Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 5:36 PM, for 10h 56m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent, with 42% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred sixty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Alcohol & Licensing Committee meets at 6 PM, the Whitewater Fire Department has a business meeting scheduled for 6:30 PM, and Common Council also meets at 6:30 PM.
George Washington is born on this day in 1732.
On this day in 1922, an ice storm brings havoc to Wisconsin: “Unprecedented freezing rain and snow assaulted the Midwest February 21-23, 1922. In Wisconsin the central and southern parts of the state were most severely affected, with the counties between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan south to Racine being hardest hit. Ice coated trees and power lines, bringing them down and cutting off electricity, telephone and telegraph services. Cities were isolated, roads were impassable, rivers rose, streets and basements flooded, and train service stopped or slowed.
Near Little Chute a passenger train went off the rails, injuring several crew members. Appleton housed 150 stranded traveling salesmen, near Plymouth a sheet of river ice 35 feet long and nearly three feet thick washed onto the river bank, while in Sheboygan police rescued a flock of chickens and ducks from their flooded coop and a sick woman from her flooded home. Icy streets caused numerous automobile accidents, but the only reported deaths were a team of horses in Appleton that were electrocuted by a fallen power line.”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Eric Levitz writes Trump Is No Longer Bothering to Conceal His Corruption:
Donald Trump has, by his own account, spent much of his adult life trying to enrich himself through corruption: During his presidential campaign, the mogul claimed that he had routinely tried to buy policy favors from elected officials by donating to their campaigns.
Given these realities, many experts in government ethics believe that Trump had an obligation to take extraordinary measures to insulate himself from conflicts of interest once be became president — up to and including divesting himself from a wide range of foreign assets. Of course, Trump refused to do any such thing. Instead, he vowed to place his assets into what he referred to as a “blind trust,” but was actually an entity that would allow him perfect knowledge of his holdings — and that would be managed by his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr. The president’s sole concession to ethical propriety was the stipulation that neither Eric nor Don Jr. would have any role whatsoever in his administration.
“The company and policy and government are completely separated,” Eric Trump assured the Washington Post last year. “We have built an unbelievable wall in between the two.”
The key word there was “unbelievable.” The president has never been willing to expend much effort on maintaining such a facade. In the first weeks after his election, Trump invited Eric and Don Jr. to a policy meeting with tech executives, met with his Indian business partners, and allowed his D.C. hotel to begin courting the patronage of foreign diplomats. In the first year after his inauguration, he mixed politics and business in ever more blatant ways.
But Don Jr.’s trip to India represents a kind of “coming-out party” for the Trumpist kleptocracy: According the the Washington Post, the manager of the president’s “blind trust” will travel to Mumbai this week to promote his family’s real-estate projects, sell access to himself for $38,000 a head, and give a foreign policy speech (ostensibly) on behalf of his father’s administration at a global business summit ….
➤ Evan McMullin writes It’s Clear: Donald Trump Welcomes Russia’s Subversion of Our Democracy (“The president’s response to Bob Mueller’s latest indictments is disturbing but all too expected at this point”):
But Friday’s indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and the president’s response to them, point to a more troubling and increasingly likely motivation: President Trump does not want to stop Kremlin interference intended to sway our elections in his favor. Rather, he welcomes it.
The Special Counsel’s revelations provided a detailed description of part of the modern information warfare Russia has waged against our country since at least 2014. It was a highly-coordinated assault, employing foreign agents on U.S. soil as well as Moscow-based internet operatives.
And yet, in response to this news, the president still couldn’t muster a forceful rebuke of Putin’s regime. Nor would he vow to hold it accountable and deter future attacks. On the contrary, he tried to spin the entire ordeal as an exoneration.
This is either willful ignorance or, more likely, disloyal opportunism. That’s because, whether he admits it or not, the president must know that the story he publicly calls a “hoax” is real. We have detailed evidence of Moscow’s subversion of our democracy. But it seems unlikely that the president will change his tune and take action to counter it.
“I can’t say I’ve been specifically directed to blunt or actually stop” Russian influence operations, NSA Director Mike Rogers shockingly revealed to the Senate Intelligence Committee this week. Rogers and the nation’s other top intelligence chiefs were on the Hill to provide their annual Worldwide Threats Assessment.
(Donald Trump reveals himself as worse even than a fellow traveler – he’s effectually a fifth columnist for Putin. Indeed, he’s likely the highest-placed fifth columnist in modern times.)
➤ Danielle Root, Liz Kennedy, Michael Sozan, and Jerry Parshall survey Election Security in All 50 States:
In 2016, America’s elections were targeted by a foreign nation-state intent on infiltrating and manipulating our electoral system. On September 22, 2017, it was reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) notified 21 states that were targeted by hackers during the 2016 election.1 Among those states notified by DHS were: Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington.2 Arizona, California, Iowa, Texas, and Wisconsin were also among those states originally contacted by DHS. However, those states have denied that their election systems were attacked.3 Ultimately, hackers only reportedly succeeded in breaching the voter registration system of one state: Illinois.4 And while DHS did not name those responsible for the attempted hacks, many believe the culprits can be traced back to Russia.5 Experts have warned that a future attack on our election infrastructure, by Russia or other malicious actors, is all but guaranteed.6
…
In August 2017, the Center for American Progress released a report entitled “9 Solutions for Securing America’s Elections,” laying out nine vulnerabilities in election infrastructure and solutions to help improve election security in time for the 2018 and 2020 elections.15 This report builds on that analysis to provide an overview of election security and preparedness in each state, looking specifically at state requirements and practices related to:
- Minimum cybersecurity standards for voter registration systems
- Voter-verified paper ballots
- Post-election audits that test election results
- Ballot accounting and reconciliation
- Return of voted paper absentee ballots
- Voting machine certification requirements
- Pre-election logic and accuracy testing
This report provides an overview of state compliance with baseline standards to protect their elections from hacking and machine malfunction. Some experts may contend that additional standards, beyond those mentioned here, should be required of states to improve election security. The chief purpose of this report is to provide information on how states are faring in meeting even the minimum standards necessary to help secure their elections.
(One reads that Wisconsin is no better than average in her election security: “Wisconsin adheres to minimum cybersecurity best practices related to voter registration systems and conducts its elections using paper ballots and voting machines that provide a paper record. But the state’s failure to carry out post-election audits that test the accuracy of election outcomes leaves the state open to undetected hacking and other Election Day problems.”)
➤ Chris Hayes contends that House Speaker Paul Ryan likes to say the same thing after gun massacres:
➤ So, What’s Up With the Bizarre Hollywood Phenomenon of “Twin Films”?: