Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 13h 04m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred ninety-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1945, Imperial Japan formally surrenders in ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri.
On this day in 1862, rumors of an Indian attack worry some Wisconsinites: “Manitowoc settlers were awakened to the cry of “Indians are coming.” Messengers on horseback arrived from the Rapids, Branch, Kellnersville, and other nearby communities, announcing that Indians were burning everything in their path, starting what was known as the “Indian Scare of 1862.” Fire and church bells gave warning to frightened residents. Over the next few days, people from the surrounding areas fled to Manitowoc and other city centers. Ox carts were loaded with women and children carrying their most valuable belongings. Men arrived with guns, axes, and pitchforks, anything with which to defend themselves and their community. A company of recruits from the Wisconsin 26th Regiment formed themselves into two scouting units, both of which returned to report that there was no threat of an Indian attack. Even after the excitement had subsided, many frightened farm families could not be persuaded to return home.”
Recommended for reading in full —
The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November.
Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.
Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before….
Jennifer Rubin asks That’s all Trump’s lawyers have?:
The Wall Street Journal reported this week on two memos President Trump’s lawyers prepared for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III:
One memo submitted to Mr. Mueller by the president’s legal team in June laid out the case that Mr. Trump has the inherent authority under the constitution to hire and fire as he sees fit and therefore didn’t obstruct justice when he fired Mr. Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in May, these people said.
Another memo submitted the same month outlined why Mr. Comey would make an unsuitable witness, calling him prone to exaggeration, unreliable in congressional testimony and the source of leaks to the news media, these people said.
As legal arguments, these are pathetic. Taking the last one first, arguing to Comey’s long-time colleague Mueller that Comey is a liar won’t win the day, nor does it pass the laugh test. Comey’s testimony will be lined up against written evidence and other witness testimony and actually may come out looking even more credible as a result. This is the sort of weak assertion one would make on Sean Hannity’s show; it’s not worthy of consideration by Mueller or any other serious prosecutor.
The “he can fire at will” argument is obviously flawed for at least three reasons. The argument is so bad one wonders if the Trump team is not ready for prime time or is simply trying to provide fodder for his cult-like following to support him if he tries to fire Mueller.
Bill Buzenberg catches readers up on All the Trump-Russia News You May Have Missed:
As crises both national and international have set in this month, Trump has been on a tear, from his comments blaming “both sides” for the deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, to his brazen pardon of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio as Hurricane Harvey bore down on Texas. Somewhat lost in the fire and fury (literally) has been a series of consequential developments concerning the multiple ongoing investigations into Team Trump’s ties to and possible collusion with Russia.
Perhaps the biggest of the bunch: On August 27, the Washington Post reported that Trump was actively pursuing a deal to build a “massive” Trump Tower in Moscow while campaigning for the presidency. And the New York Times exposed a series of emails between Trump’s business associate Felix Sater and his lawyer Michael Cohen, in which Sater boasted about how the Moscow deal could help Trump win the White House. “Our boy can become president of the USA,” Sater wrote, “and we can engineer it.”
Here are some of the other Russia investigation-related developments you may have missed in recent weeks: [list follows]….
Ronald Brownstein writes of Why a Republican Pollster Is Losing Faith in Her Party:
“There are still enough good people inside … that I agree with that I am still staying,” Anderson told me recently. “But I am significantly less convinced that I am going to succeed in this effort. [That’s] because at the same moment somebody like me is becoming very disheartened, there are voters who are thinking, ‘This is the Republican Party I have been waiting for.’ If I pack up my toys and go home, there are people in red MAGA hats who would be saying, ‘Don’t let the door hit you on your way out.’”
Anderson’s fear is that in a rapidly diversifying America, Trump is stamping the GOP as a party of white racial backlash—and that too much of the party’s base is comfortable with that. Trump’s morally stunted response to the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month unsettled her. But she was even more unnerved by polls showing that most Republican voters defended his remarks.
“What has really shaken me in recent weeks is the consistency in polling where I see Republican voters excusing really bad things because their leader has excused them,” she told me. “[Massachusetts Governor] Charlie Baker, [UN Ambassador] Nikki Haley, [Illinois Representative] Adam Kinzinger—I want to be in the party with them. But in the last few weeks it has become increasingly clear to me that most Republican voters are not in that camp. They are in the Trump camp.”
The portion of the party coalition willing to tolerate, if not actively embrace, white nationalism “is larger than most mainstream Republicans have ever been willing to grapple with,” she added….
(Well, Trumpism is a white nationalist movement. White nationalism has no future, as it’s both ideologically immoral and fundamentally composed of the worst of America: bigoted, ignorant, autocratic, self-pitying, excuse-making, unproductive. There is no better refutation of the empty conceit of a master race than to review video of Trump’s rabid supporters at one of his rallies.)
Great Big Story shares a story of The Artist Keeping Neon Aglow in the Heart of Texas: