Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:20 PM, for 14h 39m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 25.7% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the nine hundred ninety-first day.
On this day in 1974, the House Judiciary Committee votes 27–11 to recommend its first article of impeachment against Pres. Nixon (for obstruction of justice).
Recommended for reading in full:
Dana Milbank writes Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset:
Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset.
This doesn’t mean he’s a spy, but neither is it a flip accusation. Russia attacked our country in 2016. It is attacking us today. Its attacks will intensify in 2020. Yet each time we try to raise our defenses to repel the attack, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, blocks us from defending ourselves.
Let’s call this what it is: unpatriotic. The Kentucky Republican is, arguably more than any other American, doing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bidding.
Robert Mueller sat before Congress this week warning that the Russia threat “deserves the attention of every American.” He said “the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in our election is among the most serious” challenges to American democracy he has ever seen. “They are doing it as we sit here, and they expect to do it during the next campaign,” he warned, adding that “much more needs to be done in order to protect against these intrusions, not just by the Russians but others as well.”
The next day, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the minority leader, asked for the Senate to pass the Securing America’s Federal Elections Act, already passed by the House, that would direct $600 million in election assistance to states and require backup paper ballots.
McConnell himself responded this time, reading from a statement, his chin melting into his chest, his trademark thin smile on his lips. “It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia,” he said. “Therefore, I object.” McConnell also objected to another attempt by Blumenthal to pass his bill.
Pleaded Schumer: “I would suggest to my friend the majority leader: If he doesn’t like this bill, let’s put another bill on the floor and debate it.”
But McConnell has blocked all such attempts….
(To be a Russian agent would place someone in Russia’s employ; to be an asset, as McConnell is, is to be useful and valuable to Russia’s interests even without a direct connection to a foreign intelligence service. McConnell fits the definition of a Russian asset.)