Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see sleet and snow with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:37 PM, for 13h 26m 14s of daytime. The moon is new with .3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1861, Wisconsin receives the call: “On this date Governor Alexander W. Randall received a telegram from Washington requesting one regiment of 780 men to serve the Union for three months in the Civil War. Within a week ten companies, from Kenosha, Beloit, Horicon, Fond du Lac, Madison, and Milwaukee were ready. [Source: The History of Wisconsin, Vol. II by Richard N. Current]”
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Peter Stone and Greg Gordon report Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier:
The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Confirmation of the trip would lend credence to a retired British spy’s report that Cohen strategized there with a powerful Kremlin figure about Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
It would also be one of the most significant developments thus far in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of whether the Trump campaign and the Kremlin worked together to help Trump win the White House. Undercutting Trump’s repeated pronouncements that “there is no evidence of collusion,” it also could ratchet up the stakes if the president tries, as he has intimated he might for months, to order Mueller’s firing.
➤ Norman Eisen and Richard Painter contend Donald Trump’s 5 reasons to fire Rod Rosenstein reveal true aim: Obstructing Robert Mueller:
President Trump reportedly is considering firing Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed special counsel Robert Mueller and supervises his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. To prepare the way, Trump has by our count floated five rationales internally and externally for doing so. The briefest scrutiny of these purported justifications shows that they are baseless, and makes apparent the president’s true motivation: to obstruct the investigation that Rosenstein oversees.
Trump has reportedly complained about Rosenstein being a Democrat and coming from heavily Democratic Baltimore. In fact, Rosenstein is a decades-long registered Republican who worked as a federal prosecutor in Baltimore. That was part of a long career at the Justice Department devoted to the rule of law under both Republican and Democratic presidents. He was selected from a pool of Republican lawyers and nominated by Trump for his position as deputy attorney general. [Attys. Eisen and Painter then consider remaining five of Trump’s thin bases.]
➤ Nicole Lewis and Maurice Chammah write Seven Years Behind Bars for Two Joints — And Now He’s Free (“Bernard Noble, whose case became a symbol of harsh drug laws, walks out of a Louisiana prison”):
Bernard Noble, who became a national symbol of harsh drug laws after he was sentenced to 13 years of hard labor for carrying about two joints worth of marijuana, was released from prison early Thursday morning.
Noble, 51, was freed on parole after his lawyer and a team of advocates — including billionaire New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb — spent years pressing courts, governors and lawmakers to reverse the long sentence. He ultimately served seven years in prison.
“I really felt special, seeing my family and everyone waiting for me,” Noble told The Marshall Project by phone after he walked out of Bossier Parish Medium Security Prison, where his mother, sister, and other family members awaited his release.
“I cried a lot of times in prison silently because you can’t do it out loud in a treacherous place like that. But I always said, ‘one day it’s gonna get better,’ ” he said.
His freedom marked the end of a convoluted and high-profile legal journey that began in 2010, when he was arrested while biking in New Orleans, where he was visiting family. Police said they found about three grams of marijuana in his possession.
(One shouldn’t have to smoke anything – I don’t – to grasp that these sentences are disgracefully high. Yet for it all, there’s a lumpen lobby that screams for sentences like this, as long as they are visited on a different demographic.)
➤ Judy Newman reports State of Wisconsin Investment Board employees to take home $11.6 million in bonuses:
Employees of the State of Wisconsin Investment Board — the agency that manages retirement funds for more than 600,000 current and former public workers — will share in bonuses totaling $11.6 million, the agency said Friday.
It is the fourth-highest bonus pot in the past five years.
The incentive payments, approved by the SWIB board of trustees, are based on the five-year investment earnings that exceed general market returns. That amounted to $759 million for the past five years ending in December.
…
Of this year’s $11.6 million pot, two of SWIB’s high-level employees will each get bonuses topping $500,000.
(These bonuses aren’t high for private work of a similar kind – the obvious concern is that this isn’t private work of a similar kind; these funds could be managed well by those no longer seeking career earnings, as a true public service.)
➤ Take a Tour of the Moon in 4K (courtesy of NASA):
As predicted for some time, Trump is down to the nubs, and is waging wars of distraction. The funny thing about his little exercise in sand-fluffing and dog-wagging in Syria is that nobody noticed. What got the most attention was his appropriation of Dubya’s “Mission Accomplished” banner in a self-wanking tweet. It is worthy of note that W put that banner up 15 years ago announcing the end of the war that we are still in, and have pissed in excess of a trillion bux down the rat-hole fighting. Bill Maher aptly named the distraction as “Operation Desert Stormy”.
Trump might be excused for not knowing much about history, as he is busy dealing with lots of shit-storms at once. Mike Cohen is about to do for him what Roy Cohn did for one of Wisco-World’s more famous sons, Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. If Mueller actually has evidence that Cohen showed up in Prague to pay off hackers for throwing the election to Trump, the party is over. Whatever more gets disclosed, it is clear that Cohen is Marianas-Trench deep in shit. He can flip on Trump, or die in jail. Those are stark choices…
Isn’t it interesting how Steele seems to have sussed all this out a year ago with remarkable accuracy?
Meanwhile, Stormy, with Avanetti, will be watching from the courthouse bleachers, sipping beers and eating hot-dogs, while Cohen gets fileted in court tomorrow. Cohen has more than met his match in Avanetti.
There are so many ways that Trump’s unfit, each disqualifying on its own, that it’s hard to keep track: as bigoted authoritarian, ignoramus, Russian catspaw, organized crime figure, as character defective, grifter. His use of Michael Cohen, though, is notable, and combines more than one deficiency. Adam Davidson contends that one can see in this Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency. Of Davidson’s assessment of Trump’s demise, I’m reminded of the expression from his mouth to God’s ears.
Many of these separate objections to Trumpism seem to be coming together, and perhaps that shouldn’t surprise: the greatest weakness of Trumpism is that it relies on Trump, after all. But then someone of Trump’s low ability and lower character would, himself, rely on a dense misfit like Cohen, wouldn’t he?
Fitting, and good for the rest of us: what hinders Trumpism benefits America.