Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be chilly, with a high of nine degrees under sunny skies. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred eleventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1776, the Gen. Washington and the Continental Army are victorious at the Battle of Trenton.
Recommended for reading in full —
The Salt Lake City Tribune editorial board explains Why Orrin Hatch is Utahn of the Year:
The selection of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch as the 2017 Utahn of the Year has little to do with the fact that, after 42 years, he is the longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, that he has been a senator from Utah longer than three-fifths of the state’s population has been alive.
It has everything to do with recognizing:
Hatch’s part in the dramatic dismantling of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.
His role as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee in passing a major overhaul of the nation’s tax code.
His utter lack of integrity that rises from his unquenchable thirst for power.It would be good for Utah if Hatch, having finally caught the Great White Whale of tax reform, were to call it a career. If he doesn’t, the voters should end it for him.
Common is the repetition of the catchphrase that Hatch successfully used to push aside three-term Sen. Frank Moss in this first election in, egad, 1976.
“What do you call a senator who’s served in office for 18 years? You call him home.”
Less well known is a bit of advice Hatch gave to Capitol Hill interns in 1983.
“You should not fall in love with D.C.” he admonished them. “Elected politicians shouldn’t stay here too long.”
If only he had listened to his own advice.
(See also Has Trump Persuaded Orrin Hatch to Block Mitt Romney’s Senate Bid?)
Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima and Greg Jaffe report Kremlin trolls burned across the Internet as Washington debated options:
The first email arrived in the inbox of CounterPunch, a left-leaning American news and opinion website, at 3:26 a.m. — the middle of the day in Moscow.
“Hello, my name is Alice Donovan and I’m a beginner freelance journalist,” read the Feb.?26, 2016, message.
The FBI was tracking Donovan as part of a months-long counterintelligence operation code-named “NorthernNight.” Internal bureau reports described her as a pseudonymous foot soldier in an army of Kremlin-led trolls seeking to undermine America’s democratic institutions.
Her first articles as a freelancer for CounterPunch and at least 10 other online publications weren’t especially political. As the 2016 presidential election heated up, Donovan’s message shifted. Increasingly, she seemed to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding by stoking discontent toward Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and touting WikiLeaks, which U.S. officials say was a tool of Russia’s broad influence operation to affect the presidential race.
“There’s no denying the emails that Julian Assange has picked up from inside the Democratic Party are real,” she wrote in August 2016 for a website called We Are Change. “The emails have exposed Hillary Clinton in a major way — and almost no one is reporting on it.”
The events surrounding the FBI’s NorthernNight investigation follow a pattern that repeated for years as the Russian threat was building: U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies saw some warning signs of Russian meddling in Europe and later in the United States but never fully grasped the breadth of the Kremlin’s ambitions. Top U.S. policymakers didn’t appreciate the dangers, then scrambled to draw up options to fight back. In the end, big plans died of internal disagreement, a fear of making matters worse or a misguided belief in the resilience of American society and its democratic institutions.
(There never was an Alice Donovan, but there were those duped to believe so. While America slept…)
Henry Meyer reports Putin Tries to Lure $1 Trillion Home as Sanctions Fear Grows:
President Vladimir Putin is using the threat of additional U.S. sanctions to encourage wealthy Russians to repatriate some of their overseas assets, which exceed $1 trillion by one estimate.
Putin told lawmakers late Monday that a new capital amnesty program was needed “given the foreign restrictions, which instead of lessening are now worsening,” according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin’s website. This “should stimulate the return of capital to Russia,” the president said, without specifying how long the measure will last.
“People should feel comfortable and secure and it shouldn’t involve additional expenses,” Putin said Tuesday at a Cabinet meeting where he ordered officials to finalize the plan.
Russia rolled out a similar amnesty program during the worst of the conflict in Ukraine, which coincided with a plunge in oil prices that triggered the country’s longest recession of the Putin era. That 18-month initiative, the results of which haven’t been disclosed, “didn’t work as well as we’d hoped,” Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said. Unlike that plan, this one waves Russia’s 13 percent tax on personal income, according to Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman….
(Sanctions aren’t nearly stringent enough against a nation that seized Crimea, forments war in eastern Ukraine, interfered in America democracy, and commits human rights violations at home and abroad.)
Emily Steel reports At Vice, Cutting-EdgeMedia and Allegations of Old-School Sexual Harassment:
One woman said she was riding a Ferris wheel at Coney Island after a company event when a co-worker suddenly took her hand and put it on his crotch. Another said she felt pressured into a sexual relationship with an executive and was fired after she rejected him.
A third said that a co-worker grabbed her face and tried to kiss her, and she used her umbrella to fend him off.
These women did not work among older men at a hidebound company. They worked at Vice, an insurgent force in news and entertainment known for edgy content that aims for millennial audiences on HBO and its own TV network.
But as Vice Media has built itself from a fringe Canadian magazine into a nearly $6 billion global media company, its boundary-pushing culture created a workplace that was degrading and uncomfortable for women, current and former employees say.
An investigation by The New York Times has found four settlements involving allegations of sexual harassment or defamation against Vice employees, including its current president.In addition, more than two dozen other women, most in their 20s and early 30s, said they had experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct at the company — unwanted kisses, groping, lewd remarks and propositions for sex.
The settlements and the many episodes of harassment the women described depict a top-down ethos of male entitlement at Vice, where women said they felt like just another party favor at an organization where partying often was an extension of the job.
(For Whitewater and elsewhere – there’s hard work everywhere to be done. Those who wish to defend an institution or organization at any cost – indeed rather than the redress of real injuries to individuals – will sometimes defend their efforts as otherwise progressive, enlightened, or cutting-edge. There is no noble way to defend an ignoble act; there is no worthy distraction from obstruction of justice. These institutional and organizational efforts have the character of a taunt: Will you defend the truth if we build monuments to pretty lies? Sometimes, there is a resolute reply: Yes, so assertively and completely as one can.)
There are Long-Term Health Benefits Of Running A Marathon: