Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with an even chance of an afternoon shower, and a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:17 PM, for 14h 32m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous, with 93.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1864, Wisconsinites fight for the Union at the Battle of the Crater:
The Battle of the Crater took place outside Petersburg, Virginia. Union troops set off a tremendous mine underneath a stronghold in the Confederate lines. Among the soldiers charging into the resulting crater were Company K, 37th Wisconsin Infantry (composed partly of Menominee Indians) and Wisconsin’s only black unit, Company F, 29th U.S. Colored Troops. Delayed by bungling commanders, they were trapped in the crater, exposed to crossfire from Confederate soldiers, and cut down mercilessly. Read eyewitness accounts in our Civil War digital collection.
Recommended for reading in full —
Tory Newmyer writes Trump’s trade rhetoric does not match reality for farmers:Trump is heralding the trade truce he struck last week with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker as a “breakthrough,” telling an Iowa rally last Thursday that he “just opened up Europe for you farmers.”
Not so, European officials say. “On agriculture, I think we’ve been very clear on that — that agriculture is out of the scope of these discussions,” a European Commission representative said Friday, per the Wall Street Journal.
In fact, the world’s two largest economies are engaging on a pair of agricultural issues. But European moves on both fronts predate last week’s summit. The two sides are continuing ongoing negotiations toward lifting European barriers to high-end American beef. And the Europeans are talking up their intent to buy more American soybeans, although they already needed more of the product and likely won’t make up for orders the Chinese have canceled as part of their trade fight with the Trump administration.
(Emphasis in original.)
Grigor Atanesian reports Voting systems in Wisconsin, a key swing state, can be hacked, security experts warn (“Even machines disconnected from the internet can be breached, demonstrations have shown — but state and local officials say not to worry”):A key swing state, Wisconsin was the scene of Russian measures in 2016 that utilized social media and also probed the websites of government agencies.
Wisconsin and other battleground states including Pennsylvania were targeted by a sophisticated social media campaign, according to a recent University of Wisconsin-Madison study headed by journalism professor Young Mie Kim. This campaign tapped into divisive issues like race, gun control and gay and transgender rights. A Twitter account titled @MilwaukeeVoice and styled as a local news outlet was one of 2,752 now-deactivated Twitter bots and trolls — automated or human online fake personas — connected to Russia. Twitter vows further purges of tens of millions of suspicious accounts.
Besides trying to influence Wisconsin voters through political ads and Twitter, alleged Kremlin-linked operatives also probed the website of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. The websites of Ashland, Bayfield and Washburn in northern Wisconsin were targeted from Internet Protocol (IP) addresses listed in the joint FBI and Department of Homeland Security report on Russian malicious activity. And in July 2016, Russian government operatives attacked the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development website, state officials reported.
Clive Irving remembers the Last Time a President Dismissed the Russian Threat, It Took Churchill to Wake Him Up (“Britain’s greatest war leader came to America to warn us about a despot in Moscow. He was widely attacked for doing so. Sound familiar?”):
E.J. Dionne Jr. describes Russia and the far right’s cozy affair:In a preamble Churchill thanked Truman for traveling “a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting” and then, signaling the seriousness of the moment, he added “it is his wish that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times.”
He made a token gesture to Stalin: “We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world.”
But then, in a speech that is rightly seen as the moral foundation for the Cold War, he said: “From Stetin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I call the Soviet sphere…The communist parties have been raised to preeminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control…”
Inventing Coca-Cola was a Successful Failure:The links among Vladimir Putin, President Trump, and segments of both the Republican Party and the American conservative movement seem bizarre. How can this be, given the Russian president’s KGB pedigree and a Cold War history during which antipathy toward the Soviet Union held the right together?
In truth, there is nothing illogical about the ideological collusion that is shaking our political system. If the old Soviet Union was the linchpin of the Communist International, Putin’s Russia is creating a new Reactionary International built around nationalism, a critique of modernity and a disdain for liberal democracy. Its central mission includes wrecking the Western alliance and the European Union by undermining a shared commitment to democratic values.
Putin is, first and foremost, an opportunist, so he is also happy to lend support to forces on the left when doing so advances his purposes in specific circumstances. But the dominant thrust of Putinism is toward the far right, because a nationalism rooted in Russian traditionalism cements his hold on power.
And the right in both Europe and the United States has responded. Long before Russia’s efforts to elect Trump in the 2016 election became a major public issue, Putin was currying favor with the American gun lobby, Christian conservatives and Republican politicians.