Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:07 PM, for 10h 56m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 5.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority meets at 5:30 PM, and City Council at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1931, Al Capone is convicted of tax evasion (and sentenced a week later to eleven years in jail). On this day in 1970, Pres. Nixon visits Green Bay: “On this date President Richard Nixon traveled to Green Bay to speak at a testimonial dinner in honor of Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Michael Gerson contends that The religious right carries its golden calf into Steve Bannon’s battles:
….There is no group in the United States less attached to its own ideals or more eager for its own exploitation than religious conservatives. Forget Augustine and Aquinas, Wilberforce and Shaftesbury. For many years, leaders of the religious right exactly conformed Christian social teaching to the contours of Fox News evening programming. Now, according to Bannon, “economic nationalism” is the “centerpiece of value voters.” I had thought the centerpiece was a vision of human dignity rooted in faith. But never mind. Evidently the Christian approach to social justice is miraculously identical to 1930s Republican protectionism, isolationism and nativism.
Do religious right leaders have any clue how foolish they appear? Rather than confidently and persistently representing a set of distinctive beliefs, they pant and beg to be a part of someone else’s movement. In this case, it is a movement that takes advantage of racial and ethnic divisions and dehumanizes Muslims, migrants and refugees. A movement that has cultivated ties to alt-right leaders and flirted with white identity politics. A movement that will eventually soil and discredit all who are associated with it.
The religious right is making itself a pitiful appendage to this squalid agenda. If Christian conservatives are loyal enough, Bannon promises that they can be “the folks who saved the Judeo-Christian West.” All that is required is to abandon the best of the Judeo-Christian tradition: a belief in the inherent value and dignity of every life….
Barbara Radnofsky contends The Founding Fathers designed impeachment for someone exactly like Donald Trump:
….Their writings and debates surrounding the creation of the Constitution make clear that the framers feared a certain kind of character coming to power and usurping the republican ideal of their new nation. Having just defeated a tyrant — “Mad” King George III of England — they carefully crafted rules to remove such a character: impeachment. In the process, they revealed precisely the kind of corrupt, venal, inattentive and impulsive character they were worried about….
Again and again, they anticipated attributes and behaviors that President Trump exhibits on an all-too-regular basis. By describing “High Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the grounds for impeachment, as any act that poses a significant threat to society — either through incompetence or other misdeeds — the framers made it clear that an official does not have to commit a crime to be subject to impeachment. Instead, they made impeachment a political process, understanding that the true threat to the republic was not criminality but unfitness, that a president who violated the country’s norms and values was as much a threat as one who broke its laws.
Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the Constitution’s preamble, and future president James Madison were worried about a leader who would “pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation” — theft of public funds — “or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers,” as Madison put it. Morris, who like many in the colonies believed King Charles had taken bribes from Louis XIV to support France’s war against the Dutch, declared that without impeachment we “expose ourselves to the danger of seeing the first Magistrate [the President] in foreign pay without being able to guard against it by displacing him”….
Natasha Bertrand reports New memo suggests Russian lawyer at Trump Tower meeting was acting ‘as an agent’ of the Kremlin:
The Russian lawyer who met with President Donald Trump’s son, son-in-law, and campaign chairman last June at Trump Tower brought a memo with her to that meeting that contained many of the same talking points as one written by the Russian prosecutor’s office two months earlier.
The memo Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to the Trump campaign last year focused on banker-turned-human rights activist Bill Browder, whose reputation has become inextricably linked to the global human-rights campaign he launched in 2009 after tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky died in a Russian prison.
Magnitsky was thrown in jail and beaten to death after he discovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme that implicated high-level Kremlin officials, Browder says. The US passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 that sanctioned high-level Russian officials accused of human rights abuses and corruption….
The document’s language closely mirrored the contents of a memo provided to Republican US Rep. Dana Rohrabacher by the office of Russia’s chief federal prosecutor Yuri Chaika while Rohrabacher was in Moscow last April.
(The similar language isn’t, itself, conclusive; combined with other information, it does strengthen the contention that Veselnitskaya acted as a tool of Russian state authorities when she met Trump Jr.)
Bill Allison reports Trump’s Campaign Paid His Son’s Russia-Probe Law Firm $238,000:
President Donald Trump’s re-election committee paid almost $238,000 in the third quarter to the law firm representing Donald Trump Jr. in connection with ongoing investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to campaign finance disclosures.
Trump’s campaign made two payments — one in mid July, the other in early August — to the law firm of Alan S. Futerfas, a lawyer for the president’s son, who is facing scrutiny over a 2016 meeting he had with a Russian lawyer while seeking damaging information about Democrat Hillary Clinton. The third-quarter disclosures with the Federal Election Commission didn’t specify what the legal expenses were for.
Futerfas declined to comment. The Trump campaign and the White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Campaign committees are permitted to pay for the legal defense of a person involved in the campaign as long as the legal services are related to the person’s campaign work….
Cath Le Couteur describes The Threat of Objects Lost in Space:
100 million pieces of “space junk” currently orbit our planet at 17,500 miles per hour. Adrift investigates the fate of these interstellar objects, which threaten to collide with and destroy satellites and spacecraft.
Director and producer Cath Le Couteur recruited Sally Potter to narrate the film from the perspective of the oldest piece of space junk, a solar-powered satellite lost in 1958. Adrift also features interviews with astronomers and scientists, such as NASA astronaut Piers Sellers, who dropped a spatula in space during a repair mission in 2006.“Space junk,” says Le Couteur, “has become an intriguing but potentially serious and destructive museum of space exploration hurtling above our heads.”
It is hard to parse what Trump is doing as anything less than the deliberate destruction of the US government. There isn’t much room to give him the benefit of any doubt.
Consider the posse that is his cabinet. Sessions is a hard-core racist. Perry is a bumbling fool, with atomic weapons, that thought the energy department just dug oil wells and mined coal. Just the guy to preside over Trump’s 10-fold increase in atomic weapons.
DeVos has the sole goal of destroying the public education system, presumably because public education instills the youth of America with too many actual facts, rather than full-time religious dogma. Betsy comes as a total package with her bro Erik Prince, who has his own mercenary army, should one be necessary.
Carson is the guy that is so lost in the Bozone that he thinks that Egyptian Pyramids are grain elevators, which must be necessary to house the bountiful wheat harvest of the Saini desert. I guess the gold-encrusted guys wrapped in bandages inside must be unfortunate victims of agricultural accidents. Farmers die all the time, here in the Midwest, from grain-bin accidents, so it was likely an issue with the Egyptians, too. We haven’t heard much from Ben lately.
Zinke and Tillerson are extraction industry lickspittles. Tillerson does get props for recognizing that he is working for a fking moron. His grasp of the obvious is not completely subliminal. Zinke has no such redeeming feature. Mnuchin likes to travel in style and is the archetype of a tax-cut-infatuated swamp-thing.
I could go on…
One particularly vile, since-aborted, appointment was Tom Marino for DEA. I take his proposed appointment personally. I have had too many friends and family killed or perpetually ruined by opioids. Marino explicitly made it easier for tons of pills to hit the black market. The drug-makers don’t get a pass. They know where their product ends up. Marino’s bill in congress immunized the distributors from any liability. Just the guy to combat the opioid epidemic, eh? Trump thought so…
None of the above are random poor choices. They were specifically chosen by Trump, and confirmed by Yertle and the R-Team Senate, to monkeywrench the US Government. Trump’s choices to staff the executive branch were chosen because of their demonstrated antipathy for the branches that they are supposed to administer. That is not a formula for smooth administration.
The Republicans faced a momentous choice when they took over all of the government. They could make it work better, and claim credit for doing so, or blow it up, as they had been fulminating about doing for decades. What we are experiencing now is Republicans doing their level best to make their oft-professed bullshit about government being dysfunctional come true.
It’s a suicide mission, and we are all holding hands…
It’s true what you’re saying about a self-destructive approach, because there is a way in which one could not have designed an administration more committed to undermining either government or society than the Trump Admin. There are so many issues on which one thinks: is all this deliberate, intentional sabotage? In most cases, Trump’s destruction of democratic institutions seems merely a consequence of his own authoritarian tendencies. That’s to be expected from an autocrat.
In other cases, though, on policies that implicate neither democratic nor authoritarian views, he still chooses against the better (non-ideological) practice in favor of an inferior one. There, it’s as though he does have a purely destructive, nihilistic outlook. (It is, to be sure, the kind of outlook that serves to undermine America from within, as a geopolitical foe of the United States might wish.)
The case with opioids is especially egregious – I’m not in favor of extending federal power, but then even more opposed to carving out exceptions for politicians’ favored industries. Here’s a story for readers, from Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein, on The Drug Industry’s Triumph Over the DEA (the political effort is infuriating and shockingly blatant – you’ve recounted the situation succinctly):
I see that Marino is now out-of-consideration (Tom Marino, Trump’s Pick As Drug Czar, Withdraws After Damaging Opioid Report) – he never should have been under consideration.
Marino’s nomination would have gone through without a free press to call attention his legislative favor for the pharmaceutical industry.