Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is at 5:16 AM and sunset at 8:37 PM, for 15h 20m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 9.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twenty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Fire Department will hold a business meeting at 6 PM.
On this day in 1788, New Hampshire becomes the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, thereby establishing it (dates for the first meeting of the new federal government were set later). On this day in 1944, German POWs assist with Janesville’s harvest: “Camp Janesville was established when 250 German POWs arrived in Rock County to help pick and can peas, tomatoes, and sweet corn. The camp was a small town of tents that housed guards and the POWs, many of them from the defeated Afrika Corps led by the “Desert Fox”, Field Marshall Rommel. Another 150 prisoners were assigned to a similar camp in Jefferson. The German POWs were primarily in their mid-20s. They were eventually transferred to an undisclosed camp on September 25, 1944. [Source: Stalag Wisconsin by Betty Cowley, p. 165].”
Recommended for reading in full —
David Frum correctly observes It’s Trump’s Party Now (“The Republican triumph in an affluent, educated Georgia congressional district showed GOP voters standing by their president):
It’s impossible to read the result in Georgia’s Sixth—the most expensive congressional race in U.S. history—as anything but a huge Republican victory. Notwithstanding national polls suggesting about 39 percent approval for the Republican president, a more-or-less standard-issue Republican candidate won by about 4 percentage points in exactly the kind of affluent, educated district supposedly most at risk in the Trump era. Whatever distaste they may inwardly feel for President Trump’s antics, when it comes time to vote, the Republicans of Cobb, DeKalb, and Fulton Counties did not express it at the ballot box.
But a big win is not the same thing as good news. The special elections of May and June 2017 offered Republicans a last chance for a course correction before the 2018 election cycle starts in earnest. A loss in Georgia would have sent a message of caution. The victory discredits that argument, and empowers those who want Trumpism without restraint, starting with the president himself.
Timothy O’Brien writes of Trump, Russia and a Shadowy Business Partnership (“An insider describes the Bayrock Group, its links to the Trump family and its mysterious access to funds. It isn’t pretty”):
In May, Trump told NBC that he has no property or investments in Russia. “I am not involved in Russia,” he said.
But that doesn’t address national security and other problems that might arise for the president if Russia is involved in Trump, either through potentially compromising U.S. business relationships or through funds that flowed into his wallet years ago. In that context, a troubling history of Trump’s dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just two floors beneath the president’s own office in Trump Tower.
Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and condominium in Manhattan.
During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects in the U.S. to which the president once lent his name in exchange for handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London. Trump testified under oath in a 2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing there.
Tim Cullen and Dale Schultz write of their careers that We led the Wisconsin Senate. Now we’re fighting gerrymandering in our state:
Nothing epitomizes the problem more than the extreme partisan gerrymandering that has taken hold in Wisconsin and other states, where politicians and special interests have rigged the system, manipulating voting maps to keep their own political party in power with little regard for the will of the voters.
That’s why we are supporting the lawsuit from Wisconsin the Supreme Court just agreed to hear that would limit gerrymandering no matter which party does it. In our view — as the old saying goes — absolute power corrupts absolutely. Fighting gerrymandering is about fighting abuse of power, no matter who does it. If our side wins the lawsuit, we will establish a principle that reins in not only Republicans in states such as Wisconsin and North Carolina but also Democrats in states such as Maryland and Illinois.
Ben Lindbergh describes The Brilliance of the Brewers’ Unconventional Rebuild (“Instead of following the Astros’ and Cubs’ blueprint, Milwaukee’s trying to get back to the top without ever bottoming out. Here’s how”):
…the Brewers are still narrowly fending off the defending-champion Cubs, who were expected to have one of the easiest paths to the playoffs but have thus far peaked at four games over .500 en route to a 35–34 current record. The Brewers, who are lucky to have outplayed their more middling underlying stats for this long, almost certainly can’t maintain their 86-win pace or keep the Cubs at bay for three and a half more months, but neither is necessary for their season to be deemed a success. Whereas other recent rebuilds have taught us that the most direct route to contention runs through years of terrible teams, the Brewers are sailing right through a needle that the Astros and Cubs never attempted to thread. They’re trying to get back to the top without ever bottoming out, and thus far they’ve done it not just by building from within, but by casting an extra-wide net for nontraditional talent plucked from rival organizations and distant leagues.
Adult elephants spring into action to save a calf: