned out to be more true than not.

The evangelical defense of President Trump has taken on a religious fervor immune to reason. The Post reports:

Although some say the Trump-evangelical alliance harms Christianity, it’s common to hear other conservative Christians say that Trump’s unexpected win — down to the electoral college — shows that God had a more-deliberate-than-usual hand, and has put Trump there for some reason.

Brian Kaylor, a Baptist pastor with a PhD in political communications who has written several books about religion and politics, thinks [White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee] Sanders holds this view of a divine plan and it gives her confidence at the podium.

“When you have to stand up there and defend whatever he’s done, it’s more than you are defending a politician, or even a president; you are defending God’s chosen leader for this time,” he said of Trump’s defenders.

That’s stunning to the many Americans who think the divine right of kings was what we fought against in the American Revolution. A God-chosen president can do no wrong, tell no lie, make no error. And that, it seems, has been the default setting for many of Trump’s most loyal supporters among the religious right….

(N.B.: There is a powerful religious case against Trump; a conservative religious defense of Trump runs counter to this powerful case, and leads one to conclude that it may not be theology, but electoral politics, that underlies a deplorable defense of Trumpism. Indeed, Trump actually does best with evangelicals who don’t go to church.)

Michael Weiss reports The making of a Russian disinformation campaign: What it takes:

….”Between Christmas Eve 1959 and mid-February 1960,” the American journalist John Barron later recounted, “West German authorities recorded 833 separate anti-Jewish acts. Then the epidemic ceased almost as suddenly as and mysteriously as it had begun. Police arrested and interrogated 234 people. Analyzing their motives, the government concluded that 24% acted out of ‘subconscious Nazi motives;’ 8% were inspired by extreme rightist or leftist beliefs; 48% were drunks or thugs; 15% were children; and 5% were mentally deranged.”

Case, then, seemingly closed — but for a few oddities diagnosed in Patient Zero of this epidemic. The two men who had inaugurated the spree of defacements in Cologne had belonged to a minuscule West German neo-Nazi party but, as Barron noted, the authorities discovered “that they frequently made trips to East Germany and one had a Communist Party badge hidden behind his coat lapel”….

It would take a few more years, when defectors from the GDR stole across the Berlin Wall, for the true provenance of the “swastika graffiti operation” to become known.

An operation is exactly what it was, too, cooked up by General Ivan Ivanovich Agayants, who headed Department D of the First Chief Directorate of the Soviet KGB. The “D” stood for Dezinformatsiya, or disinformation, and Agayants, an austere ethnic Armenian, was very good at his job. During his tenure, he oversaw the forgery of documents alleging that the CIA planned to assassinate Indonesian President Sukarno and eliminate Turkish military officials and political actors in the interest of the then-ruling center-right Justice Party.

The 58-year-old provocation may have been a tactical success, but it was a strategic failure: West Germany stayed in NATO and remained an intact liberal democracy immune from the restoration of Hitlerism well into reunification with its eastern neighbor. But the swastika graffiti campaign remains a vivid case study of a poisonous weapon used for decades, not only by the Soviets, but also by their heir, Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, in trying to influence western nations, including the course of American democracy….

NASA’s ScienceCasts presents A Display of Lights Above the Storm:

Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) are flashes and glows that appear above storms and are results of activity occurring in and below those storms. Researchers are working to better understand lightning and thunderstorms, how they form and develop over time, and why storms produce different TLEs in different circumstances.

Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 6:17 PM, for 11h 12m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1942, the Battle of Cape Esperance begins (concluding with an American victory the next day): “The naval battle was the second of four major surface engagements during the Guadalcanal campaign and took place at the entrance to the strait between Savo Island and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Cape Esperance (9°15’S 159°42’E) is the northernmost point on Guadalcanal, and the battle took its name from this point.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Patrick Marley reports Internal affairs: Gov. Scott Walker’s team shut unit down for exposing Lincoln Hills problems:

MADISON – The leaders of a Department of Corrections internal affairs unit that was recently shut down by Gov. Scott Walker’s administration said changes were ordered because they had done too good a job at exposing problems at the state’s juvenile prison.

A Department of Corrections spokesman discounted that contention, saying the decision to close the unit was unrelated to the wide-ranging internal investigation into Lincoln Hills School for Boys and Copper Lake School for Girls.

The department’s Office of Special Operations in 2014 launched a review of those two juvenile prisons, which share a campus 30 miles north of Wausau. It uncovered extensive problems that grew into a criminal investigation that has been ongoing for nearly three years.

Walker’s administration shut down the Office of Special Operations in June, contending doing so would allow it to concentrate its resources on investigating and preventing sexual assault behind bars….

Steve Wierenga, the head of the office, and Cheryl Frey, the special investigations chief, said they believe “they have done ‘too good a job’ … and are now being pulled from employee investigations because they ‘found out too much’ at (Lincoln Hills) and ‘made the DOC look bad’ ”….

Ellen Nakashima reports Israel hacked Kaspersky, then tipped the NSA that its tools had been breached:

In 2015, Israeli government hackers saw something suspicious in the computers of a Moscow-based cybersecurity firm: hacking tools that could only have come from the National Security Agency.

Israel notified the NSA, where alarmed officials immediately began a hunt for the breach, according to people familiar with the matter, who said an investigation by the agency revealed that the tools were in the possession of the Russian government.

Israeli spies had found the hacking material on the network of Kaspersky Lab, the global anti-virus firm under a spotlight in the United States because of suspicions that its products facilitate Russian espionage.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security instructed federal civilian agencies to identify Kaspersky Lab software on their networks and remove it on the grounds that “the risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security.” The directive followed a decision by the General Services Administration to remove Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. And lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering a governmentwide ban….

Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, Carol E. Lee and Savannah Guthrie report Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military:

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said he wanted what amounted to a nearly tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during a gathering this past summer of the nation’s highest ranking national security leaders, according to three officials who were in the room.

Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.

According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the build-up. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned….

(Trump is so ignorant that he cannot see an increase of this kind would be limited by existing treaties, and that in any event our current force is more advanced and capable than any on Earth.)

David A. Graham asks Are Trump’s Feuds With Tillerson and Corker a Prelude to War?:

….Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea. Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more. Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?

There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)

In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary”….

The new Star Wars: The Last Jedi trailer is available:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 6:19 PM, for 11h 15m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Google has a doodle today to commemorate the 156th birthday of Fridtjof Nansen, a “a Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate” who when younger was  “a champion skier and ice skater. ” In his later years, “Nansen devoted himself primarily to the League of Nations, following his appointment in 1921 as the League’s High Commissioner for Refugees. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the displaced victims of the First World War and related conflicts. Among the initiatives he introduced was the “Nansen passport” for stateless persons, a certificate that used to be recognised by more than 50 countries. He worked on behalf of refugees until his sudden death in 1930, after which the League established the Nansen International Office for Refugees to ensure that his work continued. This office received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1938. His name is commemorated in numerous geographical features, particularly in the polar regions.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Nicholas Confessore and Daisuke Wakabayashi report How Russia Harvested American Rage to Reshape U.S. Politics:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 6:21 PM, for 11h 18m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1861, the 1st Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “The 1st Wisconsin Infantry mustered in on October 9, 1861. It left Wisconsin for Louisville, Kentucky, and moved gradually through Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia during the war. It would participate in the battles of Perryville and Chickamauga and the Siege of Atlanta. It would lose 300 men during its service. Six officers and 151 enlisted men were killed in combat and one officer and 142 enlisted men died from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

David Filipov reports on The notorious Kremlin-linked ‘troll farm’ and the Russians trying to take it down:

SHUSHARY, Russia — She rode into a pitch-black truck stop on a scooter, stepped out of the pouring rain into a gas station cafe on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and recounted her quest to bring down Russia’s infamous “troll farm.”

Lyudmila Savchuk is one of a disparate handful of Russian journalists, activists and legal experts who have tried to shed light on the shadowy operation that has become a focal point of U.S. investigations into Kremlin meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

And like most people who challenge the established order in today’s Russia, Savchuk and the others are jousting against a nebulous entity with apparent Kremlin ties and evident protection from government and law-enforcement agencies. For them, this is a task that entails significant risks and little chance of success.

How much the trolls affected the outcome of the U.S. election is unclear. But their omnipresence is evident on Twitter, where one recent study suggested that trolling by pro-Putin bots trolling dominates political talk about Russia, and in the comments section of publications like The Washington Post, where trolls can be found criticizing the premises, lambasting other posters and accusing one another of being trolls.

While the troll farm’s operations have stirred concerns about the reach of Kremlin propaganda across Europe and the United States, Savchuk and her cohorts are concerned about their own country….

Jason Landers reports White Supremacists Return to Charlottesville Chanting, ‘Russia is Our Friend’:

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Virginia—White supremacist Richard Spencer suddenly reappeared on Saturday night with torch-bearing supporters, two months after he organized an infamous hate march here.

Spencer and his 50 or so followers gathered around a statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park chanting white supremacist slogans.

“They were shouting ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Russia is our friend,’ ‘the South will rise again,’ ‘we’ll be back,’” said a University of Virginia faculty member, who wished not to be named for fear of retribution….

Michael Shear reports White House Makes Hard-Line Demands for Any ‘Dreamers’ Deal:

….The demands were developed by a half-dozen agencies and departments, officials said. But among the officials behind the demands are Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have long advocated extremely aggressive efforts to prevent illegal entry into the country and crack down on undocumented immigrants already here.

The demands represented a concerted effort to broaden the expected congressional debate about the Dreamers to one about overhauling the entire American immigration system — on terms that hard-line conservatives have been pursuing for decades….

James Fallows writes that It’s What Bob Corker Does Next That Counts (“After the senator warned that Trump’s reckless threats may set the nation ‘on the path to World War III,’ the question is whether the Tennessee Republican intends to do anything about it”):

Senator Bob Corker, a Republican of Tennessee, deserves credit for saying in public this evening to The New York Times what most prominent Republicans have known and many have said (in careful privacy) over the past two years.

Namely: that Donald Trump is irrational, ill-informed, impulsive, unfit for command, and increasingly a danger to the country and the world. The man who has ultimate authority over the world’s most powerful military, including its nuclear weaponry, is recklessly issuing threats to North Korea and others that set the nation “on the path to World War III,” according to Corker—who, for the record, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” he told Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler of the Times.

This situation is not normal. It is not safe. And the group which for now has a monopoly on legislative and investigative power in Washington, Corker’s own Republican Party, has an obligation to the country’s past and its future to do something about it. Talk is better than nothing, but action is what counts….

Great Big Story describes Summiting Mountains Without Sight:

Scaling the world’s tallest mountains is a feat in and of its own—doing it while blind is extraordinary. Erik Weihenmayer is the first blind rock climber to summit the tallest peak in every continent, Mount Everest included. At a young age, Weihenmayer was diagnosed with retinoschisis, a rare eye disease that left him sightless by age 13. But he didn’t let that hold him back from seeking out adventure, proving that what others may see as a hinderance can oftentimes be your greatest asset. Now, he’s using his incredible spirit to inspire others to live a life with no barriers.

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 6:22 PM, for 11h 21m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred thirty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire, a blaze that killed hundreds, “started at about 9:00 p.m. on October 8, in or around a small barn belonging to the O’Leary family that bordered the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street.^[2] The shed next to the barn was the first building to be consumed by the fire, but city officials never determined the exact cause of the blaze.^[3] There has, however, been much speculation over the years. The most popular tale blames Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, who allegedly knocked over a lantern; others state that a group of men were gambling inside the barn and knocked over a lantern.^[4] Still other speculation suggests that the blaze was related to other fires in the Midwest that day.^[5] ” Also on this day in 1871, Peshtigo, Wisconsin “was devastated by a fire which took 1,200 lives. The fire caused over $2 million in damages and destroyed 1.25 million acres of forest. This was the greatest human loss due to fire in the history of the United States.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Ari Berman reports Trump Election Commission Leader Sought a Radical Change to a Key Voting Law (“New documents show that Kris Kobach wanted Trump to make it much harder to register to vote”):

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of President Donald Trump’s election integrity commission, urged the Trump administration to weaken a key federal voting law, according to documents released by a federal court on Thursday. Kobach called for amending the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to offer voter registration at the DMV and other federal agencies, to allow states to require proof of citizenship in order to register—a requirement that has blocked tens of thousands from the polls in Kansas.

On November 20, 2016, Kobach met with Trump at the president-elect’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Kobach was a top adviser to Trump on immigration and voting issues and at the time was under consideration to lead the Department of Homeland Security. As he greeted Trump, Kobach was photographed holding a white paper outlining the “Kobach Strategic Plan for the Next 365 Days.”

Though partially obscured, the document revealed a wish-list of radical policies for the Trump era that included “extreme vetting” and tracking of “all aliens from high-risk areas,” reducing the “intake of Syrian refugees to zero,” deporting a “record number of criminal aliens in the first year,” and the “rapid build” of a wall along the US-Mexico border.

At the bottom of the document was a section called “Stop Aliens From Voting,” where Kobach said he wanted to “Draft Amendment to National Voter Registration Act to promote proof-of-citizenship requirements.” On Thursday, in response to a lawsuit from the ACLU, a federal court ordered Kobach to release the document to the public, along with a draft of his proposed amendment. Those documents show how Kobach would alter one of the country’s most important voting rights laws by adding a new requirement that would make it much more difficult for Americans to register. (Kobach wrote to Trump’s transition team the day after the election and made the same policy recommendation.)

Kobach’s proposal is modeled after a law in Kansas requiring citizenship documents to register to vote, such as a birth certificate, a passport, or naturalization papers. Since the law went into effect in 2013, one in seven Kansans trying to register has been prevented from doing so. Nearly half of those 30,000 people have been under the age of 30. A federal appeals court blocked a key part of the law last year, ruling that “there was an almost certain risk that thousands of otherwise qualified Kansans would be unable to vote in November.” Kobach has appealed that ruling….

David Daley writes How the GOP Made Your Vote Useless:

Ed Gillespie masterminded the devastating 2010 GOP strategy to retake Washington by winning crucial state and local elections that brought the power to redistrict the U.S. House.

His plan, aptly dubbed REDMAP, worked so well that Republicans captured almost 700 state legislature seats in an epic rebuke of Barack Obama and Democrats nationwide. The true spoils of that victory came the following year. New GOP majorities in Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania reinvented the gerrymander as a blunt-force partisan weapon.

It took Democrats many years to realize how long-lasting the consequences of 2010 would be. Now—just as the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in Gill v Whitford, a landmark case that could create the first-ever constitutional standard to define when a partisan gerrymander goes too far—Democrats have realized that the future of their party will be determined down-ballot. Gillespie, the godfather of the GOP gerrymander and the Republican nominee for governor of Virginia, is their most crucial target.

A Gillespie win, combined with well-cemented Republican majorities in the state assembly and senate, would lock in GOP control when new legislative districts for statewide and congressional races are drawn in 2021….

David Corn writes Did Russia Hack the 2016 Vote Tally? This Senator Says We Don’t Know for Sure:

At a packed press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, provided a progress report on his panel’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. Naturally, this is a touchy and dicey matter for a Republican, and Burr tried to make some points that appeared designed to limit President Donald Trump’s political vulnerabilities on this front.

First, Burr declared that although Russian hackers had probed or penetrated the election systems of at least 21 states, he could confidently state that the Russian meddling in the 2016 election resulted in no changes to the vote tallies. That is, there’s no reason to question Trump’s Electoral College win. And second, Burr said that Russia’s use of Facebook ads during the presidential campaign seemed “indiscriminate” and not designed to help a particular candidate—meaning the recent revelations do not bolster the case that Trump was the Kremlin’s choice.

“The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering. I do not agree with this judgment.”

But Sen. Ron Wyden, (D-Ore.), a feisty member of the intelligence committee, says both assertions are bunk. In an interview with Mother Jones on Thursday, Wyden argued that Burr’s confidence in the election system was unwarranted. “The chairman said that he can say ‘certifiably’ that there was no vote tampering,” said Wyden. “I do not agree with this judgment. I don’t think it is possible to know that. There was no systematic analysis of the voting or forensic evaluations of the voting machines.”

Wyden pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security has noted that its assessment that there was no finagling with the vote count was made with only “moderate confidence.” For Wyden, that’s not good enough for such a sensitive and significant matter—and it sends the misguided signal that the voting system is doing just fine. Wyden believes that’s the wrong message. This week he sent a letter to the major manufacturers of voting machines demanding information about how they protect themselves from cyberattacks.

Wyden also said that Burr erred in declaring that the Russian Facebook ads—some of which targeted swing states—did not favor a presidential candidate. (Presumably Wyden has seen or been briefed on the content of the ads.) “That’s one reason why the ads need to be released to the American people,” Wyden remarked, “so Americans can make up their minds”….

Donnie Sullivan reports an Exclusive: Russian-linked group sold merchandise online:

“Young, gifted and black.” “Melanin and muscles.” “Our sons matter.” The slogans on the clothing that a group called “Blacktivist” offered for sale through Facebook were supposed to look like they came from American Black Lives Matter activists. But they were in fact being promoted by a Russian-linked group working to amplify political discord in the U.S. before the presidential election.

CNN first reported last week that “Blacktivist” accounts on Facebook and Twitter had regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage in an apparent attempt to amplify racial tensions during the U.S. presidential election. The accounts have been suspended and are among those handed over to Congress as part of its investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

 The page appears to have sold fewer than 100 items of Blacktivist-branded merchandise, but the actual amount of clothing sold is less significant than what the effort represented: A move by the people behind Blacktivist to go beyond social media and spread their influence into the physical world. The Blacktivist Facebook page also promoted at least seven rallies and demonstrations around the U.S. in 2016.

Related: Exclusive: Fake black activist accounts linked to Russian government

Jonathon Morgan, the founder of New Knowledge, a company that tracks the spread of misinformation online, says the promotion of events and the sale of merchandise is straight out of the Russian misinformation handbook, and that it “fits a pattern of Russian propagandists’ attempts at appearing as authentic Americans participating in politics”….

(One can expect future, more effective Russian attempts if reliable counter-measures are not adopted. See Pell Center Study Warns Russia Threat is Bigger than the 2016 Election.)

Among all animals, these are the animals that travel the farthest:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 6:24 PM, for 11h 24m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three 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 1765, the Stamp Act Congress (First Congress of the American Colonies) convenes in New York, with elected representatives from nine colonies meeting to form a common opposition to the Stamp Act. On this day in 1774, Wisconsin becomes part of Quebec: “On this date Britain passed the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec. Enacted by George III, the act restored the French form of civil law to the region. The Thirteen Colonies considered the Quebec Act as one of the “Intolerable Acts,” as it nullified Western claims of the coast colonies by extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi River on the west. [Source: Avalon Project at the Yale Law School].”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Phillip Bump writes FEMA buried updates on Puerto Rico. Here they are:

….We’ve taken that data for the past week or so and created a tool that will show you not only the status of each of the metrics tracked by Status.pr but also how those numbers have improved (or haven’t) over time. It updates every hour, showing the most recent numbers for any given day.

Experts predict that it will take months to repair the electrical grid enough that most residents of the island have power. For months, then, the numbers above will be below 100 percent, a constant reminder of how much work the administration still has to do before Puerto Rican society has been restored to where it was before Hurricane Maria hit.

FEMA would rather not broadcast that slow progress. So we will.

(FEMA denies intentional removal to conceal bad news that contradicts Trump’s assertions, but offers no explanation why data relevant to FEMA’s role was not included on its 10.6.17 website update.)

David A Graham asks Why Did FEMA Remove Stats About Puerto Rico’s Recovery? (“As in the case of data about climate change and occupational safety, the Trump administration has quietly pulled down bleak numbers about electricity and drinking water after Hurricane Maria”):