Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 42m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM, her Planning Commission Housing Subcommittee at 6:00 PM, and the Police & Fire Commission at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1864, Gen. Sherman’s forces begin their March to the Sea: “more formally known as the Savannah Campaign, [it] was a military campaign of the American Civil War conducted through Georgia from November 15 to December 21, 1864 by Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army. The campaign began with Sherman’s troops leaving the captured city of Atlanta on November 15 and ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21. His forces destroyed military targets as well as industry, infrastructure, and civilian property and disrupted the Confederacy’s economy and its transportation networks. Sherman’s bold move of operating deep within enemy territory and without supply lines is considered to be one of the major achievements of the war.”
Georgia O’Keeffe is born on this day in 1887: “Georgia O’Keeffe was born in Sun Prairie. She studied at the Chicago Art Institute from 1904 to 1905. In 1907 she relocated to New York to study at the Arts Students League with William Chase. In 1926 she unveiled her now famous flower paintings. She received much of her artistic inspiration from her surroundings in New Mexico, where she settled permanently in 1946. O’Keeffe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. Georgia O’Keeffe died in 1986 in Santa Fe. [Source: Wisconsin Women: A Gifted Heritage]”
Recommended for reading in full —
Matt Apuzzo and Nicholas Fandos report Jeff Sessions Denies Lying to Congress on Contacts With Russia:
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Tuesday denied, again, lying to Congress about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He said he had forgotten about a campaign round-table in which an aide played up his Russian connections and suggested arranging a meeting for Donald J. Trump in Moscow.
But even as Mr. Sessions remained hazy on the details, he was adamant that he had swiftly rejected the aide’s suggestion.
“I have always told the truth,” Mr. Sessions told the House Judiciary Committee, adding that he stood by his previous testimony because “I had no recollection of this meeting until I saw these news reports.”
Mr. Sessions, a former senator and an architect of President Trump’s policies on trade and immigration, was supposed to be an influential force in the administration. Instead, he has twice amended his sworn testimony, creating a distraction for the White House and renewing questions about whether the Trump administration is concealing its connections with Russia….
(There’s our politics, about the United States Attorney General: ‘Denies Lying…on Contacts with Russia…’)
Fred Barbash reports Fox News’s Shepard Smith debunks his network’s favorite Hillary Clinton ‘scandal,’ infuriates viewers:
Fox News anchor Shepard Smith debunked what his own network has called the Hillary Clinton uranium “scandal,” infuriating Fox viewers, some of whom suggested that he ought to work for CNN or MSNBC.
Smith’s critique, which called President Trump’s accusations against Clinton “inaccurate,” was triggered by renewed calls from Republicans on Capitol Hill for a special counsel to investigate Clinton.
Fox News, along with Trump and his allies, have been suggesting for months a link between donations to the Clinton Foundation and the approval of a deal by the State Department and the Obama administration allowing a Russian company to purchase a Canada-based mining group with operations in the United States….
(Smith: an honest man in a room of liars.)
Dominic Tierney observes ‘Human Rights Are Largely Irrelevant to the Emerging Trump Doctrine’:
Donald Trump is the first president in modern history who barely pays lip service to the promotion of universal human rights. On his grand tour of Asia, he stopped in Vietnam, where he failed to press the regime on what Human Rights Watch calls a “dire” lack of individual freedoms. Senator John McCain tweeted: “@POTUS in #Danang & no mention of human rights – Sad.” Instead, Trump prioritized trade and lauded the Vietnamese president for doing “an outstanding job.” Then Trump was off to Manila, where Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, is accused of fighting the drug trade through a campaign of extrajudicial killings. Trump claimed he had a “great relationship” with Duterte, and according to a Philippine spokesman, never mentioned human rights at all.
Sure, there’s usually a gap, and sometimes an enormous chasm, between U.S. ideals and the reality of American foreign policy. And over the decades, the centrality of human rights in U.S. diplomacy has waxed and waned. Washington is selective in its outrage: fixating on the sins of its enemies, and forgiving the failings of its friends. At times of grave threat, Americans have sometimes trampled over human rights, interning Japanese-Americans and carpet-bombing enemy civilians in World War II, for example. After cutting a deal with a Vichy French regime in North Africa, Franklin Roosevelt quoted a Balkan proverb: “My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.”
But human rights have always been woven into the fabric of U.S. foreign policy. In his inaugural address in 1977, Jimmy Carter declared: “Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” In reality, Carter ignored human rights violations by the Shah of Iran, a key U.S. ally, who was subsequently overthrown in the 1979 revolution. But Carter pressured right-wing dictatorships to reform, and negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to Panama because it was the right thing to do. (To the chagrin of one Republican senator, who said: “It’s ours. We stole it fair and square.”)
Later presidents wrestled with the promotion of American ideals in an imperfect world. Ronald Reagan castigated the Soviet Union for its failure to protect individual rights. His successor, George H. W. Bush, was a foreign-policy realist, but still promised a “new world order” based on “peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” Despite his wariness about wading into military quagmires, Bill Clinton used force, at least in part, to protect human rights in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. In 1999, he declared: “Where our values and our interests are at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must be prepared to do so”….
(Trump is an autocrat who cares for liberty neither at home nor abroad. He stands outside – and opposed – to America’s political and philosophical commitment to liberty for all.)
Philip Bump reports One of the busiest websites in the U.S. in 2016 regularly linked to Russia propaganda:
By July 2016, according to the analysis site SimilarWeb, Matt Drudge’s link-aggregation site Drudge Report was the second-most-visited on the Internet in the United States. Over the course of the month — the month of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions and the month of the leak of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee — SimilarWeb estimates that Drudge had 1,472,220,000 page views. That’s 1.4 billion, the equivalent of 47 views of the Drudge Report every second of every minute that month.
Being the second-most-visited site, incidentally, means that Drudge had more page views than Yahoo, Disney (including ABC and ESPN) and Time Warner. It had more than the New York Times and The Washington Post, combined — with enough space left over to also outpace Hearst….
DrudgeReportArchives captures an image of the Drudge Report every two minutes, as it has for 16 years. We ran a script that checked the first update to Drudge Report after 9 a.m. on every day of the past decade, counting the number of times Drudge linked to Infowars, RT or Sputnik. Over that period, excluding the two standing links to Infowars, we tallied more than 1,000 links to those sites.
Drudge started linking to Infowars in 2010. His first link to RT was that same year. Sputnik News wasn’t created until November 2014; Drudge’s first link to that site came later that month….
(Matt Drudge battens on the ignorance of readers who think Sputnik is actual journalism. There’s a term for those readers: they’re called Trump supporters)
There are ‘healthful’ breakfast foods with more sugar than a donut: