Good morning.
Halloween in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 7:28 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 19m 05s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the seven hundred twenty-second day.
Trick or Treat in the city limits is from 4 to 7 PM today. Haunt responsibly.
On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks win their first game:
On this date 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
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s unconstitutional proposal, using Ivanka to escape culpability for bigotry, investors sue Trump for fraud, Czech spies tracked Trump in the 80s, and video of a family of bears breaking into a photographer’s blind —
George T. Conway III and Neal Katyal write Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship is unconstitutional:
Birthright citizenship sprang from the ashes of the worst Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision that said that slaves, and the children of slaves, could not be citizens of the United States. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans was shed to repudiate that idea.
Afterward, the drafters of the 14th Amendment declared in their very first sentence, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The drafters were motivated by their utter revulsion toward slavery and a system that relegated people to subordinate political status because of their birth. They weren’t thinking of, or concerned with, any exceptions to birthright citizenship other than the absolutely essential.
And what they wrote was simple and clear. Both proponents and opponents of the language at the time knew exactly what it meant: Virtually anyone born in the United States is a citizen. In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed just that: It held that the “Fourteenth amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory” — “including all children here born of resident aliens.” The exception? “Two classes of cases” in which the United States could not apply its laws to foreigners under historic Anglo-American legal principles: “children born of alien enemies in hostile occupation, and children of diplomatic representatives of a foreign state.”
Neither of those narrow exceptions supports what Trump proposes to do by executive order. He is threatening, with the stroke of a pen, to declare certain people who are born in the United States ineligible for citizenship — despite the plain words of the 14th Amendment.
Molly Jong-Fast writes Trump Is Using Ivanka As A Prop To Whitewash Anti-Semitism:
Because you know who doesn’t need a Jewish daughter to prove he’s not an anti-Semite when he goes to visit grieving Jews? A person who’s not an anti-Semite.
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But why does the president need to keep insisting that he doesn’t hate blacks or Jews? Why the need for these human props?
Because his policies are so blatantly racist and anti-Semitic. From his Muslim ban to his recent interest in repealing the fourteenth amendment, Trump is constantly on the defensive because his policies are so blatantly unfavorable to ethnic and religious minorities.
At the end of the day, Ivanka Trump is her father’s greatest grift: the Jew who enables anti-Semitism, just as she is the woman who enables his misogyny.
Jonathan O’Connell reports Trump defrauded investors in marketing scheme, lawsuit says:
At issue are promotional spots and speeches that Trump made on behalf of marketing company ACN, also known as American Communications Network, which charged $499 for the chance to sell video phones licensed by the company, and sometimes extracted thousands of dollars later to have a chance of recouping the money.
Trump earned $450,000 each for three speeches he gave for ACN, according to his government disclosure form, but in marketing videos he told potential investors that the opportunity came “without any of the risks most entrepreneurs have to take” and that his endorsement was “not for any money.”
The plaintiffs allege that the investments were a sham and that Trump and his family promoted them — including twice on his TV show “Celebrity Apprentice” — despite knowing they were fraudulent.
In a 164-page complaint filed with the Southern District of New York, the plaintiffs ask for damages including financial relief and a ruling barring the Trumps and their company from promoting such offers in the future.
The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Czech Spies Tracked Trump in the 80s:
The Guardian reveals that the Statni bezpecnost (StB), the Czechoslovakian intelligence service, first noticed Donald Trump when he was a celebrity-seeking real estate developer more than 40 years ago.
The StB had been interested in Trump since 1977, when he married a Czechoslovakian-born woman, Ivana Zelnickova. News of the wedding reached the StB bureau in Zlin, the town in Moravia where Ivana grew up and where her parents lived. Ivana’s father, Milos, regularly gave the StB information on his daughter’s visits from the US and his son-in-law’s burgeoning career.
The StB’s work on Donald and Ivana intensified in the late 1980s, after Trump let it be known he was thinking of running for president. The StB’s first foreign department sat up. Inside the Soviet bloc, Czechoslovakia’s spies were reputed to be skilled professionals, competent and versatile English speakers who were a match for the CIA and MI6.
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Jarda was one of four StB collaborators who spied on the Trumps during the cold war. Jarda’s real name was Jaroslav Jansa …
… Now aged 74, and living in an apartment bloc on the outskirts of Prague, Jansa is reluctant to talk about his past. When the Guardian and the Czech magazine Respekt knocked on his door, he refused to open it. In an email, he said he was tired and wanted to be left in peace. He added: “You are trying to put me in the tomb.”
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It’s unclear to what degree the KGB and StB shared or coordinated Trump material. The two spy agencies worked closely together, signing cooperation agreements in 1972 and October 1986. The KGB was always the dominant partner – it would have closely monitored Trump when he and Ivana visited the USSR in summer 1987, following a Kremlin invitation.
Watch a Family Of Bears Try Breaking Into Photographers Hideout: