Good morning.

Christmas Day in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1776, Washington and the Continental Army cross the Delaware River at night to attack Hessians serving Great Britain at Trenton, New Jersey, the next day.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Greg Sargent writes The Biden team does not seem spooked by the ghost of Stephen Miller:

When it came to asylum seekers and refugees, President Trump’s agenda, crafted by adviser Stephen Miller, was largely animated by a few core principles.

Among them: Migrants are primarily a threat, and should above all be feared. They’re largely driven by nefarious motives, looking to scam their way into the United States and get over on us, rather than being driven by larger forces that rendered their decisions to migrate understandable, earning them just treatment.

And because of those, their efforts to migrate must above all be crushed through the deterrence of maximal cruelty and hardship, and migration flows must be mercilessly reduced to the lowest levels possible.

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team is sending early signs that the break with this worldview will be comprehensive, substituting an entirely new vision. And the rough outlines of this vision are heartening, though details will matter greatly.

On Monday, top Biden officials gave a briefing to reporters on their thinking about migrations from Central America. The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer offered a good thread reporting the details.

First, Biden officials said their intention is to “expand legal pathways for migration,” including “allowing people to apply for refugee resettlement.”

That’s important. It means they will seek to create pathways for would-be asylum seekers to apply for refugee status from home countries. That seems to mirror a Democratic proposal that would expand the number of refugees the U.S. takes in from Central America in particular.

The principle underlying this is that it’s good policy to create ways for people to more easily seek protection here, to relieve them from having to make the arduous, dangerous trek. This would also enable us to manage migration more effectively, allowing for evaluation of cases before migrants make the trip.

 Sam Anderson writes Watch This Snowball Fight From 1897 for a Jolt of Pure Joy:

We are so clearly living through the worst chapters of a civics textbook. Even as we suffer, we know that our hyperventilations and breakdowns will be archived and studied by some patient people in a saner future. And so we feel displaced. We have become living fossils, ancient even to ourselves. Still, somehow, there is so much fresh pain.

Over the last month, as a coping mechanism, I have been watching the same viral video over and over and over. It is not a campaign ad or a supercut of triumphant congressional zingers. In fact, it is the opposite: a brief clip of old-timey French people pelting one another with snowballs. This is my favorite film of 2020 — a tiny masterpiece that perfectly distills not only our current mayhem but also, more profoundly, our baffling displacement in time.

The footage was captured in Lyon, in 1897, by the Lumière brothers, who were among the world’s first filmmakers. It was originally black and white, of course, and herky-jerky because of the low frame rate. But this snowball fight has recently been colorized and smoothed, and the result is shockingly modern.

 Snow Fight (Lumière 1897. Colorized):

Good morning.

Christmas Eve in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 02m 17s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1814, representatives of the Britain and America sign the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of 1812.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Martin Pengelly reports Trump claims to be ‘working tirelessly’ but leaves Covid relief bill in disarray:

Donald Trump was at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday, claiming to be “working tirelessly for the American people” with a schedule that included “many meetings and calls”. Back in Washington, a Democratic proposal to increase direct payments to Americans under the Covid relief bill, from $600 to $2,000, was blocked.

That was Trump’s demand in a surprise video address on Tuesday night but it was shot down by Republicans who opposed greater spending throughout stimulus talks.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats would try again on Monday. Should the relief bill fail, millions of Americans will be without desperately needed relief at least until President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January.

“To vote against this bill is to deny the financial hardship that families face,” she said, “and to deny them the relief they need”.

The White House’s official guidance to reporters about Trump’s “tireless” Christmas Eve schedule contrasted with recent examples notably light on official events, which have left Trump free to make baseless claims of electoral fraud and meet with conspiracy theorists and cronies about attempts to subvert the constitution and stay in power, despite defeat by Joe Biden.

 Michael Kranish reports Trump vowed to drain the swamp. Then he granted clemency to three former congressmen convicted of federal crimes:

Trump pardoned former congressmen Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who pleaded guilty to misuse of campaign funds, and Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who was in prison after being convicted of securities fraud. The president commuted the sentence of former congressman Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who was convicted of misusing charitable contributions. Hunter and Collins were early and avid supporters of Trump’s campaign.

Michael Gerson writes Trump is an authoritarian wannabe. He must never hold power again:

Looking on the bright side of a humiliating national disaster, the manner of President Trump’s departure from power has clarified why he must never hold power again.

In leaks to a variety of news organizations, senior Trump administration officials reported: 1) Rudolph W. Giuliani urging the federal government to illegally seize Dominion voting machines; 2) presidential consideration of deranged conspiracy-monger Sidney Powell as a special counsel investigating nonexistent election fraud; and 3) a White House meeting involving disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn at which Trump discussed the imposition of martial law.

These accounts indicate the emergence of two distinct factions within Trump’s inner circle. On one side are the lunatics — among them Giuliani, Powell and Flynn — who want Trump to violate laws and assume authoritarian powers. On the other side are sycophants who supported Trump’s spurious legal challenges to the election result but apparently draw the line at treason. By most accounts, Trump’s sympathies lie with the lunatics.

Brooklyn Coffee Shop Hosts Essentials Drive for Local Residents:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 02m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1947, the transistor is first demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jennifer Rubin writes John Kelly is wrong. These were not good people:

Former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly — the man who enthusiastically presided over the separation of children at the border; defended President Trump’s lies and accommodation toward Russia; and enabled arguably the most destructive president in our history — told the Atlantic: “The vast majority of people who worked in the White House were decent people who were doing the best they could to serve the nation.” He added, “They’ve unfortunately paid quite a price for that in reputation and future employment. They don’t deserve that. They deserve better than that, because they kept the train from careening off the tracks.”

This is dead wrong. These people are not victims. Their reputations have been besmirched for the best of reasons: They participated in an administration unparalleled in its corruption, meanness, racism and authoritarianism.

Victoria Bekiempis reports More immigrant women say they were abused by ICE gynecologist:

More women have joined an official legal petition alleging that they were medically abused by a gynecologist while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in a move that significantly expands a case that has shocked America.

The legal petition outlining these alleged abuses were filed in the Middle District of Georgia federal court late Monday night. More than 40 women have submitted written testimony attesting to claims of abuse, one attorney on their case said.

These women, who have been detained by Ice at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, have alleged that they underwent invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. The women’s attorneys have also alleged that these women endured retribution for speaking out, including deportation in some cases. The petition largely echoed past legal filings and accounts by accusers.

“Petitioners were victims of non-consensual, medically unindicated and/or invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary surgical procedures under general anesthesia, performed by and/or at the direction of [gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin],” the petition said. “In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault.”

 The Washington Post editorial board writes Trump’s final month might make the past four years seem calm: 

WHILE AMERICANS prepare to celebrate the holiday season, President Trump and his hardcore supporters are contemplating a turbulent final month that could make the rest of his chaotic presidency look placid. As Mr. Trump sidelines even some of his most loyal aides and allies, the few checks that remained on the president’s behavior are eroding, potentially leading to a Jan. 6 showdown over electoral votes on Capitol Hill that could further damage U.S. democracy.

Government officials and even some presidential aides are reportedly bracing for what might come next. The possibilities include strange orders to the armed forces, mass firings in key national security departments, more bizarre pardons, demands to prosecute Trump political enemies or the appointment of one or several special counsels to force the Justice Department to investigate bogus claims of election irregularities and other Trump obsessions.

The films in 2020 that battled the pandemic:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 01m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1944, German troops demand the surrender of United States troops at Bastogne, Belgium, prompting the famous one word reply by General Anthony McAuliffe: “Nuts!”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Toluse Olorunnipa, Josh Dawsey, Rosalind S. Helderman, and Emma Brown report Trump assembles a ragtag crew of conspiracy-minded allies in flailing bid to reverse election loss:

With his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud rejected by dozens of judges and GOP leaders, President Trump has turned to a ragtag group of conspiracy theorists, media-hungry lawyers and other political misfits in a desperate attempt to hold on to power after his election loss.

The president’s orbit has grown more extreme as his more mainstream allies, including Attorney General William P. Barr, have declined to endorse his increasingly radical plans to overturn the will of the voters. Trump’s unofficial election advisory council now includes a pardoned felon, adherents of the QAnon conspiracy theory, a White House trade adviser and a Russian agent’s former lover.

Members of the group assembled­ in the Oval Office on Friday for a marathon meeting that lasted more than four hours and included discussion of tactics ranging from imposing martial law in swing states to seizing voting machines through executive fiat. The meeting exploded into shouting matches as outside advisers and White House aides clashed over the lack of a cohesive strategy and disagreed about the constitutionality of some of the proposed solutions.

Trump’s desire to remain in power was dampened further Monday as Barr said that he saw no basis for the federal government to seize voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud.

“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said during a news conference.

 Cary Aspinwall and Simone Weichselbaum report Colorado Tries New Way To Punish Rogue Cops:

Now police officers who violate people’s civil rights can be held personally responsible in state court.

And they can’t use the defense that experts say has stymied many efforts to hold police to account: “qualified immunity.” It’s a legal doctrine that says government workers can’t be held liable for what they do on the job, except in rare circumstances.

….

In 1967, the Supreme Court carved out a “qualified immunity” exception that helps government officials: They couldn’t be sued if they were acting in good faith and didn’t know what they were doing was illegal. Over the years, the court expanded that doctrine so that now, even police officers who knowingly violate someone’s rights are protected—unless a court has ruled that their behavior was unconstitutional in a previous case involving nearly identical circumstances.

Last year, for example, a federal appeals court found that a police officer who shot a 10-year-old by mistake while aiming for the family’s dog was protected from liability under qualified immunity. The judges ruled that he couldn’t be held responsible because there wasn’t a previous case where an officer was found at fault in almost identical circumstances.

Qualified immunity has blocked lawsuits for people who were killed by police during arrests; a man who was shot and killed after a 911 dispatcher put him in harm’s way; and a man who gouged his own eyes out in jail after he was denied mental health care.

 Baby elephant saved with CPR after road accident:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 01m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Library Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District Board meets via audiovisual conferencing in closed session at 6:15 PM and open session at 7 PM.

  On this day in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length animated feature, premieres at the Carthay Circle Theatre.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Erica Newland writes ‘I’m Haunted by What I Did’ as a Lawyer in the Trump Justice Department: 

I was an attorney at the Justice Department when Donald Trump was elected president. I worked in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is where presidents turn for permission slips that say their executive orders and other contemplated actions are lawful. I joined the department during the Obama administration, as a career attorney whose work was supposed to be independent of politics.

I never harbored delusions about a Trump presidency. Mr. Trump readily volunteered that his agenda was to disassemble our democracy, but I made a choice to stay at the Justice Department — home to some of the country’s finest lawyers — for as long as I could bear it. I believed that I could better serve our country by pushing back from within than by keeping my hands clean. But I have come to reconsider that decision.

My job was to tailor the administration’s executive actions to make them lawful — in narrowing them, I could also make them less destructive. I remained committed to trying to uphold my oath even as the president refused to uphold his.

But there was a trade-off: We attorneys diminished the immediate harmful impacts of President Trump’s executive orders — but we also made them more palatable to the courts.

….

Watching the Trump campaign’s attacks on the election results, I now see what might have happened if, rather than nip and tuck the Trump agenda, responsible Justice Department attorneys had collectively — ethically, lawfully — refused to participate in President Trump’s systematic attacks on our democracy from the beginning. The attacks would have failed.

….

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Gregory S. Schneider reports Virginia’s statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee removed from U.S. Capitol:

Workers have removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol, laboring in the wee hours of Monday morning to take the figure out of Statuary Hall.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) had requested the removal over the summer after a commission chartered by the General Assembly decided that a man who fought to uphold slavery was not a fitting symbol for a diverse and modern state.

How Elon Musk’s 700 MPH Hyperloop Concept Could Become the Fastest Way to Travel:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-three  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1917, the Soviets establish Cheka, the first in a series of secret police forces.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Dan Diamond reports ‘We want them infected’: Trump appointee demanded ‘herd immunity’ strategy, emails reveal (‘Then-HHS science adviser Paul Alexander called for millions of Americans to be infected as means of fighting Covid-19′):

A top Trump appointee repeatedly urged top health officials to adopt a “herd immunity” approach to Covid-19 and allow millions of Americans to be infected by the virus, according to internal emails obtained by a House watchdog and shared with POLITICO.

“There is no other way, we need to establish herd, and it only comes about allowing the non-high risk groups expose themselves to the virus. PERIOD,” then-science adviser Paul Alexander wrote on July 4 to his boss, Health and Human Services assistant secretary for public affairs Michael Caputo, and six other senior officials.

“Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk….so we use them to develop herd…we want them infected…” Alexander added.

“[I]t may be that it will be best if we open up and flood the zone and let the kids and young folk get infected” in order to get “natural immunity…natural exposure,” Alexander wrote on July 24 to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Caputo and eight other senior officials. Caputo subsequently asked Alexander to research the idea, according to emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee’s select subcommittee on coronavirus.

….

In his emails, Alexander also spent months attacking government scientists and pushing to shape official statements to be more favorable to President Donald Trump.

For instance, Alexander acknowledges in a May 30 email that a draft statement from the CDC about how Covid-19 was disproportionately affecting minority populations was “very accurate,” but he warned HHS and CDC communications officials that “in this election cycle that is the kind of statement coming from CDC that the media and Democrat [sic] antagonists will use against the president.” The problems were “due to decades of democrat neglect,” Alexander alleged.

Masha Gessen writes Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya Is Overcoming Her Fears:

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has spent more than half of her short political career in exile. Six months ago, the former English teacher was a stay-at-home mom. Her husband, the businessman Siarhei Tsikhanouski, often used his popular YouTube channel to criticize the regime of the dictator Alexander Lukashenka, who has ruled Belarus for twenty-six years. In May, as Belarus prepared for the quinquennial ritual that Lukashenka calls a Presidential election, Tsikhanouski, who had planned to run, was arrested. So was another opposition candidate, Viktar Babaryka. A third, Valery Tsepkalo, was not allowed on the ballot.

Three women—Tsepkalo’s wife, Veronika; Babaryka’s campaign director, Maria Kalesnikava; and Tsikhanouskaya—joined forces and put Tsikhanouskaya forward as the opposition candidate for President. She was allowed on the ballot, apparently because Lukashenka didn’t take her seriously. On Election Day, August 9th, she appeared to get a majority of the vote. Lukashenka claimed victory, however. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in protest and have continued protesting since. Every weekend for the last eighteen weeks, people have marched in the streets of Minsk, the Belarusian capital, and other cities and towns. Lukashenka’s forces have cracked down brutally, jailing upward of a thousand protesters some weekends, but the demonstrations continue.

How technology helps build Dubai’s mega skyscrapers:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 01m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1777, Washington and the Continental Army go into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Recommended for reading in full — 

 Bellingcat reports FSB Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey Navalny Novichok Poisoning:

Today, alongside investigative partners CNN, Der Spiegel, and The Insider, we identified a long-running FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service] operation to trail Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, including a number of chemical weapons experts involved in the research and development of Novichok. How did we find all of this information, and how did we verify the information? We’ll detail our investigative methodologies here, with some discussion on Russian data markets, cross-referencing data to be sure of its veracity, and other topics.

Bellingcat has previously investigated the role of a chain of Russian government-run scientific institutes in providing research into and manufacturing of nerve agent for GRU’s [a Russian military intelligence agency, now formally the GU, still often called the GRU] overseas assassination program, including the March 2018 Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal and the earlier poisoning of Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev.

In the course of a Belingcat investigation into Russia’s renewed chemical weapons project, we analyzed call metadata for the telephone numbers used by two senior executives of SC Signal, an entity that we found to be directly involved in the development of new variants and application methods for nerve agents. We had observed that in the months preceding Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, both of these executives – Arur Zhirov and Victor Taranchenko – had communicated with Stanislav Makshakov, and less frequently with his FSB superiors Kirill Vasilyev and Vladimir Bogdanov. Moreover, we had observed a surge in the communication between this group of FSB operatives.

….

Tugging on one thread will unravel an entire tapestry of cross-referenced data, eventually revealing how Navalny’s poisoning was planned and carried out by a team of chemical weapon experts and FSB operatives. Much of this data is available due to the negligence of the Russian government — it’s hard to imagine an entire city’s vehicle registration database with passport numbers, addresses, license plate numbers, and other data to be leaked online annually for anyone to find in Germany or Canada — as well as the sloppiness of the security services themselves.

The FSB and GRU are as ambitious as they are dangerous in their operations, but the same cannot be said about their operational security practices. You do not need to look for dead drops in a park or trail people through alleyways to uncover the cover identities of spies, rather you just need a keen eye, patience, and the sense of knowing where to look for available leaked data sources.

Reporter Confronts Operative in Alexey Navalny Poisoning:

Watch what happened when this reporter confronted one of the secret operatives believed to be involved in the poisoning of Putin critic Alexey Navalny.

 Video from Space Weekly Highlights, Week of 12.13.20: