Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will bring an even chance of snow showers and a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset is 5:05 PM, for 9h 54m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1845, Poe’s The Raven is first published in the Evening Mirror. On this day in 1865, 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fights a skirmish at the Combahee River, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fights another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, both cities in South Carolina.
Recommended for reading in full —
David Barstow describes how ‘Up Is Down’: Trump’s Unreality Show Echoes His Business Past: “As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose biggest-best boasts about everything he touched routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Mr. Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me”….But for students of Mr. Trump’s long business career, there was much about President Trump’s truth-mangling ways that was familiar: the mystifying false statements about seemingly trivial details, the rewriting of history to airbrush unwanted facts, the branding as liars those who point out his untruths, the deft conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs”….Deception, dissembling, exaggeration — what Fortune magazine called his “astonishing ability to prevaricate” — has deep roots in Mr. Trump’s business career. In innumerable interviews over the years, Mr. Trump glibly inflated everything from the size of his speaking fees to the cost of his golf club memberships to the number of units he had sold in new Trump buildings. In project after project, he faced allegations of broken promises, deceit or outright fraud, from Trump University students who said they had been defrauded, to Trump condominium buyers who said they had been fleeced, to small-time contractors who said Mr. Trump had fabricated complaints about their work to avoid paying them.”
Jennifer Rubin describes how Trump and America lose again: The Mexico blunder: “Trump is the perfect storm when it comes to foreign policy. He lacks knowledge of the world, his White House staff and children have no diplomatic training and in advance of Rex W. Tillerson’s confirmation he has scared off the top echelon at the State Department, as my colleague Josh Rogin reports. (“Suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, [undersecretary for management Patrick] Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.”)….One might expect resignations to continue in the State Department and elsewhere as veteran public servants decide that the Trump circus is not something they want any part of — not even during the extended transition phase as a new team gets up to speed. Running the State Department is hard enough in normal times; running it when the president apparently strikes career diplomats as erratic, self-destructive and clueless will be a struggle.”
Robert P. Jones reports that Not Even the Reddest States Support Deportation: “But lost amid the anti-immigrant bluster of his campaign, the flurry of executive orders, and the whirlwind of partisan politics in Washington, is a stubborn fact: Very few Americans, and even few Republicans, say their preferred policy solution to the country’s illegal immigration problem is the deportation of an estimated 11 million people. That is the clear result of a study based on over 120,000 interviews with Americans—including 40,509 conducted during the 2016 campaign—that was conducted by my organization, PRRI, over the last three years. Through the ups and downs of immigration-reform legislation and even under the darker shadows of the 2016 election season, American opinions about concrete policy solutions have remained remarkably stable. When asked about how the immigration system should deal with immigrants who are currently living in the country illegally, the new study found nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Americans say we should allow them a way to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements, and another 15 percent say we should allow them a way to become permanent legal residents but not citizens. Only 16 percent of Americans, and only 28 percent of Republicans, say their preferred policy option is to identify and deport those who are living in the country without legal documentation.”
(N.B.: I would expect that there certainly are communities within America where nativist residents will turn on others, gleefully so. See, Neither Shocked Nor Awed (Some “small, rural towns will offer the Trump Administration the advantage of many collaborators who will aid federal authorities, and many residents who will identify neighbors as targets for deportation. Almost no one in these places will say a word in public opposition; outspoken residents will hail deportation as a necessary part of Making America Great Again.”)
Alan Yuhas reports that White House defends Trump Holocaust statement that didn’t mention Jews: “The White House has defended its omission of Jews and antisemitism from a statement remembering the Holocaust by saying that Donald Trump’s administration “took into account all of those who suffered”. On International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, the White House made no mention of Jews, Judaism or the antisemitism that fueled Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews in the 1940s. The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, wondered aloudabout the “puzzling and troubling” statement, and its break with the precedent. The executive director of the Anne Frank Center, Steven Goldstein, similarly scolded the president: “How can you forget, Mr President, that six million Jews were murdered because they were Jews? You chose the vague phrase ‘innocent people.’ They were Jews, Mr President.”
Here’s Smoked Salmon the Old-School Way:
Sheepshead Bay on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way are stunning and picturesque. It’s the setting for Declan McConnellogue’s The Haven Smokehouse, which is a quaint throwback to the way people used to smoke salmon—with care, attention, and time. “Each Haven Smokehouse salmon is treated with the respect it deserves, carefully honoring our finest Irish traditions,” reads the smokehouse’s website. This short film, Turf Salmon Smoke, follows Declan’s process of using 10,000-year-old turf to smoke salmon in the way he remembers from his childhood. It comes to us from the world-traveling web series The Perennial Plate. To learn more about this series, visit its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.