Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 19m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1942, the deadliest nightclub fire in American history kills hundreds: “The Cocoanut Grove Fire was a nightclub fire in the United States. The Cocoanut Grove was a premier nightclub during the post-Prohibition 1930s and 1940s in Boston, Massachusetts. On November 28, 1942, it was the scene of the deadliest nightclub fire in history, killing 492 people (which was 32 more than the building’s authorized capacity) and injuring hundreds more. The scale of the tragedy shocked the nation and briefly replaced the events of World War II in newspaper headlines. It led to a reform of safety standards and codes across the US, and to major changes in the treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims internationally.”
On this day in 1901, UW football goes undefeated: “On this date the University of Wisconsin defeated the University of Chicago, 35-0, to finish its first undefeated football season in school history with a 9-0 record.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Andrew Van Dam writes Donald Trump is going to build a big, beautiful deficit and rely on China to help pay for it:
Republicans’ tax plans are going to clash headfirst with President Trump’s anti-China, anti-trade-deficit rhetoric. It’s just simple economics.
Assuming they pass, Republican tax plans are forecast to increase the federal debt by about $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion over the coming decade, though scoring and specifics vary. This is the same debt that, campaigning in Ohio, Trump called “a weight around the future of every young person in this country.” As the debt grew under his predecessor, Trump didn’t mince words:
And he didn’t stop once he was elected:
But now that it’s time to pass a tax plan that nonpartisan observers agree will require deficit spending, Republicans are on board with growing the federal debt. Large-scale borrowing will help make up the gap in lower tax revenue while avoiding some painful cuts to government programs.
[37 of 38 economists said the GOP tax plans would grow the debt. The 38th misread the question.]
To cover that shortfall, Trump’s government and its successors will be issuing additional Treasury bonds for decades to come, with Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, posting that one version of the bill would grow the debt as a share of the economy by 6 percentage points by 2017, and 10.1 percentage points by 2037….
(Trump is variously con man and ignoramus.)
Michelle Goldberg writes that Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump:
But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports [of collusion] until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.
That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.
Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy. He was able to interview Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier attempting to detail Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin, and who describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive”….
(Harding’s book is available at Amazon: Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.)
Michael M. Grynbaum reports Trump and Russia Seem to Find Common Foe: The American Press:
President Trump attacks CNN on a regular basis. But he usually focuses on the domestic side of the network — his least favorite cable news station — making his post on Twitter this weekend about CNN’s international arm something of a rarity.
“@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly,” Mr. Trump wrote on Saturday. “The outside world does not see the truth from them!”….
“Trump’s eagerness to win the favor of autocrats remains one of the most concerning aspects of his presidency,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and communications director for Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential bid. “If the leader of the free world does not champion the free press, then who will?”
For months, press freedom groups have warned that Mr. Trump’s escalating attacks on the news media could inspire foreign governments to follow his lead, particularly in countries that lack the robust speech protections of the United States. In many other countries, journalists can face prosecution, jail time, and violence for reporting critically on the government.
On Sunday, a day after Mr. Trump’s tweet, the spokesman for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Twitter to denounce CNN as “deplorable” for its coverage of a terrorist attack in Sinai….
(Trump and Putin see a common foe because they have common interests.)
Shawn Boburg, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites report A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation:
A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.
In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.
The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.
But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias….
(James O’Keefe, head of Project Veritas, reveals himself: (1) he’s a mediocre plotter, easily caught, and – far worse – (2) he thought having a woman impersonate an assault survivor was a legitimate technique to boost Roy Moore’s candidacy by trying to discredit actual accounts of Moore’s conduct with underage women.)
So, why do screws tighten clockwise?