Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of twenty-one, and an even chance of afternoon snow showers. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 9h 23m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred thirtieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1784, Congress ratifies the Treaty of Paris, formally ending war between the United States and Britain. On January 14, 1863, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry leads an expedition to South Bend, Arkansas.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Brian Klaas asks Want to see where Trump is taking America? Look at Turkey under Erdogan:
If imitation is the highest form of flattery, authoritarian despots across the globe must be feeling pretty flattered by President Trump these days. Trump’s latest efforts to distort and discredit special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s independent investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia is straight out of the despot’s playbook.
In 2013, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey — a democratically elected leader with a clearly authoritarian bent — was facing credible allegations of corruption. A truly independent investigation could threaten Erdogan’s grip on power. As arrests mounted, it became clear that the prosecutorial net was sweeping closer to the prime minister himself.
Erdogan’s political machine sprang into action. Despite overwhelming evidence of corruption among his close associates, Erdogan claimed there was none. He dismissed the investigation as a “dirty plot” by law enforcement. His supporters spoke of a “witch hunt” launched by the Turkish “deep state.” Erdogan demanded that the investigation focus not on him but on his political opponent. His supporters began to agitate about the need to “clean house” in the judiciary and law enforcement. Soon thereafter, Erdogan fired those who were investigating him.
Sound familiar? It should.
Despite evidence of at least attempted collusion with Russia, Trump declares that there was “no collusion.” Trump, like Erdogan, has repeatedly denounced the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” A year ago, Trump claimed that law enforcement was out to get him, comparing the FBI to “Nazi Germany.” His supporters — including Republican members of Congress — frequently refer to the Justice Department as a part of the “deep state” that needs to be “purged.” Trump has obsessively urged the FBI to turn its focus away from him and to investigate his political opponent, Hillary Clinton, instead. When Trump fired FBI Director James B. Comey, he openly admitted that he did so because of “the Russia thing”….
➤ Andrew Van Dam reports Trump wants to remove these immigrants. An ugly bit of history tells us what it could do to the economy:
In the United States, the clearest parallel may well be the mass repatriation of Mexicans during the Great Depression. It was an era of desperation, hyperbole and racist hysteria. Politicians of the time should sound familiar, a few hilarious archaisms aside. In his 1931 annual report, Commissioner General of Immigration Harry Hull bemoaned the “hardships inflicted upon the American citizen” by “exposure to competition in employment opportunities of the bootlegged aliens.”
[Salvadorans fear TPS decision will be a huge economic blow but pin hopes on Congress]
To solve this problem, he promised “to spare no reasonable effort to remove the menace of unfair competition which actually exists in the vast number of aliens who have in one way or another, principally by surreptitious entries, violated our immigration laws.”
Hull and his allies got their wish. Almost a third of America’s Mexican population, which amounted to almost a quarter of the entire labor force in some Texas towns, were eventually expelled.
And did it work?
Economists Jongkwan Lee, of the Korea Development Institute, Vasil Yasenov, a postdoctoral scholar at the Goldman School of Public Policy in the University of California at Berkeley, and Giovanni Peri, economics chair at the University of California at Davis, looked at decades of detailed data to see if the higher wages and lower unemployment promised by opponents of immigration had materialized.
If anything, the opposite occurred.
Like TPS beneficiaries, many Mexicans (defined by the authors as people born in Mexico and their children) had established themselves in their communities. Researchers found cities that sent away more Mexicans saw worsening unemployment and slower wage growth after repatriation, even when adjusting for effects such as extreme drought and localized New Deal policies….
(Trump’s policies are both racially discriminatory and economically counter-productive. Indeed, racially discrimnatory policies are inherenetly destructive of the optimal allocation of labor, capital, and goods. No one owes Trump either his bigotry or his economic ignorance.)
➤ Raquel Sater reports Russian hackers planning to target U.S. Senate, cybersecurity firm says:
The same Russian government-aligned hackers who penetrated the Democratic Party have spent the past few months laying the groundwork for an espionage campaign against the U.S. Senate, a cybersecurity firm said Friday.
The revelation suggests the group often nicknamed Fancy Bear, whose hacking campaign scrambled the 2016 U.S. electoral contest, is still busy trying to gather the emails of America’s political elite.
“They’re still very active — in making preparations at least — to influence public opinion again,” said Feike Hacquebord, a security researcher at Trend Micro Inc., which published the report . “They are looking for information they might leak later.”
The Senate Sergeant at Arms office, which is responsible for the upper house’s security, declined to comment….
➤ Ben Smith of BuzzFeed writes I’m Proud We Published the Trump-Russia Dossier:
Exactly one year ago BuzzFeed published what’s now known simply as “the dossier”: a set of reports put together by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele during the 2016 presidential campaign. The 35-page dossier suggested that the Russian government had both compromised and colluded with President-elect Donald Trump.
Our choice to publish the dossier was greeted by outrage from two sources. Journalistic traditionalists didn’t like the idea of sharing an unfiltered, unverified document with the public, whatever the caveats and context. NBC’s Chuck Todd told me on air, “You just published fake news.” Mr. Trump agreed. He described CNN’s reporting on the dossier as “fake news” and called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage.”
But a year of government inquiries and blockbuster journalism has made clear that the dossier is unquestionably real news. That’s a fact that has been tacitly acknowledged even by those who opposed our decision to publish. It has helped journalists explain to their audience the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election. And Mr. Trump and his allies have seized on the dossier in their efforts to discredit the special counsel leading the investigation, Robert Mueller….
(More is better than less; publishing was the right decision.)
➤ Cleve R. Wootson Jr. reports These alligators spent days trapped in swamp ice — and survived:
There’s a certain Homo sapiens arrogance that comes around every time we get a Snowmageddon or a bomb cyclone.
We assume that while we’re shivering through single-digit temperatures, gaining a better appreciation of what it truly means to be Inuit, most of the rest of kingdom Animalia is similarly struggling.
There are, of course, Discovery Channel extremophiles covered in blubber or wrapped in fur, but we humans are equipped with opposable thumbs and the unmatched ability to make complex tools to warm ourselves.
If we can’t handle the cold, who — or what — can?
So it can be disconcerting to see a group of creatures meet an icy end-of-days scenario with a coldblooded “meh”….
(Americans are by nature a strong people. Although there are dangers in icy weather, we diminish ourselves when we impressionably accept hysterical weather coverage. There are far greater dangers than snow. There is also, for those who would only look about, great beauty in winter.)