Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be rainy, with freezing rain in the afternoon, and a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 9h 18m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 24.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred twenty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Involvement Commission meets today at 5 PM (Update: canceled).
On this day in 1964, the Surgeon General’s Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health, United States Public Health Service, issues “Smoking and Health,” a report on the danger of cigarette smoking.
On this date in 1887, noted conservationist Aldo Leopold is born: “American author, philosopher, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has sold more than two million copies.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Tom Davies reports New layoffs at Indiana Carrier factory year after Trump deal:
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — A new round of layoffs is taking effect this week at the Carrier Corp. factory in Indianapolis a little more than a year after President Donald Trump touted a deal that staved off the plant’s closure and saved some of its jobs.
About 215 people are being let go starting Thursday, leaving about 1,100 workers at the plant, according to the company. That’s down from the some 1,600 factory, office and engineering jobs at the facility when Carrier announced plans in early 2016 to move production to Mexico.
This week’s previously announced layoffs follow about 340 job cuts at the factory in July.
Trump frequently criticized Carrier’s plant closing plans during the 2016 campaign. He traveled to the Indianapolis factory three weeks after his election win to announce a tax-incentive agreement partially reversing the closure and keeping some 800 furnace production jobs.
Retired United Steelworkers Local 1999 President Chuck Jones, who was chastised by a Trump tweet after complaining that Trump gave false hope to Carrier workers by inflating the number of jobs being saved, said the president hasn’t followed up on his campaign talk of stopping the country’s loss of manufacturing jobs….
(State capitalism is sham capitalism, but then Trump’s promises weren’t even a serious state intervention in the market – dishonest public relations is not an economy policy.)
Josh Dawsey reports Trump declines to say whether he would sit for interview with Mueller’s team:
President Trump on Wednesday declined to say whether he would grant an interview to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and his team, deflecting questions on the topic by saying there had been “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
“We’ll see what happens,” Trump said when asked directly about meeting with the special counsel.
Trump then questioned why he would be interviewed, arguing again there had been “no collusion” between his campaign and Russia.
“When they have no collusion — and nobody’s found any collusion at any level — it seems unlikely that you’d even have an interview,” Trump said during a news conference at the White House with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg.
Trump’s comments Wednesday marked a shift from what he said months ago….
(One’s tempted to say that if Trump won’t sit for an interview, he can always stand. More seriously: he either sits for an interview or gets a subpoena to a grand jury – he doesn’t have any other effective options short of provoking a constitutional crisis.)
Frank Rick contends Trump Has Moved a Step Closer to Implosion:
The only way Trump leaves office absent a Democratic sweep in the 2018 midterms is if he does so of his own volition: poisoning himself with his binges of Big Macs and Diet Coke; making a deal to head off pending indictments of himself, his son, or son-in-law; or breaking down mentally to the point where he is so unhappy, angry, and unmoored that he’d rather declare victory and take his marbles home to Mar-a-Lago. Fire and Fury has moved the latter process along. That Trump would feel compelled to declare himself a “very stable genius” and turn this book into an epic best seller by (impotently) threatening legal action to suppress it suggests that Wolff has quite successfully gaslighted him. Though it’s Ivanka Trump whom Steve Bannon described as “dumb as a brick,” her father’s self-immolating actions from the moment New York posted its Fire and Fury excerptis proof positive that the apple didn’t fall far from the orange tree….
(Trump may do many things; those in resistance and opposition have only to focus on lawfully limiting the range of what he may do. Our work is his political limitation.)
Kurt Bardella describes life Inside Steve Bannon’s ‘Fight Club’:
By the fall of 2015, Breitbart had become nothing more than a propaganda vessel to advance the political interests of Steve Bannon’s chosen one. Nothing illustrated this more than when Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed one Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields. Steve was so invested in Mr. Trump that he was willing to sacrifice his own reporter, whom he refused to defend, to protect his personal interests.
For me, it was the last straw. I made the decision during the Fields situation to resign — joined in short order by Ms. Fields herself and our editor at large, Ben Shapiro — and terminate my relationship with Steve and Breitbart, who had become one and the same.
Today, Steve finds himself a man without currency. Thanks to his arrogance and his lack of discipline, he has lost his proximity to the president, lost his billionaire benefactor Rebekah Mercer and lost his precious platform, Breitbart. Meantime, ever the dramatist, he compares himself to Thomas Cromwell….
(Self-centered, malevolent man – repulsive and unsympathetic. Stephen Miller will likely take his place – the work of opposition goes on.)
Dolphins recognize themselves: