We’re early in the formation of a grand coalition in opposition to Trump, but however long the task, that effort should focus on the top: Trump, his inner circle, principal surrogates, and media defenders. All in all, that’s a small group on which one may concentrate.
There will be endless tactical debates about how to reach this voter or that one, to shrink Trump’s room to maneuver here or there. These discussions will be well-meaning (as they’ll be directed at Trump’s political ruin), but they shouldn’t be our principal focus.
A focus on Trump, key aides, and those who defend him in the media will accomplish three things: (1) assign responsibility where it is most deserved, (2) allow concentration of resources, and (3) speed a separation of Trump from ordinary people who are mere marks in his long confidence game.
Blaming those he’s conned is a sideshow. (There’s a necessary exception for the very few who are of the alt-right; they deserve, in-and-of-themselves, obloquy whenever one has the time.)
If Trump breaks politically, it will come from the case against him, and his present supporters will by turns break away (or in any event will have nothing left to support). In this way, his remaining supporters won’t be able to bolster him adequately in the end. He’ll stand or stumble despite them.
If Trump should meet his ruin (and he will), it will come from a relentless case against his mediocrity, lies, bigotry, character disorders, and authoritarianism. One needn’t ask why people support him now; it’s enough to show him again and again as unworthy of support.
Now, there are alliances to build, and a case to make, against Trump and those in his circle.
Some of the worst aspects of our new national politics have been present in many small towns for years: (1) grandiosity, (2) news stories from weak reporters or indifferent stringers who are mere scribes for those in power, (3) ceaseless conflicts of interest, including news sites from incumbent politicians, (4) distortion of facts to turn crud into caviar, (5) low-quality, lazy work passed off as though it were Newton’s Principia, and (6) a top-down condescension in which a few decide that their work is ‘good enough’ and so the many should settle for that lesser standard & lesser product.
The overwhelming majority of people in these communities are sharp and capable, and deserve more than compromised standards.
Our new national scene brings myriad challenges, but there are many who’ve lived with small-scale versions of these challenges for years.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy, with a high of thirty-five, and an even chance of afternoon snow showers. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:49 PM, for 9h 29m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}seventieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Common Council will meet tonight at 6:30 PM (part of the session will include a joint meeting with the Planning Commission).
Andrew Kaczynski and Jim Acosta report that Monica Crowley bows out of Trump administration post following plagiarism revelations: “The move comes after CNN’s KFile uncovered multiple instances of plagiarism in her 2012 book, her columns for the Washington Times, and her 2000 Ph.D. dissertation for Columbia University. Crowley was slated to be the senior director of strategic communications for the National Security Council in Trump’s administration….CNN’s KFILE originally reported last week that Crowley had plagiarized more than 50 times in her 2012 book “What the Bleep Just Happened.” In response to the story, publisher HarperCollins pulled the book from sales until it could be updated to include proper attribution. CNN’s KFILE later found thousands of words plagiarized in Crowley’s 2000 dissertation for her Columbia University Ph.D. Columbia has said any review of her work would be kept confidential. A review of Crowley’s columns for the Washington Times also found plagiarism in seven columns.”
Paul Farhi reports on How Ed Schultz transformed from MSNBC lefty to the American face of Moscow media: “In mid-2015, MSNBC handed Schultz his last paycheck. After six years on the air, the ratings of his daily program, “The Ed Show,” were soft and MSNBC was going for more news in Schultz’s time slot, not opinion. His daily radio show had ended the previous year. So Schultz went back to his lakefront home in Detroit Lakes, Minn., and took stock. At 61, after a lifetime in broadcasting, he concluded he wasn’t done. In early 2016, he returned to television, albeit in an unlikely place and role for a guy who once styled himself as a “prairie populist.” He became the lead news anchor for RT America, the domestic network of what was once known as Russia Today, a globe-spanning multimedia organization funded by the Russian government….Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the former American ambassador to Russia, calls RT “an instrument of the Russian state. Their mission is to advance the mission of Mr. Putin and the [Russian] government.” By mimicking the look and feel of an American newscast — even to the extent of permitting an occasional dissent from the Kremlin-centric line — RT is trying to “disguise” its real intent, he said. And Schultz is part of the strategy, says McFaul. “They put on a lot of Americans as hosts and journalists,” he said. “The idea is to obfuscate and confuse people about it being a government entity.”
Robert McFadden reports that Eugene Cernan, Last Human to Walk on Moon, Dies at 82: “A ferocious competitor with a test pilot’s reckless streak, Mr. Cernan (pronounced SIR-nun) rocketed into space three times, was the second American to drift weightless around the world on a tether, went to the moon twice and shattered aerospace records on the Earth and the moon. He also slid down a banister on a visit to the White House and once crashed a helicopter in the Atlantic while chasing a dolphin. Skimming the lunar surface in a rehearsal for the first manned landing, he erupted with salty language heard by millions when his craft briefly spun out of control. But he made spacewalks and romps over the lunar surface look routine, and in a way they were. Three and a half years after Neil A. Armstrong took mankind’s first step onto the lunar surface in 1969, Mr. Cernan, a Navy captain and one of the nation’s most experienced astronauts, landed with a geologist-astronaut near the Sea of Serenity in the final chapter of the Apollo program, America’s audacious venture to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to put Americans on the moon.”
DJI World presents The Eagle Huntress (for see Aisholpan’s full story, see the SONY Pictures feature-length documentary The Eagle Huntress at http://sonyclassics.com/theeaglehuntress):
From columnist Dusty Nix of the Ledger-Enquirer, a comparison of Obama and Trump:
Barack Obama is everything so-called conservatives have, at least since the dismal dawn of the Moral Majority, told us a political figure should be: a dedicated and loving faith-and-family man, personally beyond reproach, publicly untainted by scandal or corruption. The man who succeeds him in five days is everything the same people have told us we should abhor and loathe: repulsively crass, gleefully promiscuous, serially adulterous, spiritually indifferent (at best), morally void and demonstrably corrupt.
One can guess that libertarians have had principled objections to Pres. Obama’s administration, yet for them all I’d not change a word of this comparison of Obama & Trump.
The work that awaits, as part of a grand coalition of millions of Americans, has only begun. Much is uncertain, and there are sure to be many difficult moments ahead. It is, it seems, for those opposed to Trump the regrettable but necessary work of our time to declare our views, and to act diligently each day on them.
In Whitewater, the Martin Luther King Holiday will see freezing rain in the morning change to rain in the afternoon, with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 81.3.% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Christiano Lima reports that Pence denies contact between Trump campaign and Russia: “Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Sunday flatly denied any links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian officials. “I joined this campaign in the summer, and I can tell you that all the contact by the Trump campaign and the associates were with the American people,” Pence told host Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.”
Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes answer Why Are the Trump Allegations Hanging Around When They Haven’t Been Substantiated?: “Part of the explanation may also be that the salacious allegations and the reports of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence do not take place in a vacuum. They take place amidst the background of a great deal of public evidence of ties between the Trump campaign and Russian actors. Long prior to the election, remember, media outlets reported on links between Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and advisor Carter Page and questionable actors in and around Russia. Those reports led Manafort to resign as campaign manager and for the Trump team to disavow contact with Carter Page. Incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was photographed at an RT dinner in Moscow sitting at the same table as Vladimir Putin. Trump confident Roger Stone claimed ties to Wikileaks and Julian Assange, both of which are suspected of ties to Russia. In fact, the degree of coziness between the Trump team and Russia prompted us to write a somewhat tongue-in-cheek legal analysis on whether Trump qualifies as a Russian agent. So these reports are, at the very least, consistent in key thematic respects with verified public reporting.”
Rainer Buergin reports that Trump Calls NATO Obsolete and Dismisses EU in German Interview: “Trump’s reported comments leave little doubt that he will stick to campaign positions and may in some cases upend decades of U.S. foreign policy, putting him fundamentally at odds with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on issues from free trade and refugees to security and the EU’s role in the world. On Russia, he suggested he might use economic sanctions imposed for Vladimir Putin’s encroachment on Ukraine as leverage in nuclear-arms reduction talks, while NATO, he said, “has problems.” “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Trump was quoted as saying about the trans-Atlantic military alliance. “Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism.”
Dan Egan reports that As new pipelines stall on the Great Plains, oil pressure builds in the Great Lakes: “As pipeline protests have raged out West for the last decade, ever-growing volumes of North American oil have been discreetly flowing through the far more populous Great Lakes region, under its forests, rivers, ponds, wetlands, cities and towns and even, in one extreme case, across the bottom of the Great Lakes themselves. This is the story of what could be called the Great Lakes XXL — a swelling, invisible river of oil flowing through the world’s largest freshwater system at a time when other regions on the continent are rejecting the risk of new pipelines.”
Two divers go swimming with sharks off South Africa, and live to tell the tale —
Studio 84, located in downtown Whitewater, is a non-profit art studio that offers “experiences in the visual arts and theater for the community …working with all people including those with Autism, physical disabilities, cognitive limitations and mental illness.”
Milwaukee television channel 58 WDJT recently visited and reported on the studio’s work —
Sunday in Whitewater will be a partly sunny day with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 25m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
The AP reports on Ringling Bros. calling it quits after 146 years: “Ellenton, Fla. — After 146 years, the curtain is coming down on “The Greatest Show on Earth.” The owner of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus told The Associated Press that the show will close forever in May. The iconic American spectacle was felled by a variety of factors, company executives say. Declining attendance combined with high operating costs, along with changing public tastes and prolonged battles with animal rights groups all contributed to its demise.”
Michelle Goldberg thinks that Democrats Should Follow John Lewis’ Lead (but I don’t think her advice applies only to Democrats): “Lewis was speaking for many of us who are aghast at the way Trump benefited from Russian hacking and now appears to be returning the favor by taking a fawning stance toward Putin. He spoke for those of us who are shocked by the role of the FBI, which improperly publicized the reopening of its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails but refuses to say whether it is investigating Trump’s ties with Russia. Trump lost the popular vote; he is president-elect only because the country values fidelity to the democratic process over popular democracy itself. (The Constitution, it turns out, may in fact be a suicide pact.) If the process itself was crooked—if Trump’s campaign colluded in any way with Russia—his legitimacy disappears. If he scorns the Constitution by, say, violating the Emoluments Clause, it disappears as well. A president who lost the popular vote, who may have cheated to win the Electoral College, and who will be contravening the Constitution the second he’s sworn in is due neither respect nor deference.”
Brian Buetler asks Who’s the Illegitimate President Now, Mr. Birtherism?: “But if it’s ironic that Trump rose to the pinnacle of global power on the strength of a failed campaign to delegitimize Obama, it’s also fitting that his own presidency will begin under a mix of suspicions and legitimacy questions that are very real and that Trump brought upon himself. Nobody who’s reasonable questions Trump’s eligibility for the presidency, but questions surrounding his entitlement to keep the job are widespread, and not just on the left-wing fringe. Birtherism may have been Trump’s accidental springboard to the presidency, but the next four years are set to express themselves as a continuous fight over the legitimacy of his presidency in ways that will make birtherism seem like a footnote.”
Sarah Oates describes How Russian ‘kompromat’ destroys political opponents, no facts required: “Kompromat has evolved well beyond the clumsy photo-editing of the Stalin era, when political opponents were carefully airbrushed out . Several opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Russian regime find themselves facing charges of possession of child pornography that they believe was planted by Russian operatives — in Russia, but also in Lithuania and Britain. Another tactic of choice involves sex tapes. In 2010, videos of Russian opposition journalists and politicians who had been filmed separately having sex with the same young Russian woman were leaked online. Last year, an opposition political party was damaged when a tape emerged of a married party leader having sex with an aide. Putin has been involved in such operations for years: In 1999, when he was the head of the FSB (the post-Soviet successor to the KGB), Putin reportedly helped then-President Boris Yeltsin to discredit and dismiss powerful prosecutor Yuri Skuratov, who had threatened to reveal which Russian officials were siphoning money to foreign bank accounts. When Yeltsin could not persuade the parliament to fire Skuratov, a video of the prosecutor — or at least a man who resembled him — having sex with prostitutes was aired on television. This all may sound like something out of “The Americans,” but it’s politics as usual in Russia.”
For a snowboarder in Canada, an inflatable backpack made all the difference:
Dan Sadgrove describes his recent film on an anti-poaching group:
In 2016 I travelled to South Africa to visit The Black Mambas – the worlds first all female anti-poaching unit operating in the Balule Game Reserve in South Africa. Coming from disadvantaged communities and breaking strong patriarchal tradition, these courageous women focus on eliminating illegal wildlife trade through conservation, education and the protection of wildlife, helping to ensure the long term survival of threatened and endangered species in the area. Each day they patrol up to 20km, unarmed, looking for poachers, wire-snares, and break-ins along the fence line. Their lives are at constant risk from poachers and the dangerous wildlife they protect.
It is their belief that the war on poaching will not be won with guns and bullets, but through education within their local communities.
Here in small town Whitewater we’ll have an increasingly sunny day with a high of thirty degrees. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset is 4:46 PM, for 9h 23m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Julie Pace [following a David Ignatius column in the Washington Post] reports on the longer-term meaning of a Top Trump aide in frequent contact with Russia’s ambassador: “More broadly, Flynn’s contact with the Russian ambassador suggests the incoming administration has already begun to lay the groundwork for its promised closer relationship with Moscow. That effort appears to be moving ahead, even as many in Washington, including Republicans, have expressed outrage over intelligence officials’ assessment that Putin launched a hacking operation aimed at meddling in the U.S. election to benefit Trump. During a news conference Wednesday, Trump pointedly would not say whether he planned to repeal the sanctions ordered by Obama. He again highlighted his warmer rapport with the Russian leader. “If Putin likes Donald Trump, I consider that an asset, not a liability, because we have a horrible relationship with Russia,” he said. The sanctions targeted the GRU and FSB, leading Russian intelligence agencies that the U.S. said were involved in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and other groups. The U.S. also kicked out 35 Russian diplomats who it said were actually intelligence operatives.”
Daniella Diaz reports that Trump [as if on cue] suggests he would be open to lifting sanctions on Russia: “Washington (CNN)President-elect Donald Trump suggested Friday he is open to lifting sanctions on Russia, though he plans to keep them for “at least a period of time”….”If you get along and if Russia is really helping us, why would anybody have sanctions if somebody’s doing some really great things?” he said in the interview.”
Aaron Blake demonstrates that Donald Trump’s team is running a misdirection campaign on Russian hacking: “For the first time in weeks, President-elect Donald Trump’s team has been able to play some offense when it comes to allegations of Russian hacking. BuzzFeed’s decision to publish a dossier full of unverified and sometimes over-the-top salacious claims commissioned by Trump’s political opponents has proven a controversial one, allowing Trump to credibly claim persecution by the media. But even as he and his advisers have found their footing a bit, they just can’t help but overextend themselves. In recent days, they’ve made claims and suggestions that just don’t square with the facts and/or strain credulity. It’s almost as if their boss’s tendency to bring a bazooka to a knife fight has filtered down. Below, a few examples….”
Jennifer Rubin writes that Jason Chaffetz defends warning letter to ethics chief: “Chaffetz’s passivity in the face of well-publicized concerns about the Emoluments Clause stands in stark contrast to his aggressive, self-initiating action during the Obama years. He is not alone. Indeed, the entire Republican House seems entirely uninterested in keeping its promise to act as a check on Trump. The oath they take is to defend the Constitution, an obligation which places on Chaffetz and other Republicans the responsibility to investigate, not sit idly by, if a week from today the president will be in violation of the clear text of the Constitution. If Republicans do not show more initiative in policing potential corruption and in preventing Trump from trampling on the Constitution, Democrats will have a solid argument in 2018 that a change in the House majority is necessary to curtail corruption and act as an independent check on the executive branch.”
Great Big Story depicts Harvesting Glaciers with the Last Ice Merchant: “For more than 50 years, Baltazar Ushca Tenesaca has been ascending Ecuador’s tallest mountain to harvest glacial ice. At one time, there were 40 or so ice merchants who made the daily trek up the active volcano. But now, only Ushca continues this 500-year-old tradition. And while the demand for ice isn’t as high as it once was, Tenesaca’s harvesting methods remain the same. Despite the challenges, this ice merchant is as dedicated to his work as ever.”
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 9h 22m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}sixty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 2012 the cruise ship Costa Concordiacapsized and sank after striking an underwater rock obstruction off Tuscany, killing thirty-three people. The ship’s captain was later found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to sixteen years in prison. On this day in 1922, WHA Radio, “the oldest station in the nation” is established in Madison.
Recommended for reading in full —
Journalist and Trump critic Masha Gessen describes, in Russia, Trump & Flawed Intelligence, her skeptical assessment of a recently-released intelligence statement of Russian influence in the presidential election: “The election of Donald Trump is anomalous, both because of the campaign he ran and the peculiar vote mathematics that brought him victory. His use of fake news, his serial lying, his conning his way into free air time, his instrumentalization of partisanship and naked aggression certainly violated the norms of American democracy. But the intelligence report does nothing to clarify the abnormalities of Trump’s campaign and election. Instead, it risks perpetuating the fallacy that Trump is some sort of a foreign agent rather than a home-grown demagogue, while doing further damage to our faith in the electoral system. It also suggests that the US intelligence agencies’ Russia expertise is weak and throws into question their ability to process and present information—all this, two weeks before a man with no government experience but with a short Twitter fuse takes the oath of office.”
Michael Weiss recounts Russia’s Long History With Honey Traps—They Didn’t Start With Donald Trump: “In February 1999, [general prosecutor Yuri] Skuratov resigned, citing poor health, but it was later reported that Yeltsin had tried to “squeeze” him out of a job. The following month, Russia’s Federation Council, or upper chamber of parliament, rejected his resignation and issued a motion of confidence in his role. Then a video was released on state-controlled Rossiya TV channel showing a man who looked a lot like Skuratov cavorting with two prostitutes. In April, Yeltsin suspended Skuratov “during the period of the criminal investigation” into the video….The person in charge of the investigation into the tape’s provenance was Putin, then head of the FSB who, one might safely assume, ordered the filming of the event (vanilla by modern standards) if not the procurement of the working girls, too. In any event, Skuratov accused him of planting the tape, and journalist Pavel Sheremet (murdered last year in Ukraine) reported at the time that Putin arranged to have Skuratov quietly leave the prosecutor general’s office. In a televised press conference held in April that year, Putin and Russian Interior Minister Sergei Stepashin verified that it was indeed Skuratov in the video and that the orgy had been paid for by criminal suspects being investigated by Skuratov’s office. Skuratov was finally sacked in April 2000, following the Federation Council’s vote to dismiss him, following a year-long intra-government dispute over his future.”
Richard Wolffe writes that Trump’s trainwreck press conference ushers in a shambolic presidency: “After a rambling introduction about carmakers, veterans affairs and his inaugural celebrations, Trump finally arrived at his desired topic of the day: the non-resolution of the conflicts of interest that will embroil his presidency from now until he leaves the Oval Office. A table stacked with yellow envelopes was supposed to represent all the documents Trump signed to disentangle his business affairs from his presidency, by passing management control of the Trump Organization to his sons. Rather like a suitcase supposedly full of cash, it was hard to tell if any of the documents were real without, you know, releasing them to the press like his tax returns. Instead, we were forced to listen to his personal attorney assuring us there was a wall being built between the presidency and the Trump Organization. That wall is about as solid as Trump’s other proposed wall on the southern border, given that there is no divestment. Why not? As the Trump attorney explained, a fire sale of Trump assets would be unfair to the president-elect and it was impossible to find an independent trustee competent enough to do so anyway. Oh yes, and such a divestment would involve a lot of third-party debt, despite Trump’s claims that he has no debt.”
Rosie Gray reports that An Alt-Right Leader Sets Up Shop in Northern Virginia: “This month, [racist Richard] Spencer’s rebooting again: He is renting a “hub” for the alt-right movement in a townhouse in Alexandria, Virginia. Spencer and Jason Jorjani, the editor-in-chief of Arktos, a publishing arm associated with the alt-right, have bought the domain name altright.com. Spencer and Jorjani met at the conference for the National Policy Institute, Spencer’s innocuously named think tank, where attendees gave Nazi salutes as Spencer shouted “Hail Trump” from the stage. They quickly formed a bond, and are now joining forces to brand themselves as the intellectual leaders of the alt-right. Spencer’s new headquarters reflects his increasing effort to mainstream the alt-right as its preferred candidate prepares to enter the White House, and to cement himself as its leading voice….The pair imagine the space as a kind of office-salon hybrid for the alt-right, a private space where people in the movement can make videos, throw parties (there’s an outdoor patio) and work on the nascent website, which Spencer said would launch on Monday. The loft “is symbolic in that it is a headquarters of sorts,” Spencer said.”
