Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM, for 10h 37m 33s of daytime. The moon is full today.
Today is the seven hundred fifteenth day.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board is scheduled to meet at 8 AM.
It’s United Nations Day:
UN Day marks the anniversary of the entry into force in 1945 of the UN Charter. With the ratification of this founding document by the majority of its signatories, including the five permanent members of the Security Council, the United Nations officially came into being.”
Recommended for reading in full — Why Trump’s supporters will believe any lie he tells, Trump’s closing argument for 2018 elections is dark and divisive, how Russian runs its disinformation against American elections, Georgia Republican bemoans opponent’s supporters exercising their right to vote, and video of the amateur astronomer who found a lost NASA satellite —
Teri Kanefield considers Why Trump’s Supporters Will Believe Any Lie He Tells (“From Kavanaugh to Khashoggi, they are immune to the truth”):
Part of Trump’s defense against his various investigatory pursuers is to persuade his followers that all politicians are corrupt liars, which is one reason the “Lock her up” chant has been so devastating. If people believe all politicians are corrupt, going after Trump becomes political persecution, or a “witch hunt.”
Trump’s final aim isn’t simply to escape accountability for his crimes. The final aim is to replace democracy itself with a form of autocracy, under which he and his cronies are forever unaccountable for criminal actions. Normalizing lies and flooding the zone shatters the public sphere upon which democracy depends. Without that shared reality, Mueller poses no threat to Trump. Similarly, without a shared public sphere, Trump doesn’t have to worry about resistance. As Yale professor Jason Stanley says, without truth it is impossible to speak truth to power, so there is only power.
The United States is on a steep learning curve. Because truth, factuality, and our very public sphere are under attack, our democracy (and republic) is in danger. The attack is devastatingly effective, partly because we have never experienced anything like this and thus are largely unprepared. Our task now is to save our public sphere. The way to do this was demonstrated by how the Chileans got out of the far more extreme Pinochet regime and reinstated democracy: All sides opposed to authoritarianism and committed to democracy worked together. That means they started actually talking, and listening, to one another. In the United States, this would mean that all groups that claim to be committed to continuing our democratic republic, from supporters of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Never Trump Republicans, would need to join forces. We will likely soon find out if the nation is up to the task.
David A. Graham writes Trump’s Closing Argument for the Midterms Is Dark and Angry (“With just two weeks to go, the president is resorting to the mixture of immigration fearmongering and dishonesty that got him elected”):
With the election just 14 days away, Trump is campaigning hard. He has four rallies scheduled this week alone—his other stops are central Wisconsin, Charlotte, and southern Illinois. His closing argument is a familiar one. Following the blueprint that brought him to victory in 2016, he’s relying on the power of immigration fears, enhanced by blatantly false rhetoric.
For example, Trump claimed he had begun constructing his border wall; he has not. He claimed Democrats are for open borders; for the most part, they are not, nor is Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, against whom Trump was campaigning. He claimed Democrats were to blame for asylum seekers traveling to the United States; the migrants are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. Trump also claimed—without evidence—that Democrats started the “caravan” of refugees currently wending its way northward through Mexico.
If that were true, and there’s no evidence for it, it would be a colossal blunder. The specter of a column of Hispanics marching northward in the closing weeks of the election has provided Trump just the talking point he wants to whip up his supporters, and on Monday night he showed how he intends to use it.
Trump covered lots of other ground in the speech, of course. There was a strange, and coolly received, riff about Hurricane Harvey. (The president continues to believe, for some reason, that people went out in pleasure craft to enjoy the storm; he also complained that the storm was expensive, and “I’m paying for it.”) There was also an apparently bogus promise to cut taxes 10 percent in the coming week.
But that’s a reminder that almost a year ago, when Trump rammed a tax cut through Congress, it was supposed to be the heart of the GOP’s pitch to voters in 2018. Instead, it’s been a total flop, which is why Trump was out beating the immigration drum once more.
Philip Ewing reports Here’s How Russia Runs Its Disinformation Effort Against The 2018 Midterms:
Who’s responsible?
The branch of active measures the Russians call “Project Lakhta” has been running since “mid-2014,” and works through some dozen Russian entities, of which the best-known probably was the “Internet Research Agency.” It, quasi-“news” and other organizations employed hundreds of people, with a global budget of the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars, U.S. officials say.
Who pays for it?
The money comes through a company called Concord, which is controlled by a billionaire ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the Justice Department’s allegations.
“Our fifth anniversary is coming up next May … and I am hoping we can make it to then,” he said.
….
How does it work?
Worker bees within Project Lakhta disguise themselves as Americans and insert themselves into conversations on social media. They create Facebook and Twitter identities, for example, that make them appear to be Americans. They use technical means to disguise the fact that they are logging in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Court documents unsealed in February described how influence-mongers within the Internet Research Agency set up virtual private networks and used American email accounts, along with some stolen identities of Americans, to plausibly pose as Americans, disguising the fact that they were using workstations in St. Petersburg.
Other people working in the disinformation project bought display ads, in some cases, through “third-party intermediaries,” according to court documents. So disinformation practitioners could get into an American user’s Facebook feed at least those two ways: by pretending to be real users or by having paid for ads.
Facebook and Twitter have vowed to clamp down on fake accounts and they say they’ll mandate more disclosure about who pays for political ads.
Jamil Smith reports Exclusive: In Leaked Audio, Brian Kemp Expresses Concern Over Georgians Exercising Their Right to Vote:
Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, expressed at a ticketed campaign event that his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to audio obtained by Rolling Stone.
An attendee of the “Georgia Professionals for Kemp” event says they recorded 21 minutes and 12 seconds of the evening, held last Friday at the Blind Pig Parlour Bar near Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. As proof of their attendance, the source shared with Rolling Stone a receipt of their donation, which granted access to the gathering.
….
On Tuesday morning, a member of the Kemp campaign confirmed that the event took place, but the campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the specific remarks. On Monday evening, a Facebook page for the event was removed from public view. Candice Broce, the press secretary for the Georgia Secretary of State, told Rolling Stone that she does not respond to campaign-related inquiries because she represents the office.
It is fairly typical for a political candidate expressing confidence in his campaign to lament his opponent’s efforts to increase turnout. But Kemp’s position as Georgia’s Secretary of State clouds his statements. While it is not uncommon for someone in such a position to be on a ballot during an election that he or she oversees — they do have to run for re-election, after all — the state’s top elections official speaking of “concern” about increased early and absentee voting raises further questions about a conflict of interest.
Meet the Amateur Astronomer Who Found a Lost NASA Satellite: