Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 20m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred ninety-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1933, German Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act, which effectively granted Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers.
On this day in 1865, Wisconsin troops are victorious in North Carolina: “the 21st Wisconsin Infantry, made up mostly of soldiers from the Oshkosh area, finished fighting their way through the South during Sherman’s March to the Sea and reached Goldsboro, N.C., where the campaign in the Carolinas ended. Its veterans reunited 40 years later in Manitowoc. [Source: 21st Wisconsin Infantry homepage]”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Spencer Ackerman and Kevin Poulsen report EXCLUSIVE: ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer:
Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.
…
But on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government’s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0’s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.
Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency’s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast’s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)
Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running “Fancy Bear,” the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama’s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.
(When Trump operative Roger Stone admitted he was talking over Twitter with Guccifer 2.0, Stone was admitting he was talking with a Russian agent.)
➤ Eduardo Porter and Guilbert Gates explain How Trump’s Protectionism Could Backfire:
Republicans could not lose in this deep red enclave in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Still, in the 2016 election, Mr. Trump carried Lee County, where Tupelo sits, by a 38-percentage-point margin over Hillary Clinton — nine percentage points more than Mitt Romney’s lead over Barack Obama four years before.
And yet it’s not working out great for the working men and women of Tupelo. Indeed, President Trump’s first big trade barrier — tariffs against steel and aluminum imports — is, again, threatening to undermine their livelihood.
For every job in Tupelo producing steel or aluminum, there are 200 jobs in industries that consume them that could be put at risk as tariffs push up the prices of these metals, according to research from Jacob Whiton and Mark Muro of the Brookings Institution.
This is true across the country. The lesson the White House has yet to figure out is that the tariffs meant to protect the businesses that make these metals will end up hamstringing the industries that rely on them.
➤ Ron Brownstein asks Has Trump Already Sealed the GOP’s Fate in 2018?:
Every time Donald Trump breaks a window, congressional Republicans obediently sweep up the glass.
That’s become one of the most predictable patterns of his turbulent presidency—and a defining dynamic of the approaching midterm elections. Each time they overtly defend his behavior, or implicitly excuse him by failing to object, they bind themselves to him more tightly.
➤ The New York Times editorial board asks Why Is Trump So Afraid of Russia?:
The former C.I.A. director John Brennan pulled no punches on Wednesday when he was asked why President Trump had congratulated his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for his victory in a rigged election, even after Mr. Trump’s national security staff warned him not to.
“I think he’s afraid of the president of Russia,” Mr. Brennan said, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program, of the phone call on Tuesday between the two presidents. “The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump and may have things they could expose.”
The possibility that Mr. Putin could have some hold on the American president has lurked in the background over the past year as Mr. Trump displayed a mystifying affection for the Russian leader and ignored or excused his aggressive behavior and nefarious activities, most important, his interference in the 2016 campaign, a subject of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
➤ So, Has There Ever Been an Actual Case of Someone Being Pelted With Tomatoes During a Performance?:
There will be no renaissance of reason in the Trump administration. Shit, in slavish adherence to Joe’s first law of Trump, is splattering everywhere. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the White House, thousands of Russian-paid GRU agents are manufacturing vast quantities of crazy shit, pumping it up to the West Wing thru a pipe connected to Trump’s ass, where it exits, as he spins, dervish-like, from all other orifices, spackling everyone, and everything, within range.
In the last few days the level of activity in the sub-basement shit-factory has approximated what was going on under the bleachers at Alonzo Stagg Field in Chicago during the final days of the Manhattan Project. Today, like in early July, 1945, we are not far from a big-‘shroom event. Hopefully, I’m just waxing metaphorical, but with the addition of Bolton and Pompeo, I’m not sure that is the case.
Trump is operating under huge stress loads, as his life shreds in front of him. I fully expect him to go nuts and start a war. He has the personnel in place to egg him on, now. He has no other options left. It’s gonna happen.
Consider…Just yesterday:
Trump suffered a three-front bimbo-eruption (H/T to Betsey Wright). Stormy’ s lawyer is all over TV teasing her baring her all on 60 minutes on Sunday. Meanwhile, Karen McDougal spent an hour-and-a-half on CNN tearfully repenting the dozens of hook-ups with Donald and explaining how offended she was to be offered $200 for her services. And…A judge is letting Summer Zervo’s defamation case against Trump proceed. There is a lot of gold being dug, these days.
Trump just snuffed his lead lawyer, Dowd, and replaced him with the dynamic-duo of Joe diGenova and Vickie Toensing, the finest husband-and-wife political comedy team since Carville and Matalin. Joe and Vickie are not much as lawyers, but they are top-shelf when it comes to lying and snarling on TV. It certainly appears that Trump has concluded that he is not going to survive the onslaught of legal problems, so his back-up plan is to take it to the streets. There is no other reason to structure his legal team as he is doing. Smart lawyers, like Ted Olson, want nothing to do with the roiling cauldron of shit that is the white house.
McMaster is gone. He is replaced by John Bolton, a man who has been wrong more often than Bill Kristol and Larry Kudlow combined. The “Walrus of War” is only there for one reason; to facilitate Trump’s final war of diversion. Be very afraid…
It’s coming apart rapidly. Nobody with a shred of intelligence or decency will work for Trump, so he is surrounded by hacks. FOX TV is now running the country. Trump has done one thing supremely well, though, which is to bury the rotting corpse of the once-proud GOP. Yertle and the Wisco-Kid sit flaccidly by and rub their tax-cuts while their party submerges in disgrace. There is still a bit of writhing and a muted death-rattle or two left in the GOP, but even those faint signs of life will be over by next November.
I hope we last that long…
That’s the odd thing about Trump, from a rational person’s perspective: he is coming apart, and each day he descends to depths no rational person would plumb. There’s no fiction-writer in all the world who’d expect a publisher to pick up this plot.
But it’s not a plot, it’s the distorted world in which we find ourselves. Suppose, a few years ago, you’d written what you’ve written today. Who’d believe it? If someone read what I post each morning about our state of affairs, who’d believe it? No one, at least no one with whom either of us would want to talk. That sort of person would be sitting on a park bench, reeking of Mad Dog and talking about his time machine…
But it’s not a plot, and those writing about it – and thankfully for all of us those investigating so much of this as they can – are not concocting stories about time machines.
Trump’s way is unsustainable. The only question is how much damage we face before he meets his political and legal ruin. We’ve three obligations, I think: do what’s possible to mitigate Trump’s damage, lawfully to ruin the political apparatus that now supports him, and rebuild our country on firmer ground after Trump and his ilk meet their political and legal ruin.