Daily Bread for 10.31.17

Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny as the day progresses with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 18m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1941, although not yet at war with the United States, a German U-boat sinks the USS Reuben James: “At daybreak on 31 October, she was torpedoed near Iceland^[2] by U-552 commanded by Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp. Reuben James had positioned herself between an ammunition ship in the convoy and the known position of a German “wolfpack“, a group of submarines poised to attack the convoy. Reuben James was hit forward by a torpedo meant for a merchant ship and her entire bow was blown off when a magazine exploded. The bow sank immediately. The aft section floated for five minutes before going down. Of a crew of seven officers and 136 enlisted men plus one enlisted passenger, 44 enlisted men and no officers survived.^{[1][2] “}

On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks win their first game: “the Milwaukee Bucks claimed their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons in the Milwaukee Arena. The Bucks were 0-5 at the time, and Wayne Embry led Milwaukee with 30 points. Embry became the first player in Bucks history to score 30 or more points in a regular season game.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes assess Robert Mueller’s Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis:

The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them.

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.“….

(Forget Fox News: these are serious matters.)

Tony Romm and Kurt Wagner report Facebook says 126 million people in the U.S. may have seen posts produced by Russian-government backed agents:

Facebook, Google and Twitter plan to tell congressional investigators this week that the scope of Russia’s campaign to spread disinformation on their sites — and to potentially disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential race — is much broader than the companies initially reported.

At Facebook, roughly 126 million users in the United States may have seen posts, stories or other content created by Russian government-backed trolls around Election Day, according to a source familiar with the company’s forthcoming testimony to Congress. Previously, Facebook had only shared information on ads purchased by Kremlin-tied accounts, revealing that they reached more than 10 million U.S. users….

(The more one learns, the clearer Putin’s reach into America media becomes.)

Anne Applebaum asks Did Russia teach Paul Manafort all its dirty tricks?:

Years from now, historians may study the documents indicting Paul Manafort to understand just how the Russification of American public life was accomplished. Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.

Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington. But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.

Manafort was first invited to work in Ukraine in 2004, by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. But Manafort left a real mark in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country. In 2008, he helped run an anti-NATO campaign, opposing Ukraine’s membership in the transatlantic alliance. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won….

(Posterity will be rightly harsh, and view these Trump men as opponents of America’s democratic tradition.)

Greg Sargent describes The Trump authoritarian cult:

The Glorious Republican Civil War of 2017 isn’t really a battle over policy or ideology. It isn’t even quite the clash of grand agendas we constantly read about — the supposed showdown between populist economic nationalism on one side, and limited government conservatism, free trade and internationalism on the other.

Instead, the GOP civil war is really a battle over whether Republican lawmakers should — or should not — genuflect before President Trump. The battle is over whether they should — or should not — applaud his racism, his authoritarianism and his obvious pleasure in dispensing abuse and sowing racial division. It’s also over whether Republicans should submit to Trump’s ongoing insistence that his lack of major accomplishments is fully the fault of Republicans who failed his greatness….

If you’re a Stranger Things fan, 13 details you might have missed in ‘Stranger Things’ season 2: