Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 26m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1726, the first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is published as two volumes. On this day in 1892, a fire strikes Milwaukee’s Third Ward: “an exploding oil barrel started a small fire in Milwaukee. It spread rapidly and by morning four people had died, 440 buildings were destroyed, and more than 1,900 people in the Irish neighborhood were left homeless. It was the most disastrous fire in Milwaukee’s history.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jack Shafer writes Week 23: Mueller Bombs Trump’s Big Week (“The president was thrilled to turn the tables on the Democrats, but news the grand jury had filed charges made the celebration look premature”):
Fortified by news in the Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS to produce the Steele Dossier, President Donald Trump overran his opponents’ positions this week. Splattering them with half-truths and hyperbole, Trump charged that “the whole Russian thing” was a “hoax” and an excuse for Democrats unwilling to accept that they lost the election. Then he rolled in a grenade, calling the dossier “fake.” Finally, he sparked his flamethrower to life and hosed his political foes with rhetorical fire by invoking the uranium deal in none-dare-call-it-conspiracy style, describing Uranium One’s sale to a Russian company during the Obama era as the equal of Watergate.
At least that’s how it looked in Trump’s version of the war movie until late Friday, when it turned out that the president was rushing to take the wrong hill. First, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website—funded by a billionaire from the never-Trump movement—’fessed to having paid for Fusion GPS’s original anti-Trump work before the Clinton Democrats took over the payments. Then CNN reported that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III had fired a bunker buster, bringing his first indictment in the probe. The identity of the person charged is under seal still, CNN reported, and will remain so until the person is arrested, possibly as soon as Monday. Will it be Paul Manafort, whom prosecutors reportedly all but promised to indict? It will be a long weekend of rampant speculation until the scoop is confirmed.
(Be not distracted: Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, etc. will say anything, however absurd the accusations, to distract from the methodical and lawful investigation Mueller leads. Obsessive, ignorant Fox viewers feast on lies, diversionary accusations, and contempt for – so to speak – the regular order of American political and legal tradition. Centuries of that evolving regular order are more powerful than their many lies.)
Josh Gerstein reports Manafort realtor called to testify before grand jury in Russia probe (“The realtor, who helped Manafort buy the Alexandria apartment recently raided by the FBI, was called last week by prosecutors working under special counsel Robert Mueller”):
The realtor who helped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort buy the Virginia condo that was recently raided by the FBI testified last week before the federal grand jury hearing testimony in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, POLITICO has learned.
The real estate agent, Wayne Holland of Alexandria, Virginia-based McEnearney Associates, appeared before the Washington-based grand jury after a federal judge rejected the firm’s lawyer’s bid to quash subpoenas for testimony and records about various real estate transactions.
The broker’s appearance before the grand jury is one of few concrete indications of the leads Mueller’s prosecutors are pursuing as they investigate Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. The investigation encompasses lobbying work done by Manafort as well as possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials….
(Manafort, Flynn, Kushner, Trump, Putin: those are the real subjects of concern. Hillary Clintion colluding with Russia? Uranium One? No, those are distrations for deplorables, diversions for the dim-witted.)
Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports Cambridge Analytica used data from Facebook and Politico to help Trump (“Speech by company executive contradicts denial by Trump campaign that claimed the company used its own data and Facebook data to help the campaign”):
….This week, the group became the focus of a new controversy after the Daily Beast reported that the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had contacted Julian Assange last year. Nix allegedly asked the WikiLeaks founder whether he could assist in releasing thousands of emails that had gone missing on a private server that had been used by Hillary Clinton. Assange confirmed the contact but said the offer was rejected.
The news prompted a top former campaign official, Michael Glassner, who was executive director of the Trump election campaign, to minimise the role Cambridge Analytica played in electing Trump, despite the fact that it paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars in fees.
In a statement on Wednesday, Glassner said that the Trump campaign relied on voter data owned by the Republican National Committee to help elect the president.
“Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” he said.
But that claim is contradicted by a detailed description of the company’s role in the 2016 election given in May by a senior Cambridge Analytica executive.
Speaking at a conference in Germany, Molly Schweickert, the head of digital at Cambridge Analytica, said that Cambridge Analytica models, which melded the company’s own massive database and new voter surveys, were instrumental in day-to-day campaign decisions, including in helping determine Trump’s travel schedule.
The company’s models also helped drive decisions on advertising and how to reach out to financial donors.
Schweickert said Cambridge Analytica started working with the Trump campaign in June 2016….
(Of course Cambridge Analytica helped Trump. Bannon, Kushner, the Mercers: they were all leaderrs or key funders, for goodness’ sake.)
Rebecca Ballhaus reports Trump Donor Asked Data Firm If It Could Better Organize Hacked Emails (“August 2016 exchange between Rebekah Mercer and Cambridge Analytica’s CEO shows efforts to leverage Clinton-related messages”):
Trump donor Rebekah Mercer in August 2016 asked the chief executive of a data-analytics firm working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign whether the company could better organize the Hillary Clinton-related emails being released by WikiLeaks, according to a person familiar with their email exchange.
The previously undisclosed details from the exchange between Ms. Mercer and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix show how an influential Trump supporter was looking to leverage the hacked Clinton-related messages to boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Nix emailed Ms. Mercer and some company employees that he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to offer help organizing the Clinton-related emails the website was releasing. The new details shed light on the timing of Mr. Nix’s outreach to Mr. Assange, which came before his company began working for the Trump campaign….
(Cambridge Analytica even sought Russian catspaw Julian Assange’s help on behalf of Trump.)
Great Big Story tells of The Last of the French Cowboys:
Since the 1500s, the residents of Camargue, France, have been caring for and tending to the rare, all-white horses local to the area. The horses come from a long and storied legacy, thought to date back to prehistoric times. Marie Pagès, one of the Guardians of the Camargue, has been nurturing her horses for the past 28 years. Sadly, as the population of Camargue horses diminishes, so goes with it the tradition of the horsemen. Still, Marie hopes that the passion that she and her fellow cowboys share for their stewardship will keep their legacy alive.