Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 6:11 PM, for 11h 01m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1862, the 3rd Wisconsin Light Artillery Battery engages the enemy for the first time in a small skirmish at Crab Orchard, Kentucky. On this day in 1885, Marinette-Menominee lumbermen strike: “2,500 Marinette-Menominee lumbermen walked off the job to support a reduction in workday hours. Mill owners locked out the workers in an attempt to force acceptance of an eleven-hour workday. The lockout failed as many lumbermen simply moved away from the area rather than agree to work eleven hour days. The employers were forced to negotiate with unions and conceded to a ten-hour work day and cash payment for wages.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jim Tankersley writes Kansas Tried a Tax Plan Similar to Trump’s. It Failed:
….In 2012, Kansas lawmakers, led by Gov. Sam Brownback, a Republican, enacted a tax cut that eliminated state income taxes entirely for pass-through entities — such as sole proprietorships and limited liability partnerships — which are taxed at the owner’s individual income tax rate. The law also lowered individual income tax rates, cutting the top rate to 4.9 percent from 6.4 percent.
The tax package reduced state revenue by nearly $700 million a year, a drop of about 8 percent, from 2013 through 2016, according to the Kansas Legislative Research Department, forcing officials to shorten school calendars, delay highway repairs and reduce aid to the poor. Research suggests the package did not stimulate the economy, certainly not enough to pay for the tax cut. This year, legislators passed a bill to largely rescind the law, saying it had not worked as intended.
“It caused a lot of budget instability,” said State Senator Jim Denning, a Republican who led the effort to repeal the pass-through exemption this year. Mr. Denning, who earns pass-through income from his interest in a commercial real estate firm, said he had personally benefited from the exemption, but the state’s economy had not….
(It’s always and forever worth noting that libertarianism seeks a smaller, limited government, but the path to a smaller, limited government requires prioritizing government services expressly, and then eliminating some. Ineffectual tax plans that, themselves, neither enumerate and prioritize spending reductions nor even stimulate the economy relative to government spending achieve nothing of a rational reduction in government. They merely foment budget crises that lead to scrambling for ill-considered cuts, or cuts considered only to benefit a majority party’s friends. Walker’s time in office has been like this – not a reduction in government’s size, but merely a redistribution to his favored interests. )
Michael Wines reports Wary of Hackers, States Move to Upgrade Voting Systems:
WASHINGTON — State election officials, worried about the integrity of their voting systems, are pressing to make them more secure ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Reacting in large part to Russian efforts to hack the presidential election last year, a growing number of states are upgrading electoral databases and voting machines, and even adding cybersecurity experts to their election teams. The efforts — from both Democrats and Republicans — amount to the largest overhaul of the nation’s voting infrastructure since the contested presidential election in 2000 spelled an end to punch-card ballots and voting machines with mechanical levers.
One aim is to prepare for the 2018 and 2020 elections by upgrading and securing electoral databases and voting machines that were cutting-edge before Facebook and Twitter even existed. Another is to spot and defuse attempts to depress turnout and sway election results by targeting voters with false news reports and social media posts.
West Virginia’s elections team has added a cybersecurity expert from the state National Guard with a top-secret federal security clearance. Colorado and Rhode Island will now verify election results via an advanced statistical procedure called a risk-limiting audit….
(The Trump Administration is not part of this effort; even a man of his ignorance has heard the saying that ‘one should not bite the hand…’)
Kenneth Vogel reports Trump legal tab: $4 million and rising:
During his campaign, Donald Trump promised to pay the legal bills of supporters who beat up protesters at his rallies, but a POLITICO analysis found that Trump’s campaign hasn’t always paid its own legal bills in a timely or transparent fashion.
The analysis of court and campaign filings found that Trump’s campaign committee is still spending heavily to defend against ongoing civil lawsuits alleging assault, incitement, threats and other illegal behavior by the president, his supporters and staff. But in at least four ongoing cases, Trump’s campaign had yet to make a publicly disclosed payment to the law firms representing it, paid months late or paid in tiny amounts that don’t appear commensurate with the amount of work performed by the firms.
In some cases, lawyers from the Trump Organization assisted outside law firms paid by the campaign in defending cases that named both Trump’s campaign and his company, blurring the line between Trump’s political and business operations. And there were at least two cases in which Trump’s campaign appears to have settled lawsuits quietly by making lump-sum payments to firms involved in the cases, which it listed in its Federal Election Commission reports as “legal consulting.”
In all, FEC filings show that Trump’s campaign has paid out nearly $4 million in “legal consulting” and “legal fees,” including $556,000 since Election Day. That total is more than twice as much as former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign spent on legal fees through this point in his first term….
Aggelos Petropoulos and Richard Engel report Manafort Had $60 Million Relationship With a Russian Oligarch:
LONDON — Paul Manafort, a former campaign manager for President Donald Trump, has much stronger financial ties to a Russian oligarch than have been previously reported.
An NBC News investigation reveals that $26 million changed hands in the form of a loan between a company linked to Manafort and the oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin.
The loan brings the total of their known business dealings to around $60 million over the past decade, according to financial documents filed in Cyprus and the Cayman Islands.
Manafort was forced to resign from the Trump campaign in August 2016, following allegations of improper financial dealings, charges he has strenuously denied. He is now a central figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Investigators have said they are looking into Manafort’s financial ties to prominent figures in Russia.
According to company documents obtained by NBC News in Cyprus, funds were sent from a company owned by Deripaska to entities linked to Manafort, registered in Cyprus….
In Canada, good-hearted people are Warming the Feet (and Hearts) of Canada’s Homeless:
After the passing of his wife in 2010, Bob Rutherford searched for a way to give back to his community. He built two custom-made knitting machines and used them to create socks to protect those in need from the frigid Canadian winters. Now, the 88-year old has expanded his sock operation into a four-person outfit, knitting up and churning out socks en masse. Today, Socks by Bob has warmed the feet (and hearts) of thousands, having knit and donated over 11,600 pairs to homeless shelters across Canada.