Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will see an occasional thunderstorm with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 45m 53s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the nine hundred twenty-first day.
On this day in 1980, the Mount St. Helens volcano in Skamania County, Washington erupts.
Recommended for reading in full:
Eliza Newlin Carney writes Republicans Abandon Election Security:
Russian attacks on the U.S. election infrastructure in 2016 were even more serious than reported at the time, recent disclosures show, and intelligence officials say they are bracing for more aggressive attacks from a wider array of foreign adversaries in 2020.
Yet instead of moving to shore up the nation’s vulnerable voting machines and databases, the Trump administration is sabotaging efforts to enhance election security at every turn. Trump’s determination to portray Russian interference as a hoax has made it taboo for members of his own administration to even talk about foreign meddling, and has derailed the leading bipartisan election security bill on Capitol Hill.
To make matters worse, Republicans have signaled that they don’t even plan to hold a single hearing on election security legislation—despite a growing list of bills introduced in recent weeks to block foreign interference on multiple fronts, many of them bipartisan. The reason? It seems that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in such a fit of pique over House Democrats’ approval of sweeping democracy legislation that he’s unwilling to discuss election legislation of any kind.
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Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report on Russian interference disclosed for the first time that Russian hackers accessed election information from “at least one” Florida county—we now know it was two—in 2016. Mueller also disclosed that Russian hackers infiltrated and installed malware on the network of a U.S. vendor that manufactures voter registration software.
Jackson Diehl explains The real reason Venezuela’s Maduro survives: Dirty money:
When asked to explain why their efforts to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have fallen short, Trump administration officials typically cite the sinister influence of Cuba and Russia, which they say has stiffened the regime’s resistance. What they don’t speak about so much is a possibly more important factor: the Cartel of the Suns.
That colorful term refers to the drug-trafficking network that each year flies hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine from Venezuelan airfields to Central America and the Caribbean for eventual distribution in the United States and Europe — and that includes some of the most senior officials in the Maduro regime. These men are not clinging to power because they are true believers in socialism, or because of their fealty to Vladimir Putin and Raúl Castro. They hang on because, in spite of Venezuela’s economic implosion, they are still reaping millions — and they are likely to find themselves imprisoned in Venezuela or the United States if they walk away.
Watch Jeff Bezos Reveal Blue Origin’s Detailed Plan For Colonizing Space: