Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:11 AM and sunset 7:43 PM, for 13h 32m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union establish the Molotov–Ribbentrop non-agression pact. On this day in 1864, the 8th Wisconsin Infantry takes part in an expedition from LaGrange, Tennessee to Oxford, Mississippi, including a skirmish that broke out in Abbeville, Mississippi.
Recommended for reading in full —
Casey Michel observes that America’s neo-Nazis don’t look to Germany for inspiration. They look to Russia:
….It doesn’t take much to gather white nationalists’ affections for modern Moscow — a regime whose model they want to bring to bear in the United States. For David Duke, who has seen his books sold in the Russian Duma, Moscow remains the “key to white survival.” For Richard Spencer, a founding member of the alt-right’s rogues’ gallery — and someone married to the translator of Alexander Dugin, Russia’s illiberal polemicist extraordinaire — the Kremlin stands as the “most powerful white power in the world.” For Matthew Heimbach, who has said he would like to see the United States fracture on ethnic lines, Vladimir Putin has transformed into the “leader of the free world.”
Ignore the multi-confessional, multiethnic nature of the Russian state. Ignore the fact that Moscow maintains the largest mosque in Europe, or that Putin’s Russia contains one of the largest swaths of immigrantsoutside of the United States. These alt-right actors have proved to be more than capable of disregarding these base realities. For the white supremacists who brought bloodshed to Charlottesville, Russia remains the last, best hope for the world they would wish in Washington.
And Russia has proved to be only too willing to cater to these groups. While Moscow’s relations with neo-fascist contingents across Europe — in France, in Hungary — are well-known, less has been said about its extensive efforts to cultivate like-minded actors in the United States…..
Jennifer Rubin explains Why Paul Ryan, defender of the indefensible, should just stop talking:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), among all elected Republicans, may be faring the worst during the Trump era. By defending, rationalizing, excusing and ignoring President Trump’s egregious behavior and attack on democratic norms, Ryan has gone from respected wonk to disgraced toady. At a CNN town hall on Monday night, he demonstrated why he would do better to say as little as possible.
Asked a reasonable question about a timeline for Afghanistan, he answered with double talk. “And that is why I think it’s important that we don’t telegraph — I think that was a strategic mistake the last president made, that we shouldn’t telegraph our timetable when we’re leaving so that we can actually make it conditions-based, which is what is the purpose of being there. … So I think it’s very important that we not do that. But at the same time, like the president said, no blank check. You’ve got to make sure that we prosecute this to the end so that we can bring reconciliation.” So there is no timeline, but no blank check and no idea when this will end — not to mention no idea what “reconciliation” is or what happens if this is impossible. One wonders why Ryan even agreed to do this town hall, since he has literally nothing to offer good-faith questioners.
Things went from bad to worse when Charlottesville came up. Asked to comment on Trump’s remarks, he blathered on for some time decrying racism, white nationalism and hate but never condemning the president’s comments. The best he could come up with was to praise Trump’s scripted remarks on Monday, Aug. 14, and then say this about his off-the-cuff comments: “I think he made comments that were much more morally ambiguous, much more confusing. And I do think he could have done better. I think he needed to do better.” He went on to say, “So I do believe that he messed up in his comments on Tuesday, when it — it — it sounded like a moral equivocation, or at the very least moral ambiguity, when we need extreme moral clarity.” When Ryan says Trump “messed up,” he suggests falsely that this was a political faux pas, a poorly phrased comment. No, Mr. Speaker, what he said was morally abhorrent, a none-too-subtle wink to white nationalists. Trump says these things when freed from ascript because that is what he really thinks. Ryan seems incapable of both disagreeing with Trump and holding him to account….
Sohrab Ahmari ponders The Self-Degradations of Jerry Falwell, Jr. (“Trump corrupts”):
How far–how low–do religious leaders end up going when they decide that, in public life, the end justifies any means? Consider the case of Jerry Falwell, Jr. For the Liberty University president, the end was the advancement of social conservatism. The means: Donald Trump….
It didn’t have to be like this for Falwell. One of the great blessings of a faith in a loving, personal God is that it liberates the faithful from the populist leaders and impulses of the moment. As Russell Moore of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention noted in his contribution to National Review’s “Against Trump” issue, “Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy … in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of ‘winning’ for the masses. Social and religious conservatives have always seen this tendency as decadent and deviant.”
Moore might have added self-degrading.
Abha Bhattarai reports that ‘Not one drop’ of Poland Spring bottled water is from a spring, lawsuit claims:
Poland Spring, the country’s best-selling bottled water, is “a colossal fraud,” according to a class-action lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed last week in Connecticut, alleges that instead of spring water, parent company Nestle Water North America has been selling billions of gallons of groundwater to its customers.
“Not one drop of Poland Spring Water emanates from a water source that complies with the Food and Drug Administration definition of ‘spring water,’” the lawsuit states.
And, it goes on: “the famous Poland Spring in Poland Spring, Maine, which defendant’s labels claim is a source of Poland Spring Water, ran dry nearly 50 years ago”….
Here’s How Deep Sea Creatures Emit Their Own Light: