Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:34 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 53m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 20% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1961, TWA was “the first American airline with movies aboard its aircraft when it showed By Love Possessed, starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. in the first-class section of a Boeing 707 flying New York to Los Angeles.” On this day in 1832, General James Henry & Colonel Henry Dodge found “the trail of the British Band and began pursuit of Black Hawk and the Sauk Indians. Before leaving camp, the troops were told to leave behind any items that would slow down the chase. The troops camped that evening at Rock River, 20 miles east of present day Madison. [Some sources place this event on July 18, 1832.]”
Recommended for reading in full —
David A. Graham writes of The Other Putin-Trump Meeting:
When President Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin went for more than two hours, well past the scheduled half-hour, it was a major news event. But it turns out that wasn’t even the end of the conversation between the two men.
Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, first reported the second meeting Tuesday. Other outlets also reported the news, and the White House confirmed it to Reuters. (BuzzFeed journalist Alberto Nardelli had previously reported about a meeting.) Trump reportedly met with the Russian leader for an additional hour of informal chats after a dinner of G20 leaders—though the White House in a statement reported late Tuesday by NBC’s Hallie Jackson called the encounter “brief” and denied it constituted a second meeting. While the first meeting was small—the only attendees were Trump, Putin, the Russian foreign minister, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and one interpreter from each country—this was even smaller: just Trump, Putin, and a Russian interpreter. Trump did not have his own interpreter….
It’s all the more significant because it is the second time in less than two weeks that Trump and those close to him have been less than forthcoming about meetings with Russians. As Trump returned to the country, news broke that his son Donald Trump Jr. had met with a Russian lawyer. Trump Jr. initially claimed the meeting had been to discuss adoptions, but he later released emails showing that he believed he was meeting with a Russian government lawyer offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump Jr. told an intermediary, though he now says it wasn’t: The lawyer didn’t deliver any dirt, he complained. Since then, the public has learned there were at least eight people present, including Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a White House senior adviser, and Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort.
James Kirchick explains How the GOP Became the Party of Putin:
What I never expected was that the Republican Party—which once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Union—would become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putin’s Russia. My message for today’s GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 called—it wants its foreign policy back.
I should not have been surprised. I’ve been following Russia’s cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (“Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative?” he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting “godless communism.”
Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin – a career KGB officer who hates America – have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.
Garry Kasparov writes of Donald’s Pravda: Trump and his apologists spookily echo Vladimir Putin:
There is a clear parallel here to what we have experienced in Russia for the past 17 years under Putin: the intentional conflation of the private interests of the few with the public good. When Putin talks about what’s best for Russia, he always only means what is best for him and his cronies — what keeps them wealthy and in power.
There is now a similar dynamic with Trump, especially where Russia is concerned. His Hamburg meeting with Putin was a great gift to the Russian dictator, who needs prominent photo-ops to reassure his gang back home that he’s still a big boss who can protect their investments abroad.
Meanwhile, the U.S. needs nothing from Russia. No, despite Trump claims to the contrary, we’re not really on the same side in Syria. And U.S. sanctions are locked to Russia’s exit from Crimea, which is not going to happen any time soon.
So why the meeting? It’s a case of “Ask not what Russia can do for America, ask what Putin can do for Trump — and what has he been doing for him already?”
Trump also loves photo ops and feeling like a big man on the international stage, especially with his domestic agenda of health care, tax reform, infrastructure and immigration foundering.
John Dickerson considers All the Presidents’ Dirty Tricks (describing several adminsitations):
Whatever one may think of how Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner should have behaved in accepting the June 2016 meeting, President Trump has updated its relevance to the present. It is now a moral benchmark for the president and his team. Despite the moral and national security reasons to be wary of such a meeting, by the president’s rules of politics it was still a fine thing to do.
NASA has now released the closest-ever images of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot: