Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:33 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 14h 55m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 37% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board agenda lists a meeting time of 5:30 PM today.
On this day in 1865, four Wisconsin regiments muster out: “The 3rd and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st and 6th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries mustered out.”
Recommended for reading in full —
As is his habit, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, Trump now proclaims his summit with Putin a great success:So many people at the higher ends of intelligence loved my press conference performance in Helsinki. Putin and I discussed many important subjects at our earlier meeting. We got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match. Big results will come!So many people at the higher ends of intelligence loved my press conference performance in Helsinki. Putin and I discussed many important subjects at our earlier meeting. We got along well which truly bothered many haters who wanted to see a boxing match. Big results will come!
(Many of Trump’s remarks have this same childish character, with their habitual mixture of weak thinking, evident insecurity, and stunted expression. The ‘higher ends of intelligence,’ however odd, is an expression Trump uses to awe the ignorant or slow-witted into believing that somewhere, someplace, there are supposedly clever people who support Trump’s approach, and so others should fall in line.)
Lucian Kim reports ‘Better Than Super’: Russia Reacts To Trump-Putin Summit In Helsinki:Julia Ioffe contends Now We All Know What Putin Has on Trump:Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, a master of diplomatic verbosity and sardonic barbs, summed up the results of the Helsinki summit in just three exuberant words: “better than super.”
After four years of getting short shrift by his American counterparts, Russian President Vladimir Putin was standing side by side with President Trump, who lavished him with the words of praise, respect and awe normally only heard on Russian state television.
When Putin militarily intervened in Ukraine in 2014, President Barack Obama called Russia a “regional power” that threatened its neighbors out of weakness, not strength. Russia’s annexation of Crimea set off a precipitous decline in relations with the United States. When he took office, Trump could not reverse the trend because of accusations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 election.
And then, without any change in Kremlin policy, Trump agreed to sit down one-on-one with Putin.
It’s hard to know what to say after a day—a week—like the one we’ve just experienced. On one hand, none of it should’ve come as a surprise. The full frontal assault on our closest allies in the EU and NATO, like the assault on the free press and the pointless flattery of Vladimir Putin, stretch back two years to the 2016 campaign. Donald Trump has spent this past week doing exactly what he said he would do before his election, and doubling down on the denials that anything but his own genius helped him win that election. And yet, no matter how many times we’ve heard “NO COLLUSION!,” there’s something about watching it unfold in real time that stuns in a way that—like catching a cheating partner after months of suspicion or seeing a loved one die after a terminal illness—no amount of intellectual knowing, understanding, or expecting can prepare you for.
After Trump and Putin met in Helsinki, many pundits and politicians struggled to understand what it is they saw, to rationalize it, to explain it away, to speculate on what kinds of kompromat the Russians could have on Trump, when the answer—like infidelity or death—was staring them, us, in the face. Yes, Putin has something on Trump: He helped him win. That’s the kompromat.
Facing the press after his meeting with Trump, Putin admitted—openly, arrogantly—that yes, he had wanted Trump to win in 2016. But we had known that as early as…2016. His state-run media didn’t do much to hide their boss’s preference: anyone but Hillary Clinton. I remember constantly explaining that summer why Putin preferred Trump to Clinton. Through the spring of 2016, Kremlin TV was clear that it wasn’t that Putin wanted Trump to win, it was that he wanted Clinton to lose. The propaganda machine—and, as we now know, the covert influence machine—got behind Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Jill Stein—anyone who wasn’t Clinton.
(There’s likely more Putin has on Trump, but Ioffe’s core claim is right: Putin helped elect Trump, and that alone is a powerful lever.)
Anton Troianovski contends Putin got his summit. Now he needs results:Here’s Why Stradivarius violins are worth millions:For the Kremlin, the summit was only the beginning.
Russian commentators and politicians declared the meeting here between Presidents Trump and Vladimir Putin a triumph, concluding that Trump was finally serious about fulfilling his campaign promise to improve relations with Moscow.
“It is here in Helsinki where the first step toward a better future was made,” government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta proclaimed.
Now, Russian officials are waiting to see whether Trump’s words will translate into action or fall flat in the face of a U.S. establishment that they view as determined to reverse the thaw.
Andrei Klimov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said in an interview Tuesday that he expected senior U.S. and Russian officials to meet repeatedly in the next six months and hammer out a “road map” toward resolving contentious issues and deepening cooperation.
I’ve been wondering when the Russian thing was going to get local. WI was clearly a state that Trump had to win, so the idea that we were not targeted by the Russians has always seemed improbable. NBC reported last February that WI was a state that the Russians had “compromised”. There has been radio silence since then about just what was compromised and what were the effects of said compromise.
There were some anomalous results in NE and West Central WI in 2016, but they have yet to be tied to anything internationally nefarious, and could just be the result of the rather effective voter suppression activities of the Republican party over the last 10 years. The decline in turnout in heavily black Milwaukee County is likely the result of that aggressive voter suppression.
The role of local politicians in the Russian affair is going to be a lot clearer when Mueller drops the domestic indictments. There are a number of Wisco-World Republicans well within shit-splatter range of Trump. Reince Priebus ran the RNC, as well as Trump’s White House. Whaddya suppose he knows about Trump/Russian relations? The Wisco Kid was the chair of the RNC convention, Speaker of the House, and is a prime protector of Trump. He is limping off to “spend time with his family”. Why do you think he chose to give up all that power to do so?
The busting of the red-headed Russian spy gave us a few more hints. She was buzzing around Walker like a fly homing in on a pile of fresh shit. She was at his campaign launch, and was photographed apparently sugaring Walker with some sort of bling at a NRA convention. She also set up Sheriff David “Cowboy” Clarke with a $40,000 trip to Russia. Walker took $12,500 from an NRA PAC, and $1.5M to his “Unintimidated” PAC was from a pro-Putin Ukrainian businessman, now a US citizen. Walker is claiming metaphysical purity. We should know soon if that is the case.
Walker: in more than one way, a precursor of Trumpism. Not overtly vulgar like Trump, but with similar instincts: a willingness to divide by geography and (far worse) by ethnicity and race, to suppress the vote of minorities, to interfere in the marketplace, to redistribute spending rather than restrain it, to redistribute it to his corporate donor cronies, a dislike and perhaps envy of formal education and anyone well read, with a boundless ambition unmatched by true ability.
Yes, it’s no surprise that such a press-cosseted crony capitalist would be attractive to Russia, and (as part of her duty to the Motherland) a twenty-something operative would exhibit at least a political attraction to Walker. (What is it about these scheming, crony capitalists that their weak understanding of economics is matched only by their shallow grasp of true beauty? In both cases, they settle cheaply.)
Time, really, to collect some articles on Walker’s, and other locals’, roles in all this – we’ve not heard the last of it.