Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:29 PM, for 11h 32m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launches the world’s first satellite into orbit: “The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by amateurs, and the 65° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.”
On this day in 1897, a union is chartered: “At the time of organization, seven-eighths of the woodworkers labored for twelve-hour days, five days a week, for no more than $1.10 a day. Further, women were employed at lesser wages and boys worked for forty cents a day. Frank J. Weber, American Federation of Labor and Wisconsin Federation of Labor general organizer, visited the city and spoke to a large audience of Oshkosh woodworkers. Four days later Local 29 initiated one hundred new members and Local 49 gained thirty-nine laborers. [Source: The Oshkosh Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898: A Wisconsin Community in Crisis by Virginia Glenn Crane]”
Recommended for reading in full —
Manu Raju, Dylan Byers and Dana Bash report that Exclusive: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin:
A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.
Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said.
It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.
Michigan saw the closest presidential contest in the country — Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by about 10,700 votes out of nearly 4.8 million ballots cast. Wisconsin was also one of the tightest states, and Trump won there by only about 22,700 votes. Both states, which Trump carried by less than 1%, were key to his victory in the Electoral College.
The sources did not specify when in 2016 the ads ran in Michigan and Wisconsin.
As part of their investigations, both special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are seeking to determine whether the Russians received any help from Trump associates in where to target the ads….
Tony Romm reports that Twitter and Facebook haven’t stopped Russia-backed RT from advertising on their websites:
Twitter has continued to allow a Russian government-supported news network to advertise on its platform, even though the tech company sounded alarms about its ads to lawmakers investigating the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
In a meeting with House and Senate investigators last week, Twitter executives shared more than 1,800 promoted tweets from Russia Today, known as RT, and its three main accounts on the site. Some of the ads, valued in total at about $274,000, sought to promote RT’s own stories, including those that sharply attacked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Twitter’s decision to share that information with Congress followed a report by the U.S. government’s top intelligence agencies, which slammed RT in January as the “Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” Despite those concerns, though, the news network’s three Twitter accounts — @RT_com, @RT_America and @ActualidadRT — remain fully operational. And Twitter has not banned RT from advertising, according to a source familiar with the matter.
A spokeswoman for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook, meanwhile, similarly has not shut down RT’s official pages, one of which boasts more than 4.5 million followers. Nor has Facebook targeted any new advertising restrictions against the news network, a spokesman for the social giant told Recode, before adding they are monitoring the situation. Facebook nonetheless finds itself in congressional crosshairs for Russian-sponsored misinformation circulated in posts and advertisements before Election Day.
Google is still reviewing its platform for potential Russian interference. So far, it has not yet announced any findings or steps to harden its review process, and a spokeswoman declined to comment for this story. But RT videos had been viewed about 800 million times on Google-owned YouTube between the video platform’s founding in 2005 and the U.S. government’s January 2017 analysis of the election….
(See James Kirchick’s RT wants to spread Moscow’s propaganda here. Let’s treat it that way:”It should register as an agent of a foreign government.”)
Elias Groll reports GOP Congressman Met in Moscow With Kremlin-Linked Lawyer at Center of Russia Investigation:
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher met with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during a 2016 trip to Moscow, a previously undisclosed tête-à-tête that sheds additional light on the extent to which Moscow-based political operatives sought to influence American officials in the run-up to last year’s presidential election….
While in Moscow, Rohrabacher and his staff met with a variety of Russian officials and received a collection of documents stamped “confidential” alleging that Browder had duped American lawmakers into passing the sanctions bill, according to the Daily Beast. The document was supplied by officials in the Russian prosecutor-general’s office and raised the possibility that repealing the sanctions law could lead to improved relations between Moscow and Washington.
Paul Behrends, a top Rohrabacher aide, was removed from his job as staff director of the foreign affairs subcommittee chaired by the California Republican after news of his involvement in the meeting was made public.
A vocal advocate of warmer relations between Russia and the United States, Rohrabacher has repeatedly gained the attention of Kremlin officials, who view him as one of their few reliable allies in Congress. In 2012, the FBI even warned Rohrabacher that Russian spies were attempting to recruit him, according to the New York Times.
News Front, based in Crimea, publishes a mix of aggregated and original news in six languages, including Russian and English. One former employee alleges that it is financed by Russian security services, a claim News Front denies.
Amy Howe has an Argument analysis: Cautious optimism for challengers in Wisconsin redistricting case?:
Today may have been only the second day of the Supreme Court’s new term, but it may also prove to be one of the biggest. The justices heard oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, agreeing with the plaintiffs that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. After roughly an hour of oral argument this morning, the justices seemed to agree that partisan gerrymandering is, as Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged, “distasteful.” But there was no apparent agreement about whether courts could or should get involved in policing the practice.
The case arose after Republicans won majorities in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and captured the governor’s office, giving them control over the maps that were drawn after the 2010 census. In the 2012 elections, Republicans won slightly less than half of the statewide vote, which translated into 60 seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly; by contrast, Democrats won just over half of the statewide vote but garnered only 39 seats. Two years later, Republicans won 52% of the vote and 63 seats, while Democrats won approximately 48% of the vote and 36 seats.
A group of challengers argued that the new redistricting plan amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They contended that the new plan sought to dilute Democratic votes across the state, using two methods: “cracking,” which divides up supporters of one party among different districts so that they do not form a majority in any of them; and “packing,” which puts large numbers of a party’s supporters in relatively few districts, where they win by large margins.
The dispute went to a divided three-judge district court, which Congress has designated as the forum for redistricting challenges. That court regarded the case as an easy one. Although it may sometimes be difficult to tell when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting, the lower court conceded, this case is “far more straightforward”: The Republican-controlled legislature drafted a redistricting plan to lock in the party’s control of the state legislature, even though it could have created a different plan that would have accomplished redistricting goals without giving Republicans such a partisan advantage….
The case arose after Republicans won majorities in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and captured the governor’s office, giving them control over the maps that were drawn after the 2010 census. In the 2012 elections, Republicans won slightly less than half of the statewide vote, which translated into 60 seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly; by contrast, Democrats won just over half of the statewide vote but garnered only 39 seats. Two years later, Republicans won 52% of the vote and 63 seats, while Democrats won approximately 48% of the vote and 36 seats.(Howe published her analysis on her own website and at the highly-regarded SCOTUSblog.)
The Atlantic Series presents The Harrowing Personal Stories of Syrian Refugees, in Their Own Words:
“I don’t think the human mind is able to understand the suffering we’ve experienced,” says a man in Matthew K. Firpo’s short documentary, Refuge. Filmed on location in 2016 in four different refugee camps across Greece—outside Athens and on the islands of Lesvos and Leros—the film allows victims of the Syrian Civil War to share their experiences. One man describes how his sewing factory was completely destroyed, leaving him penniless and starving. Another man says he was jailed and tortured for attempting to distribute food; his brother was killed shortly thereafter. Some lost everyone and everything. “Wherever I went in Syria, I saw the injured and the dead,” yet another refugee recounts. For Firpo and his production team, Refuge was a passion project fueled by “wanting to know more about the people living these headlines. I wanted to know more about their stories, about what they had lost, what they had left behind, and where they hoped their lives were headed. While news coverage focused on the problem, it often forgot about the human being.”
For more information on the film, visit the Refuge website.