Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:30 PM, for 15h 14m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred tenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
The Whitewater Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1944, Allied forces storm the beaches of Normandy, France, in the D-Day liberation of Europe.
Ben Collins reports that Pro-Trump Canadians Throw ‘Million Deplorable March.’ Right-Wing Media Counts 5,000. Cops Say Hundreds:
Although it was dubbed the “Million Canadian Deplorables March,” both The Daily Caller and Breitbart claimed about 5,000 people showed up in Ottawa to protest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and to show favor for Donald Trump, whom protest organizer Mike Waine called a “smart man.”
[Ottawa Police Constable Marc] Soucy said that, while the Ottawa Police doesn’t officially provide crowd estimates, there were not 5,000 people at the rally’s “gathering point” in Ottawa’s Confederation Park.“There were less than 100 [at the park],” he said.
A spokesperson for the Parliamentary Protection Services estimated to Canada’s iPolicy, who first reported on the discrepancy, that 300 to 400 people in total went to the rally in at the Canadian capital.
Kimberly Dozier reports that the White House Looked at Dropping Russia Sanctions—Even After Firing Michael Flynn:
The White House explored unilaterally easing sanctions on Russia’s oil industry as recently as late March, arguing that decreased Russian oil production could harm the American economy, according to former U.S. officials.
State Department officials argued successfully that easing those sanctions would actually hurt the U.S. energy sector, according to those former officials and email exchanges reviewed by The Daily Beast.
In one email exchange, a State Department official feels the need to explain that lowering punitive sanctions on the Russian oil industry would be rewarding Moscow—without getting anything from the Kremlin in return.
“Russia continues to occupy Ukraine including Crimea—conditions that led to the sanctions have not changed,” the official wrote.
Michelle Ye Hee Lee lists Every Russia story Trump said was a hoax by Democrats: A timeline:
There have been twists and turns over the past year in the saga of President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia and Russian influence on the 2016 presidential election to help Trump win.
Yet one thing has remained consistent: Trump blames the Democrats, not the Russians.
Trump says the latest reports of ties between his staff and Russians are the Democrats’ attempt to undermine his presidency. But a look at his comments over the past year shows Trump used the same explanation for every new development in stories involving Russia, the election and his staff.
In this timeline, we took a look at all the developments in the Trump-Russia controversy that Trump has blamed on Democrats. We will update the timeline as necessary….[timeline follows]
Charles Pierce asks Why Would Russia Stop at ‘Influence’ When They Could Hack Directly?:
So far, the only evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 election has indicated that the hacking and ratfcking was one step removed from the actual balloting. The theft and release of e-mails from the Democratic National Committee, and the spreading of invented news and slander over social media platforms, were both aimed at influencing people to vote a certain way. If it could be proven that the Russians actively hacked into the election process itself—which people have been warning for years is a genuine vulnerability—that would pretty much set the world on fire.
Now, though, The Intercept has a report that indicates that the National Security Agency considered this sort of sabotage very seriously in the days before the election.
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light. While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A U.S. intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.
This is authentically terrifying and, at the same time, it seems horribly inevitable. If you could ratfck the election on a second-hand basis, why wouldn’t you try simply to ratfck the results as well?
Today I Found Out recounts The Story Behind the Morton’s Salt Girl: