Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:28 PM, for 11h 31m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand sixty-first day.
On this day in 2017, the New York Times publishes its investigation into allegations against Harvey Weinstein. See Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. (Kantor & Twohey now have a book, She Said, about their reporting on Weinstein’s serial violence.)
Recommended for reading in full:
Adam Taylor writes Foreign allies who gambled on Trump face big losses:
The Trump administration has had a rough few weeks, but spare a thought for the president’s closest foreign allies. From Britain to Australia, Japan to Saudi Arabia, foreign leaders who decided to gamble on America’s unpredictable leader are probably wondering whether they made a losing bet.
In the United States, the ongoing scandal about President Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sparked a swell of momentum for impeachment. Democrats argue that the phone call, in which Trump said Zelensky should open a criminal investigation against the son of one of his rivals, amounted to an abuse of office.
But there was more than one world leader on that phone call. Some critics in Ukraine have condemned Zelensky’s attempts to placate Trump during the conversation. “Now we’re a part of American elections, and I don’t like it,” Oleksiy Honcharenko, a member of former president Petro Poroshenko’s party, told The Washington Post. “Ukraine has problems enough without this.”
(Emphasis in original. Foreign leaders who gambled on Trump were never worthy allies of the United States. If they were worthy allies, then they would not have been so solicitous to a bigoted autocrat who was a threat to the liberal democratic order that defines the American republic. We can do better.)
In Fighting Russian Disinformation, Brookings scholar Alina Polyakova on why the United States needs to go on the offense:
Russia’s attempt to swing the 2016 U.S. election campaign for Donald Trump was just one of dozens of such operations Moscow has waged in the West in recent years. Assessing the specific impact of each act of political interference is exceedingly difficult. But analysts increasingly point to a general trend that serves Russia’s interest: The operations are eroding Western voters’ overall trust in democracy.
This week on And Now the Hard Part, we trace the roots of Moscow’s political interference and talk about how countries can fight back.
“You have to send the message to those that try to undermine our democracies that there will be consequences for their actions,” says Alina Polyakova, the director of the Global Project on Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution and our guest this week.
When [Miguel] Gomez moved to a small town outside Philadelphia, he lamented its lack of a video store. So he opened one himself. Roy Power’s short documentary Memory Video is a portrait of Gomez and his homespun operation—one of the last rental stores of its kind.
It strikes me that the foreign leader that lost the most gambling on Trump was Putin. He put a lot of effort and rubles into getting Trump elected. That turned out to be a worse bet than gambling that Atlantic City would remain viable as a gaming center after the onslaught of Indian casinos.
Putin hasn’t gotten anything he paid for, and is highly likely to get even less after the 2020 election. Betting on Trump has historically been for suckers. Just ask anyone that has worked for him, like the plumbers and painters that he stiffed, or attended his “University”, or the otherwise marginally respectable cabinet members that have, and are, pissing their reputations away and likely will go to jail. Rick Perry, showing uncommon (for him) good sense has figured it out and is bailing. Pompeo and Barr should take heed, cause they’re next in the barrel.
You get anywhere near Trump, you get covered in shit. That’s the law, and it remains unchallenged.