Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:35 PM, for 15h 10m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fortieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Joint Review Board meets today at 9 AM.
On this day in 1981, Pres. Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor to become a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. On this day in 1832, Gen. Atkinson leads his men (among them future presidents Zachary Taylor & Abraham Lincoln) to an encampment in Palmyra during the Black Hawk War.
Recommended for reading in full —
Rep. Adam Schiff writes that Putin Aims to Take Down Liberal Democracy. To Put America First, Trump Must Stand Up to Him:
If Trump fails to stand up to Putin and forcefully raise the issue of Russian interference in our elections, the Kremlin will conclude that he is too weak to stand up to them at all. That makes his statement today—that no one really knows who was behind the hacking and dumping of Hillary Clinton’s emails—more than discouraging. Far from putting America first, if he continues to cling to this personal fiction, he will be elevating Russian interests above all others.
On the agenda should also be Russia’s continued destabilization of Ukraine, Russia’s propping up of Bashar al-Assad, and a clear declaration that the U.S. will not turn a blind eye to any potential Russian support of the Taliban or increased trade with North Korea.
There is little evidence, though that Trump plans to confront Putin on any of these serious matters. Instead, he may seek little more than the exchange of pleasantries and the usual claims of a fabulous meeting.
Michael Riley , Jennifer A. Dlouhy, and Bryan Gruley report that Russians Are Suspects in Nuclear Site Hackings, Sources Say:
Hackers working for a foreign government recently breached at least a dozen U.S. power plants, including the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas, according to current and former U.S. officials, sparking concerns the attackers were searching for vulnerabilities in the electrical grid.
The intruders could be positioning themselves to eventually disrupt the nation’s power supply, warned the officials, who noted that a general alert was distributed to utilities a week ago. Adding to those concerns, hackers recently infiltrated an unidentified company that makes control systems for equipment used in the power industry, an attack that officials believe may be related.
The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks. One of those networks belongs to an aging nuclear generating facility known as Wolf Creek — owned by Westar Energy Inc., Great Plains Energy Inc. and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative Inc. — on a lake shore near Burlington, Kansas.
The possibility of a Russia connection is particularly worrisome, former and current officials say, because Russian hackers have previously taken down parts of the electrical grid in Ukraine and appear to be testing increasingly advanced tools to disrupt power supplies.
Pamela Brown, Shimon Prokupecz, and Evan Perez report that Russia steps up spying efforts after election:
Russian spies are ramping up their intelligence-gathering efforts in the US, according to current and former US intelligence officials who say they have noticed an increase since the election.
The officials say they believe one of the biggest US adversaries feels emboldened by the lack of a significant retaliatory response from both the Trump and Obama administrations.
“Russians have maintained an aggressive collection posture in the US, and their success in election meddling has not deterred them,” said a former senior intelligence official familiar with Trump administration efforts….
Since the November election, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies have detected an increase in suspected Russian intelligence officers entering the US under the guise of other business, according to multiple current and former senior US intelligence officials. The Russians are believed to now have nearly 150 suspected intelligence operatives in the US, these sources said. Officials who spoke to CNN say the Russians are replenishing their ranks after the US in December expelled 35 Russian diplomats suspected of spying in retaliation for election-meddling.
“The concerning point with Russia is the volume of people that are coming to the US. They have a lot more intelligence officers in the US” compared to what they have in other countries, one of the former intelligence officials says.
The FBI, which is responsible for counterintelligence efforts in the US, would not comment for the story.
Fueling law enforcement officials’ concern is that the Russians are targeting people in the US who can provide access to classified information, in addition to ongoing efforts to hack the US government for intelligence, according to several of the officials. In some cases, Russian spies have tried to gain employment at places with sensitive information as part of their intelligence-gathering efforts, the sources say.
Peter Beinart describes The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech:
The most shocking sentence in Trump’s speech—perhaps the most shocking sentence in any presidential speech delivered on foreign soil in my lifetime—was his claim that “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” On its face, that’s absurd. Jihadist terrorists can kill people in the West, but unlike Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, they cannot topple even the weakest European government. Jihadists control no great armies. Their ideologies have limited appeal even among the Muslims they target with their propaganda. ISIS has all but lost Mosul and could lose Raqqa later this year.
Trump’s sentence only makes sense as a statement of racial and religious paranoia. The “south” and “east” only threaten the West’s “survival” if you see non-white, non-Christian immigrants as invaders. They only threaten the West’s “survival” if by “West” you mean white, Christian hegemony. A direct line connects Trump’s assault on Barack Obama’s citizenship to his speech in Poland. In Trump and Bannon’s view, America is at its core Western: meaning white and Christian (or at least Judeo-Christian). The implication is that anyone in the United States who is not white and Christian may not truly be American but rather than an imposter and a threat.
Poland is largely ethnically homogeneous. So when a Polish president says that being Western is the essence of the nation’s identity, he’s mostly defining Poland in opposition to the nations to its east and south. America is racially, ethnically, and religious diverse. So when Trump says being Western is the essence of America’s identity, he’s in part defining America in opposition to some of its own people. He’s not speaking as the president of the entire United States. He’s speaking as the head of a tribe.
(It’s worth noting that many are white and Christian and yet opposed to Trump’s tribalism. I’m white, of a Lutheran & Catholic family, and yet Trump and his lumpen band hold no attraction for me. Indeed, it would more appealing to sit among a troop of screenching, scratching, howling baboons than any of Trump’s officials and surrogates. More enlightening, too: one can learn much about the created order from the beauty of nature.)
UW-Madison’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences rooftop camera recorded a recent, and beautiful, thunderstorm: