Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-seven. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:27 PM, for 14h 51m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 11.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
The City of Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM.
On this day in 1969, Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to walk on the moon.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rosie Gray writes that A Top Rohrabacher Aide Is Ousted After Russia Revelations:
Paul Behrends, a top aide to Representative Dana Rohrabacher, has been ousted from his role as staff director for the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee that Rohrabacher chairs, after stories appeared in the press highlighting his relationships with pro-Russia lobbyists.
“Paul Behrends no longer works at the committee,” a House Foreign Affairs Committee spokesperson said on Wednesday evening.
Behrends accompanied Rohrabacher on a 2016 trip to Moscow in which Rohrabacher said he received anti-Magnitsky Act materials from prosecutors. The Magnitsky Act is a 2012 bill that imposes sanctions on Russian officials associated with the 2009 death in prison of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who had been investigating tax fraud. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian attorney and lobbyist who met with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower last year, reportedly brought up the Magintsky Act during the meeting.
Rohrabacher’s meeting in Moscow was an object of concern for embassy officials, who had warned the delegation about FSB presence in Moscow—warnings Rohrabacher brushed off.
(Behrends and Rohrabacher are at the least fellow travelers with Putinism, and at the wost – and quite possibly – fifth columnists.)
The Washington Post editorial board explains Why Trump’s chat with Putin is not just a chat:
Talk isn’t bad; what’s key is the nature of the talk. To carefully calibrate messages to world leaders, presidents usually rely on an elaborate bureaucratic machine, including the interagency process and the National Security Council staff. Mr. Trump’s dinner chat showed once again his proclivity to act alone, and he undoubtedly created headaches. With no U.S. note-taker or interpreter, the U.S. national security structure was left without a record of the exchange, except for Mr. Trump’s memory. Mr. Putin will have a better record.
But the deeper problem is the epidemic of mistrust Mr. Trump has created about his ties to Russia, which sensationalizes contacts that might otherwise be unremarkable. The doubts began during the campaign with his failure to release his tax returns, which could show the origins of his income, and grew worse when Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. Mr. Trump refused to accept U.S. intelligence community warnings of Russian interference during the election, and his family and his campaign associates have repeatedly been negligent or untruthful about their contacts with Russian officials — most recently, in the accounts of a meeting with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Ms. Clinton. In his first meeting as president with Russia’s foreign minister, Mr. Trump blurted out classified information. It’s reasonable to worry about what he might have told Mr. Putin.
Mike McIntire reports that (former Trump campaign chairman) Manafort Was in Debt to Pro-Russia Interests, Cyprus Records Show:
Financial records filed last year in the secretive tax haven of Cyprus, where Paul J. Manafort kept bank accounts during his years working in Ukraine and investing with a Russian oligarch, indicate that he had been in debt to pro-Russia interests by as much as $17 million before he joined Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign in March 2016.
The money appears to have been owed by shell companies connected to Mr. Manafort’s business activities in Ukraine when he worked as a consultant to the pro-Russia Party of Regions. The Cyprus documents obtained by The New York Times include audited financial statements for the companies, which were part of a complex web of more than a dozen entities that transferred millions of dollars among them in the form of loans, payments and fees.
(Emphasis added.)
Political scientist Brendan Nyhan explains Why Trump’s Base of Support May Be Smaller Than It Seems:
A new working paper by the Emory University political scientists B. Pablo Montagnes, Zachary Peskowitz and Joshua McCrain argues that people who identify as Republican may stop doing so if they disapprove of Trump, creating a false stability in his partisan approval numbers even as the absolute number of people approving him shrinks. Gallup data supports this idea, showing a four-percentage-point decline in G.O.P. identification since the 2016 election that is mirrored in other polling, though to a lesser extent….
When the Emory political scientists use the Gallup data to account for Republicans who have stopped identifying with the party since the election, they find that partisan support for Trump could be substantially lower than it appears. The lower bound is often from 70 percent to 80 percent instead of the 80-to-90 range that Gallup polls typically show. Given the decline in Republican identification since last November, they find, “the lower bound on Trump’s partisan approval rate is much lower” than partisan approval at a comparable point in the Obama presidency and is lower than it was even during Mr. Obama’s second term.
(A copy of the full working paper is online. Whether Trump has many supporters or few, the principal objects of opposition will always be Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders. I’ve no doubt that Trump’s support is waning, and in the way that the working paper suggests, but in any event, when Trump meets political ruin – as he will – so will his movement.)
Tech Insider reports there’s a new theory that The T. Rex couldn’t actually sprint like it does in ‘Jurassic Park’: