Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of clouds and sun with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM, for 11h 56m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred eighty-seventh day.
On this day in 1960, the first Kennedy-Nixon debate takes place.
Recommended for reading in full — Evers considers tax cuts for needy families, Walker’s former transportation secretary escalates criticism, members of the U.N. laugh at Trump, Russian propagandists try new tricks, and video of a bear catching fish underwater —
Ximena Conde reports Evers Says He’ll Prioritize Tax Cut For Wisconsin’s Neediest Families:
Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public schools and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, says he wants to help more than 860,000 of Wisconsin’s neediest families with a tax break. But how he would fund those cuts is a fluid process.
Speaking at a Milwaukee Rotary Club event Tuesday, Evers cited an August United Way of Wisconsin report that found almost 40 percent of Wisconsin families struggled to pay for basic needs like transportation and child care.
Evers said giving these families a tax cut would boost the state’s economy more evenly. Funding these cuts, he said, is a matter of priorities.
“You go to the budget, you get the best you can and you try to do it without any taxes and it happens,” Evers said. “It happens every single time.”
Evers maintains the state can find savings in parts of government, including the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s job creation agency, which Evers has vowed to eliminate and replace.
Mark Sommerhauser reports Scott Walker dismisses former transportation chief’s heightened criticism of his roads stance:
In a Tuesday interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Mark Gottlieb, a Republican who led the state Department of Transportation from 2011 to 2017, also said Walker is “fear-mongering” by claiming his campaign opponent, Democrat Tony Evers, could raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar per gallon.
Those comments came shortly before Walker appeared at a Milton Interstate rest stop Tuesday, touting his expedited plans for part of the Interstate 39-90 project in Dane and Rock counties.
How to pay for roads and bridges has been a longstanding political flashpoint for Walker. Gottlieb’s latest remarks are an indicator the issue will not abate as the general election nears.
David Nakamura reports ‘People actually laughed at a president’: At U.N. speech, Trump suffers the fate he always feared:
President Trump has long argued that the United States has been taken advantage of by other nations — a “laughing stock to the entire World,” he said on Twitter in 2014 — and his political rise was based on the premise that he had the strength and resolve to change that.
But at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump got a comeuppance on the world’s biggest stage. Delivering a speech that aimed to establish U.S. “sovereignty” over the whims and needs of other nations, the president’s triumphant moment was marred in the first minute when he was met by laughter — at his expense.
The embarrassing exchange came when Trump boasted that his administration had accomplished more over two years than “almost any administration” in American history, eliciting audible guffaws in the cavernous chamber hall.
Ben Collins reports On Reddit, Russian propagandists try new tricks:
The ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Russia-linked propagandists and tech companies now includes a simple tactic the Russians are using to sidestep social media bans — changing web addresses.
Reddit users last week were able to trace links posted to a pro-Trump community back to a Russian propaganda website that shares web infrastructure with the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). The links appeared to have been custom-made to appeal to a particular community, /r/The_Donald, which is known to be the most fervent and active in support of the president.
The address-changing effort highlights how propagandists continue to push disinformation on digital media platforms, employing new strategies to hide their origins as companies begin to crack down on foreign influence campaigns.
Cosimo Mortola, an analyst who tracks Russian disinformation for security firm FireEye, said that propaganda operations that started years ago have learned new tricks.
“We’ve been tracking the IRA for several years and there’s no doubt that they’re getting more sophisticated,” Mortola said.
It almost seems like the Republican party has been split into two chunks, loaded in opposing directions into an atom-smasher, and blasted together at the speed of light. The party is disintegrating into short-lived particles. Quarks, muons, and bozos (not bozons) are flying everywhere!
Kavenaugh is the latest example of this. He clearly did not heed Joe’s first law, and got too close to Trump. He didn’t just get splattered with shit, but covered so deeply that a dung-beetle would need shit-penetrating RADAR to figure out which way to burrow to find his withering chances to be a Supreme Court toady for Trump. He’ll not get thru this, and my well lose his Fed Ct. seat as well.
Avenatti just kneecapped Kavenaugh, along with Yertle and “Cornshucker Chuck” Grassley. Even their trained lady seal from Joe Arpiao’s mothership can’t clean this one up. If Chuck and Yertle manage to ram this thru, they will reap the vengeance of America’s women. At that point, they lose the Senate and can put the party an a raft, light it on fire, and push it out to sea. If they don’t ram it thru, they lose their chance to pack to court, anyway. McConnell is the premier political strategist of our time, but this is rapidly getting out of control, and may elude even his formidable skills.
There may actually be a few male Republicans unwilling to seat an alleged gang-rapist on the SC w/o an investigation. If there isn’t, that disqualifies the R-Team from running the country. They will not be participants in a democracy, but rather goose-stepping zealots willing to do anything, no matter how unspeakable, to hold power.
I’ll be surprised if tomorrow’s hearing comes off. If it does, it is the worst possible alternative for the Republicans. “Worst possible” does not imply that there are any good alternatives. There are not, and this is an unvarnished political disaster.
Hard to believe that there was a time we thought Douglas H. Ginsburg’s marijuana smoking was disqualifying. We now see what troubling, disturbing, and concerning truly mean…
At the very least, normal men and women would want a deliberate, methodical process. No one should be racing this through. For accusers and accused, a serious deliberative process should be a comfort – resting one’s claims in the hands of the best investigators, and allowing for the strongest investigatory method. Thereafter, there would need to be time to organize and describe the findings.
Instead, it’s a self-interested rush, to beat a timer that should never have been set. This approach is beneath our people. No one supporting it will, as you note of Kavanaugh, escape your first law. One can’t say that the ingredients are any good, but even now one can say that the cooks’ hands are filthy.
Senators, who should be lions of this republic, look only like a pride of mangy tabbies, rushing to find a woman who will question a witness they are too dense, or too rusty, or too scared to question themselves. If they can’t handle all the job, they don’t deserve any of it.
Here we are, all of us, at a place well-described: “an unvarnished political disaster.”