Good morning.
A new month begins for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:20 AM and sunset 8:37 PM, for 15h 16m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1863, the Battle of Gettysburg begins:
After his success at Chancellorsville in Virginia in May 1863, Lee led his army through the Shenandoah Valley to begin his second invasion of the North—the Gettysburg Campaign. With his army in high spirits, Lee intended to shift the focus of the summer campaign from war-ravaged northern Virginia and hoped to influence Northern politicians to give up their prosecution of the war by penetrating as far as Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, or even Philadelphia. Prodded by PresidentAbraham Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker moved his army in pursuit, but was relieved of command just three days before the battle and replaced by Meade.
Elements of the two armies initially collided at Gettysburg on July 1, 1863, as Lee urgently concentrated his forces there, his objective being to engage the Union army and destroy it. Low ridges to the northwest of town were defended initially by a Union cavalry division under Brig. Gen. John Buford, and soon reinforced with two corps of Union infantry. However, two large Confederate corps assaulted them from the northwest and north, collapsing the hastily developed Union lines, sending the defenders retreating through the streets of the town to the hills just to the south.[14]
Recommended for reading in full —
Two days ago, I posted a story from Dan Friedman describing how, as a matter of law, collusion with Russia could be a crime: Sorry, Fox News: Legal Experts Say Trump Collusion With Russia Could Be a Crime. Yesterday, I posted Shane Harris’s of the Wall Street Journal’s story that GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn. Another story from Harris and a post from Matt Tait now advance one’s understanding of possible election-related collusion with Russia.
Sean Harris follows up with GOP Activist Who Sought Clinton Emails Cited Trump Campaign Officials:
WASHINGTON—A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort.
The activist, Peter W. Smith, named the officials in a section of the document marked “Trump Campaign.” The document was dated Sept. 7, 2016. That was around the time Mr. Smith said he started his search for 33,000 emails Mrs. Clinton deleted from the private server she used for official business while secretary of state. She said the deleted emails concerned personal matters. She turned over tens of thousands of other emails to the State Department.
As reported Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Smith and people he recruited to his effort theorized the deleted emails might have been stolen by hackers and might contain matters that were politically damaging. He and his associates said they were in touch with several groups of hackers, including two from Russia they suspected were tied to the Moscow government, in a bid to find any stolen emails and potentially hurt Mrs. Clinton’s prospects.
Matt Tait describes The Time I Got Recruited to Collude with the Russians:
I read the Wall Street Journal’s article yesterday on attempts by a GOP operative to recover missing Hillary Clinton emails with more than usual interest. I was involved in the events that reporter Shane Harris described, and I was an unnamed source for the initial story. What’s more, I was named in, and provided the documents to Harris that formed the basis of, this evening’s follow-up story, which reported that “A longtime Republican activist who led an operation hoping to obtain Hillary Clinton emails from hackers listed senior members of the Trump campaign, including some who now serve as top aides in the White House, in a recruitment document for his effort”….
Over the course of our conversations, one thing struck me as particularly disturbing. Smith [the GOP operative] and I talked several times about the DNC hack, and I expressed my view that the hack had likely been orchestrated by Russia and that the Kremlin was using the stolen documents as part of an influence campaign against the United States. I explained that if someone had contacted him via the “Dark Web” with Clinton’s personal emails, he should take very seriously the possibility that this may have been part of a wider Russian campaign against the United States. And I said he need not take my word for it, pointing to a number of occasions where US officials had made it clear that this was the view of the U.S. intelligence community as well.
Smith, however, didn’t seem to care. From his perspective it didn’t matter who had taken the emails, or their motives for doing so. He never expressed to me any discomfort with the possibility that the emails he was seeking were potentially from a Russian front, a likelihood he was happy to acknowledge. If they were genuine, they would hurt Clinton’s chances, and therefore help Trump.
Peter Beinart contends that Trump’s Grudges Are His Agenda:
On policy, Trump is inattentive and inconsistent. Where he’s attentive and consistent is in his personal attacks on his adversaries. Trump’s presidency will have vast and frightening policy implications, most which he doesn’t understand. But Trump’s primary goal as president does not appear to be enacting a set of policies; his behavior suggests that his real goal is feeding his ego and vanquishing his enemies. He’s only truly interested in his presidency’s impact on himself. Calling Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky a diversion made sense because Clinton was genuinely committed to certain policy goals, which he undermined by his personal recklessness. With Trump, personal recklessness is all there is.
That’s why Trump will launch attacks like the one he launched against Mika Brzezinski for as long as he’s president, and likely after that. Saying he attacks people viciously because he lacks impulse control is like saying a professional boxer lacks impulse control because he punches people in the ring. For Trump, this is the true purpose of politics, if not life itself.
Jack Shafer writes of Pravda on the Checkout Line:
All the hallmarks of classic propaganda appear in the newly politicized tabloids. First, there is the pure volume of the malicious bunk they churn out. The tabs construct wild story after wild story that “entertains, confuses, and overwhelms the audience,” as one recent report described modern Russian propaganda technique. Like the Enquirer, propagandists are rarely content to push a single fabrication. The greater the number, the greater likelihood one will take root. The Enquirer’s harping on Clinton’s health is a good example. Had she suffered from half of the conditions and ailments the Enquirer had claimed, she would have been in intensive care instead of on the campaign trail. But classic propaganda makes little attempt to be consistent with observable facts, relying instead on volume and insistence to overwhelm its subjects and on their willingness to believe what’s spread.
Like propagandists, tabs make up bizarre yet plausible stuff faster than the fact-checkers can knock it down—assuming that the fact-checkers care about tracking tabloid outrageousness in the first place. In a Rand Corporation study of Russian propaganda published last year, Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews write about the “rapid, continuous and repetitive” quality of the propaganda, which is a good descriptor of the kinds of bogus campaign stories the Enquirer and Globe published. Effective propaganda, they tell us, drowns out other messages, and repeated exposure increases the acceptance among the receptive over time.
Kif Leswing describes the upcoming iOS 11 in I’ve been using the new iOS on my iPhone — here’s what I think: