Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy and windy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM, for 10h 36m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1861, California Chief Justice Stephen Field sent “one of the first [transcontinental telegraph] messages from San Francisco to Abraham Lincoln, using the occasion to assure the president of California’s allegiance to the Union.[6] ” On this day in 1933, Amelia Earhart visits Janesville: “Amelia Earhart spoke to the Janesville Woman’s History Club as part of the group’s 57th anniversary celebration. Four years later, Earhart disappeared as she attempted to fly across the Pacific Ocean.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jack Nicas reports Russia State News Outlet RT Thrives on YouTube, Facebook (“U.S. intelligence labels RT a top Kremlin propaganda tool; social media’s open approach to content enabling unreliable and highly partisan content to reach large audiences”):
Google, Facebook Inc. FB -2.12% and Twitter Inc. TWTR -2.80% have spent months trying to ferret out covert Russian influence on their sites.
Meanwhile, RT, the Russian state news organization that federal intelligence officials call “the Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet,” uses Google’s YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as the main distributors of its content.
RT’s main English-language YouTube channel has amassed 2.1 billion views and 2.2 million subscribers, roughly the same figures as CNN’s primary YouTube channel. Fox News’s main channel has 600 million views. RT has drawn an additional 3.3 billion views across roughly 20 other channels, making it among YouTube’s most-watched news networks. YouTube, by running ads before RT’s videos, also gives the Russian-government outlet ad revenue.
Twitter named RT in a report last month on alleged Russian interference in the U.S. election, and the company noted that RT spent $274,100 to promote tweets to U.S. users. The Twitter dossier, submitted to a congressional committee investigation into Russian influence in the election, cited a federal intelligence report released earlier this year that claimed RT was a primary tool in Russia’s alleged efforts to swing the U.S. election toward President Donald Trump —a charge RT has denied. Yet RT maintains a thriving presence on Twitter with 10 million followers….
(Key point: RT’s speech is the speech from a foreign dictatorship’s propaganda tool. Americans who support it are, depending on the level of their support, either fellow travelers or fifth-columnists. At the least, this foreign state tool should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). See generally A Primer on the Foreign Agents Registration Act. FARA doesn’t prohibit speech – it merely requires registration and reporting for specified foreign entities.)
Katie Zavadski, Ben Collins, Kevin Poulsen, Spencer Ackerman report Russian Propaganda Hosted by Man on Staten Island, New York:
Russia’s propaganda campaign targeting Americans was hosted, at least in part, on American soil.
A company owned by a man on Staten Island, New York, provided internet infrastructure services to DoNotShoot.Us, a Kremlin propaganda site that pretended to be a voice for victims of police shootings, a Daily Beast investigation has found.
Every website needs to be “hosted”—given an Internet Protocol address and space on a physical computer—in order to be publicly viewed. DoNotShoot.Us is a website run out of the Kremlin-backed “Russian troll farm,” according to two sources familiar with the website, both of whom independently identified it to The Daily Beast as a Russian propaganda account. It was hosted on a server with the IP address 107.181.161.172.
That IP address was owned by Greenfloid LLC, a company registered to New Yorker Sergey Kashyrin and two others. Other Russian propaganda sites, like BlackMattersUs.com, were also hosted on servers with IP addresses owned by Greenfloid. The company’s ties to Russian propaganda sites were first reported by ThinkProgress.
The web services company owns under 250 IP addresses, some of which resolve to Russian propaganda sites and other fake news operations. Others are sites that could not be hosted at other providers, like “xxxrape.net.” There’s also a Russian trinket site called “soviet-power.com.” (The IP address that pointed to DoNotShoot.Us now resolves to a botnet and phishing operation, and is currently owned by Total Server Solutions LLC.)
(Any American owning or knowingly working for Greenfloid LLC would be a true fifth columnist – that is, someone within America actively working for our foreign enemies, including Russian government-backed websites.)
Nicholas Fandos reports Hopes Dim for Congressional Russia Inquiries as Parties Clash:
….All three committees looking into Russian interference — one in the House, two in the Senate — have run into problems, from insufficient staffing to fights over when the committees should wrap up their investigations. The Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry has barely started, delayed in part by negotiations over the scope of the investigation. Leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, while maintaining bipartisan comity, have sought to tamp down expectations about what they might find.
Nine months into the Trump administration, any notion that Capitol Hill would provide a comprehensive, authoritative and bipartisan accounting of the extraordinary efforts of a hostile power to disrupt American democracy appears to be dwindling….
From Fandos’s story, here’s Trey Gowdy:
WASHINGTON — In a secured room in the basement of the Capitol in July, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, fielded question after question from members of the House Intelligence Committee. Though the allotted time for the grilling had expired, he offered to stick around as long as they wanted.
But Representative Trey Gowdy, who spent nearly three years investigating Hillary Clinton’s culpability in the deadly 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, was growing frustrated after two hours….
“Congressional investigations unfortunately are usually overtly political investigations, where it is to one side’s advantage to drag things out,” said Mr. Gowdy, who made his name in Congress as a fearsome investigator of Democrats….
(Years investigating Benghazi, but now even two hours’ time to investigate Russia is too much for Gowdy….)
Here’s a time-lapse video of the installation of the Milwaukee Bucks replica floor (in the UWM Panther Arena):