Good morning.

 Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy.  Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 48m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1860, the steamship Lady Elgin sinks in Lake Michigan:

On this date the steamship Lady Elgin was lost on Lake Michigan and was one of the lake’s most tragic maritime disasters. The ship had been chartered by Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guards who had been in Chicago attending a fund raiser in order to purchase weapons to arm their unit. Their ship was struck by an unlit lumber schooner and sank. At least 300 lives were lost, many from Milwaukee’s Irish Third Ward community. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride, p. 17]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Patrick Marley reports Scott Walker administration waited 2 years to alert nursing regulators of teen inmate who almost died:

Gov. Scott Walker’s administration waited more than two years to tell the state Board of Nursing about a 14-year-old inmate who nearly died when nurses didn’t get him to a doctor for three days, according to state agencies.

Once the complaint was filed in July, the Board of Nursing — which itself is overseen by the Walker administration — waited seven weeks to process it, according to the board. Officials entered the complaint into the board’s electronic system on Tuesday, the first business day after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an article about the February 2016 incident.

RELATED: ‘Absolute incompetence’: Prison nurses didn’t get teen at risk of dying to hospital for 3 days in 2016.

Registered nurses at the state’s juvenile prison, Lincoln Hills School for Boys, gave the teen Sierra Mist, Gatorade and crackers for days when he was repeatedly vomiting because his appendix was at risk of bursting. A doctor who performed emergency surgery on him at the time called the nurses’ actions inexcusable and said they should have known to get him to a doctor three days earlier.

A spokesman for Walker’s Department of Corrections wouldn’t say why the agency held off seeking the review for 30 months. Likewise, Board of Nursing officials did not explain why the board waited a month and a half to process the complaint.

Jonathan O’Connell reports GSA chief may have misled Congress about White House involvement in FBI headquarters, according to draft of inspector general report:

The administrator of the General Services Administration, which manages the FBI headquarters project, may have misled Congress about White House involvement in the project, according to a portion of a soon-to-be published report from the agency’s inspector general that was obtained by The Washington Post.

Last year the GSA and the FBI scrapped a long-delayed plan to build an FBI headquarters campus in the Washington suburbs in favor of a proposal to build a smaller headquarters in downtown D.C. and relocate some staff to Alabama, Idaho and West Virginia.

President Trump has said he supported the new plan. Although GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee in April, mentioned discussions of funding with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, she downplayed the role of the White House in the decision-making process.

The conclusions section of the inspector general’s report, which is expected to be released publicly in the coming weeks, states Murphy’s testimony “was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials about the project.”

Michael Carpenter writes Russia Is Co-opting Angry Young Men (“Fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serve as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries”):

On the streets of the French city Marseille, Russian soccer hooligans sporting tattoos with the initials of Russia’s military intelligence service, GRU, brutally attacked English soccer fans in June 2016, sending dozens of bloodied fans to the hospital. Alexander Shprygin, an ultranationalist agitator and the head of the All-Russian Union of Supporters (a soccer fan club that he claims was established at the behest of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB), was arrested during the melee and deported from France.

In Budapest’s Fiumei Road Cemetery in May 2017, a Russian motorcycle gang carrying giant red flags displaying the Soviet hammer and sickle rode up to a World War II memorial. Somewhat incongruously, the tattooed bikers, accompanied by pinstriped Russian Embassy diplomats, disembarked from their motorcycles to lay red carnations in front of the memorial and then posted a video clip of it online.

It seems almost too strange to be true: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries. It sounds more like an episode of The Americans with a dash of Mad Max and Fight Club mixed in. Yet this is exactly what is happening across Europe and North America as Russia’s intelligence services co-opt fringe radicals and angry young men to try to undermine Western democracies from within. And not just in the virtual world, but in real life.

  Mark Potok writes To Russia With Love: Why Southern U.S. Extremists Are Mad About Vladimir Putin (“The League of the South hates black people, Jews, and lots of other people. But there’s one country, and one man, it really, really likes”):

The League of the South, America’s leading neo-secessionist group, is a white supremacist organization that describes the Deep South as “White Man’s Land.” It speaks often of a coming race war, which its leader warns black people will surely lose. It hates Jews. It believes the antebellum South was a rare remnant of true Christianity in a godless world. It denounces egalitarianism as a “fatal heresy.” It openly embracesthe Ku Klux Klan and other extremists.

And it really, really likes Russia.

A few weeks ago, the League made that crystal clear with the introduction of a new Russian-language section of its website. In an essay headlined “To Our Russian Friends,” League President Michael Hill—a former academic who started out as a relatively moderate Southern nationalist but now urges followers to arm themselves in preparation for civil war—spelled out the reasons why.

….

The politics of contemporary Russia are certainly different than those of the Soviet Union. But it is wildly naïve, not to say densely stupid, for groups like the League to see it as a natural ally. It’s true that Russia has cultivated extreme-right links in Europe and the U.S., but it does so in a cynical, opportunistic way.

“American right-wing radicals oppose communism, but modern Russia actively propagates the Soviet past, its symbolism, the cult of the KGB and Stalin,” Kseniya Kirillova, a respected Russian journalist living in the U.S. who specializes in analyzing Russian propaganda and influence operations abroad, told me.

Brave Pooches Attend UK’s First Surfing School For Dogs:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy-one.  Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 51m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On the night of September 6-7, 1776, American forces make the first use in history (sadly unsuccessful) of a submarine in combat:

Turtle (also called American Turtle) was the world’s first submersible vessel with a documented record of use in combat. It was built in 1775 by American David Bushnell as a means of attaching explosive charges to ships in a harbor, for use against Royal Navy vessels occupying North American harbors during the American Revolutionary War. Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull recommended the invention to George Washington, who provided funds and support for the development and testing of the machine.

….

Just before midnight at 11:00 pm on September 6, 1776, Sgt. Lee piloted the submersible toward Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, Eagle, then moored off Governors Island.

On that night, Lee maneuvered the small craft out to the anchorage. It took two hours to reach his destination, as it was hard work manipulating the hand-operated controls and foot pedals to propel the submersible into position. Adding to his difficulties was a fairly strong current and the darkness creeping overhead, which made visibility difficult.

The plan failed. Lee began his mission with only twenty minutes of air, not to mention the complications of operating the craft. The darkness, the speed of the currents, and the added complexities all combined to thwart Lee’s plan. Once surfaced, Lee lit the fuse on the explosive and tried multiple times to stab the device into the underside of the ship. Unfortunately, after several attempts Lee was not able to pierce Eagle’s hull and abandoned the operation as the timer on the explosive was due to go off and he feared getting caught at dawn. A popular story held that he failed due to the copper lining covering the ship’s hull. The Royal Navy had recently begun installing copper sheathing on the bottoms of their warships to protect from damage by woodworms and other marine life, however the lining was paper-thin and could not have stopped Lee from drilling through it. Bushnell believed Lee’s failure was probably due to an iron plate connected to the ship’s rudder hinge.[38] When Lee attempted another spot in the hull, he was unable to stay beneath the ship, and eventually abandoned the attempt.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Lee Bergquist reports Torrent of stormwater spills from Foxconn construction site after heavy weekend rains:

Stormwater rushed from the construction site of Foxconn Technology Group in Mount Pleasant this week after a deluge pummeled many areas of southern Wisconsin in recent days.

A video taken by a resident on Monday afternoon shows rain pooled in low-lying areas and surging off the Foxconn property in Racine County near Highway H and KR and into a ditch that flows to the Pike River.

A group of residents has expressed concerns to village officials about how Foxconn would manage water at the massive complex — both during construction and after the $10 billion industrial project is completed.

One of those is Kelly Gallaher, who took the video of conditions about 3 p.m. Monday and posted it on Facebook.

“The biggest concern is that with all of these different consultants, what the village told us is that there wasn’t going to be a problem,” said Gallaher, who is a member of A Better Mount Pleasant, a local group.

“Clearly, this past weekend, the last few days, there has been a problem.”

(Perhaps the local business lobby, the Greater Whitewater Committee, so very attentive and solicitous of the state operative overseeing Foxconn, is even now hatching a plan to help residents whose properties are threatened. However much one might credit an effort, should there even be one, it seems probable that an after-the-fact assistance of any kind won’t be half so valuable as a before-the-fact recognition of the project’s risks.)

 Patrick Marley and Molly Beck report GOP leader says teen prison is ‘a mess’ that Scott Walker’s team should have addressed sooner:

“Obviously, Lincoln Hills has been a mess,” the Juneau Republican said. “It’s been a mess for some time. So, often times when you read these articles (about problems there), I’m not necessarily shocked, but very disappointed that there wasn’t more action taken directly by DOC at the time.”

  Julia Davis – whose work is valuable and compelling – shows readers what a fifth columnist looks like:

Pro-Trump commentator Scottie Nell Hughes has landed a full-time position as an anchor on the Russian propaganda network RT. Her multiyear deal was described as “lucrative.””It’s an honor and privilege to anchor RT America’s weeknight newscasts,” she said. https://t.co/PckMnndFhP

— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 7, 2018

(Sympathy to America’s foreign adversaries makes one a fellow traveler. Working for them, however, makes one a fifth columnist. There’s no way back from that. RT – formerly Russia Today – is a tool of Russian state propaganda, so much so that it has had by our law to register as a foreign agent, that is, as something like a foreign-paid lobbyist.)

  Conservative evangelical Michael Gerson concludes We are a superpower run by a simpleton:

What we are finding from books, from insider leaks and from investigative journalism is that the rational actors who are closest to the president are frightened by his chaotic leadership style. They describe a total lack of intellectual curiosity, mental discipline and impulse control. Should the views of these establishment insiders really carry more weight than those of Uncle Clem in Scranton, Pa.? Why yes, in this case, they should. We should listen to the voices of American populism in determining public needs and in setting policy agendas — but not in determining political reality.

We should pay attention to the economic trends that have marginalized whole sections of the country. We should be alert to the failures and indifference of American elites. But we also need to understand that these trends — which might have produced a responsible populism — have, through a cruel trick of history, elevated a dangerous, prejudiced fool. Trump cannot claim the legitimacy of the genuine anxiety that helped produce him. The political and social wave is real, but it is ridden by an unworthy leader. The right reasons have produced the wrong man.

The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things. Woodward’s book recounts one story in which then-economic adviser Gary Cohn heads off U.S. withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement by removing documents from Trump’s Oval Office desk. Think on that a moment. A massive change in economic policy was avoided — not by some brilliant stratagem — but by swiping a piece of paper and trusting in Trump’s minuscule attention span.

Go Inside the Cajun Navy: How Volunteers are Training to Rescue Hurricane Victims:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sun, with a high of seventy-two.  Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 53m 58s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 14% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets this evening at 6 PM.

On this day in 1976, Soviet fighter pilot Viktor Belenko defects to Japan:

Belenko was born in Nalchik, Russian SFSR, in a Ukrainian family. Lieutenant Belenko was a pilot with the 513th Fighter Regiment, 11th Air Army, Soviet Air Defence Forces based in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai. On 6 September 1976, he successfully defected to the West, flying his MiG-25 “Foxbat” jet fighter to Hakodate, Japan.[2]

This was the first time that Western experts were able to get a close look at the aircraft, and it revealed many secrets and surprises. His defection caused significant damage to the Soviet Air Force.[3] Belenko was granted asylum by U.S. President Gerald Ford, and a trust fund was set up for him, granting him a very comfortable living in later years. The U.S. Government debriefed him for five months after his defection, and employed him as a consultant for several years thereafter. Belenko had brought with him the pilot’s manual for the MiG-25 “Foxbat”, expecting to assist U.S. pilots in evaluating and testing the aircraft.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  All America’s pondering a New York Times op-ed entitled I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration:

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

(Candidly, I don’t know what to make of this op-ed, except to say that from my own view there is a broad resistance to Trump, much more than only ‘from the left,’ and that in any event those within this administration look more like collaborators than members of the resistance.

One is reminded of a line from the musical Hamilton: “If there’s a fire you’re trying to douse, you can’t put it out from inside the house.” Indeed. This does show, however, how much a failure Trump is at what he does.)

  Craig Gilbert and Patrick Marley report Former Gov. Tommy Thompson says he regrets his part in the Wisconsin prison building boom:

Former Gov. Tommy Thompson, the author of a new memoir, has done many things in public life he’s very proud of.

But among his regrets, he said Wednesday, is getting caught up decades ago in the “hysteria” of locking people up. He wishes he hadn’t built so many prisons.

“We lock up too many people for too long. It’s about time we change the dynamics. I apologize for that,” Thompson, the state’s Republican governor from 1987 to 2001, said at the Marquette University Law School.

….

Thompson did not criticize Walker directly over the issue Wednesday.

“I wouldn’t say he’s wrong. It’s just that I have matured over the years and I’ve seen the prison systems inside and out. … I’ve studied it. The way we warehouse prisoners right now is not the right way. … Some people have to be in prison, there is no question about it. But we have too many people locked up that should be rehabilitated, retrained and allowed to get out and take a job. We need the workers,” Thompson told reporters after the Marquette event. He said he has made his case to Walker on the subject.

(Emphasis added.  Thompson’s saying Walker’s wrong without saying the mere words ‘Walker’s wrong.’)

  PolitiFact concludes McCabe hits the mark on Minnesota vs. Wisconsin prison rates:

https://t.co/RUFbOSUA1z pic.twitter.com/lwuVURCUbG

— Share the Facts (@sharethefact) September 5, 2018

  The Committee to Investigate Russia writes British Police Name Spy Poisoning Suspects:

British authorities have charged two Russian military intelligence officers in the attempted murder of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, England last March.

The Guardian:

Police said the two men were travelling on authentic Russian passports under the names of Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov and arrived in the UK on an Aeroflot flight days before the attack. The Crown Prosecution Service said there was enough evidence to charge them.

The prime minister, Theresa May, told the House of Commons on Wednesday that the two men had been identified as officers from Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.

The CPS said it had charged the two men with conspiracy to murder the Skripals and DS Nick Bailey, who fell ill after going to the Skripal home after the Russian pair were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury.

The two Russian suspects are also charged with the use and possession of novichok, contrary to the Chemical Weapons Act. They are also charged with causing grievous bodily harm with intent to Yulia Skripal and DS Bailey.

They have not been charged with the later poisoning that killed Dawn Sturgess and left Charlie Rowley seriously ill, after they became unwell on 30 June at an address in Amesbury, Wiltshire.

However, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has concluded the novichok that killed Sturgess and poisoned Rowley was the same as that used on the Skripals.

So, What was the First Horror Movie?:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with an afternoon thunderstorm, and a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:21 PM, for 12h 56m 48s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 22.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1905, a Russo-Japanese peace treaty is signed:

The Russo-Japanese War comes to an end as representatives of the two nations sign the Treaty of Portsmouth in New Hampshire. Russia, defeated in the war, agreed to cede to Japan the island of Sakhalin and Russian port and rail rights in Manchuria.

On February 8, 1904, following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan launched a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. The Russian fleet was decimated. During the subsequent Russo-Japanese War, Japan won a series of decisive victories over the Russians, who underestimated the military potential of its non-Western opponent. In January 1905, the strategic naval base of Port Arthur fell to Japanese naval forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo; in March, Russian troops were defeated at Shenyang, China, by Japanese Field Marshal Iwao Oyama; and in May, the Russian Baltic fleet under Admiral Zinovi Rozhdestvenski was destroyed by Togo near the Tsushima Islands.

These three major defeats convinced Russia that further resistance against Japan’s imperial designs for East Asia was hopeless, and U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a peace treaty at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905. (He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this achievement.) Japan emerged from the conflict as the first modern non-Western world power and set its sights on greater imperial expansion. The Russian military’s disastrous performance in the war was one of the immediate causes of the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Aaron Blake reports Transcript: Phone call between President Trump and journalist Bob Woodward:

Bob Woodward, an associate editor at The Washington Post, sought an interview with President Trump as he was writing “Fear,” a book about Trump’s presidency. Trump called Woodward in early August, after the manuscript had been completed, to say he wanted to participate.

Over the course of 11-plus minutes, Trump repeatedly claimed his White House staff hadn’t informed him of Woodward’s interview request — despite also admitting Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had told him Woodward wanted to talk. He also started the phone call by saying Woodward had “always been fair” to him, but by the end he said the book would be “inaccurate.”

This is a transcript of that call, with key sections highlighted and annotated. To see an annotation, click on the yellow, highlighted text. [Full article includes transcript]

  Jennifer Rubin explains The dilemma Woodward’s book raises about Trump:

The White House is worse than you imagine. That’s the essential message from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear: Trump in the White House.” As my colleague Aaron Blake puts it, the details “are damning in a way we simply haven’t seen before — both for their breadth and degree.”

In part, the out-sized impact the book is having can be attributable to Woodward’s reputation, sourcing (hundreds of people) and possession of scores of taped interviews. It is noteworthy that so many people around President Trump spoke to him, even those still at the White House. Moreover, accounts in the book are entirely credible because incidents he describes explain certain events (e.g., John Dowd quitting as Trump’s lawyer after the president couldn’t hold up during a mock interview with the special counsel). More so than Michael Wolff (who seemed to have gotten the details wrong in various episodes), Woodward’s book raises unavoidable, legitimate issues as to the president’s fitness to serve. (A responsible Congress would begin contacting people such as former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former economic adviser Gary Cohn to determine the president’s capacity to function.) The president’s insistence all of this is made up simply doesn’t fly except with the most devoted cultists.

[Paul Waldman: Woodward’s reporting reveals that in Trump’s world, everybody hates everybody]

This is not a story of what Trump’s critics or neutral observers think of him. This is an account by those who know him best. It is they who believe he cannot be trusted to do his job. From the Post’s report: “The combination of [anecdotes] in one book is something we simply haven’t seen. It suggests a White House full of top aides who have almost no confidence in the man they’re serving and feel as if they are constantly averting calamity.” They think he’s an “idiot” (Chief of Staff John F. Kelly), or “unhinged” (Kelly again), or has the mental capacity of a “fifth- or sixth-grader”(Defense Secretary Jim Mattis). They deliberately thwart him because he tells them to do dangerous things (e.g., taking a document off his desk so he won’t pull out of a South Korea trade deal, an assassination of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad).

  Max Boot concludes President Trump is unfit for office. Bob Woodward’s ‘Fear’ confirms it:

These revelations will be greeted among Republicans not as a sign of Trump’s unfitness for office — which they are — but as more evidence of a conspiracy among the “fake news media” against their electoral hero. That is the genius of Trump’s attacks on the press and on truth itself: He has largely inoculated his base against all of the damaging revelations that continue to emerge about the most corrupt and dysfunctional administration in U.S. history. And by keeping the support of his base (78 percent of Republicans approve of him in a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll), Trump protects himself from removal either via the 25th Amendment or the Article II impeachment process.

Kelly is right. We really are in Crazytown. But Trump is far from the craziest person in town. His defects are no secret — they were obvious before his election. The really crazy people are the Republicans who think we should continue to entrust a man manifestly unfit to be Queens Borough president with the presidency of the United States of America.

  Conservative & Republican Tom Nichols writes Want to save the GOP, Republicans? Vote for every Democrat on this year’s ballot:

In the parliamentary systems of our allies, such as Canada or the United Kingdom, a vote for a candidate at any level is almost always a vote for a governing party and its leadership: The party that gains the most legislative seats gets to form a government and choose a prime minister.

By contrast, one of the great virtues of the American system of separated powers is that voters, usually, can ignore party affiliation if they feel a candidate is worth their support. Our model forces the legislative and executive branches to seek separate mandates from the electorate. In our system, voters can separate the party from its leader. They can split their tickets regionally, nationally and by party. They can even vote for divided government, and choose to place the executive and legislative power in opposing hands.

For now, however, those days are over — at least for the Republican Party. Rather than acting like a national party, entrusted with separate but coequal branches of government, the GOP at every level and in every state has been captured by the personality cult that has congealed around President Trump, and it is now operating like a parliamentary party, utterly submissive to its erratic but powerful prime minister. Republican elected officials, from Congress to the state houses, have chosen to become little more than enablers for an out of control executive branch.

The only way to put a stop to this is to vote against the GOP in every race, at every level in 2018. It’s tough medicine. But as someone who’s voted Republican for nearly 40 years, who favors limited government and public integrity, and who believes America still needs a credible, responsible center-right party, I see no alternative.

(Well said. I am not a Republican but rather a libertarian, and yet, I, too, see the necessity of Nichols’s approach: every last pillar and prop of Trumpism has to go.  One must be both relentless and patient, prepared not merely for a single election but for so many seasons and years as it takes. The Republican Party cannot be a normal party until Trumpism is exorcised from it.)

Here’s How Your Body’s Internal Clock Might Be Messing With Your Sleep:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 59m 37s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 33.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM, and along with the agenda the city has posted an Ehlers Financial Managment Plan for presentation at the council session.

Quick note on upcoming posts this week: By comment or mail, readers have asked me to review Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies, the new documentary Active Measures, and also to consider to Franklin Foer’s contention that Elizabeth Warren is a capitalist (‘Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism‘).  The requests and the posts responding to them – happily received, happily written – will go up this week, Wednesday to Friday.

On this day in 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus uses the state National Guard to prevent the lawful integration of Central High School in Little Rock:

After a series of legal proceedings the Federal District Court ordered the Little Rock School District to proceed with its integration plans when school opened on September 4, 1957. Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957, because he said he had evidence (although none was shown) that there was “…imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace and the doing of violence to persons and property.”[2] The governor initially ordered to state duty the State Headquarters Detachment, the Base Detachment at Adams Field and any other units the Adjutant General felt necessary to “accomplish the mission of maintaining or restoring law and order and to preserve the peace, health, safety and security of the citizens of Pulaski County, Arkansas.”[3] On September 4, Elizabeth Eckford was the only student to enter the school due to lack of communication. It is commonly but mistakenly believed that she was taking this stand on her own, but rather it was because she was the only student who didn’t have a phone, so nobody could contact her to let her know the integration wasn’t happening until the next day.[4]

Major General Sherman T. Clinger, the Adjutant General of Arkansas, assembled a force of 289 soldiers under command of Lieutenant Colonel Marion Johnson.[5] On September 4, 1957, Johnson told nine black students who were attempting to enter Central High School to return home. The National Guard presence gradually decreased to a fifteen-man day and night shift. By court order,[6] the National Guard was replaced by the Little Rock City Police on Friday, September 20, 1957.[3]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Catherine Rampell writes Trump promised farmers ‘smarter’ trade deals. Now he has to bail them out:

“Trade, not aid.”

That’s what farmers, ranchers and their elected officials keep telling the Trump administration they want. They have worked hard over the years to grow their export opportunities, forging critical relationships in China, Mexico, the European Union, Canada and other markets. Customers around the world have gobbled up U.S.-produced pork, soybeans, fruits and other goods.

Yet in a matter of months, President Trump has managed to fray — and possibly sever — many of those ties.

For bogus “national security” reasons, among other rationales, he has provoked nearly every one of our major trading partners into slapping retaliatory tariffs on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American-made agricultural products.

(Trump is a profoundly ignorant man, seemingly unaware – truly – of centuries of economic insight.)

  Chuck Todd contends It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back:

Bashing the media for political gain isn’t new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s.

Then, as now, that hatred was artificially stoked by people who found that it could deliver them some combination of fame, wealth, and power.

Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine.

  Tamara Keith reports President Trump’s Description of What’s ‘Fake’ Is Expanding:

The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about “fake books,” “the fake dossier,” “fake CNN,” and he added a new claim – that Google search results are “RIGGED” to mostly show only negative stories about him. He also accused NBC News’ Lester Holt of “fudging” the tape of his May 2017 interview conducted shortly after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.

An NPR analysis found that in the month of August, Trump sent out 46 tweets containing the words “fake” or “phony,” far surpassing his previous record. (Two of the tweets were later deleted to fix typos).

  Consider merely the first four years of the WEDC:

The first four years after @ScottWalker‘s WEDC popped up $700 million in grants went Walker campaign donors. Sixty percent of all handouts went to Scott Walker donors. Our full report from 2015. https://t.co/KiSayMGTPG pic.twitter.com/mwSLnswQ6g

— One Wisconsin Now (@onewisconsinnow) August 30, 2018

Watch the Incredible Moment a Diver Hypnotises a Shark:

Good morning.

Labor Day in Whitewater will see an occasional thunderstorm with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 02m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 45.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, the Treaty of Paris is signed:

The Treaty of Paris, signed in Paris by representatives of King George III of Great Britain and representatives of the United States of America on September 3, 1783, ended the American Revolutionary War. The treaty set the boundaries between the British Empire in North America and the United States, on lines “exceedingly generous”[2] to the latter. Details included fishing rights and restoration of property and prisoners of war.

This treaty and the separate peace treaties between Great Britain and the nations that supported the American cause — France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic — are known collectively as the Peace of Paris.[3][4] Only Article 1 of the treaty, which acknowledges the United States’ existence as free, sovereign, and independent states, remains in force.[5]

Recommended for reading in full — 

  Pawan Naidu reports Secret cash aided politicians who rewrote Wisconsin law to block claims of lead-poisoned children:

At age 2, Yasmine Clark was lead-poisoned so severely that she had to be hospitalized for emergency chelation treatment to cleanse her blood of life-threatening levels of the heavy metal.

At age 5, Yasmine was again diagnosed with lead poisoning. She suffered significant brain damage. Her IQ declined. She developed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

So, in 2006, at age 5, Yasmine became a plaintiff in a Milwaukee County lawsuit filed against multiple paint companies, including National Lead, now called NL Industries, which had made lead paint like that found in the rental homes where she was raised in Milwaukee.

She was among about 170 Wisconsin children named as plaintiffs in lawsuits against the paint companies. The suits sought compensation for medical expenses and other damages for what their attorneys said were severe and permanent injuries from ingesting lead-tainted paint chips.

While these children had compelling personal stories, NL Industries had something even more powerful on its side: Republican politicians facing recall elections in 2011 and 2012 who secretly benefitted from $750,000 contributed by NL’s owner, Harold Simmons, to an “independent” political group.

At the request of NL’s lobbyist, Republicans inserted a handful of words into the 2013-15 state budget that sought to halt such lead-paint lawsuits, including the one filed by Yasmine, according to a memo obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, a left-leaning watchdog organization that exposes corruption in government.

  Matthew Rosenberg, Michael LaForgia, and Andrew E. Kramer report Wife of Former N.R.A. President Tapped Accused Russian Agent in Pursuit of Jet Fuel Payday:

Ms. Butina’s [Maria Butina, whom American prosecutors now accuse of being a covert Russian agent] efforts to deal in Russian jet fuel, detailed in hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails, were notable not just for their whiff of foreign intrigue but for whom they involved: David Keene, a former president of the National Rifle Association and a prominent leader of the conservative movement, who has advised Republican candidates from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney. They also involved Mr. Keene’s wife, Donna, a well-connected Washington lobbyist, and Ms. Butina’s boyfriend, Paul Erickson, who ran Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and who moved in rarefied conservative circles despite allegations of fraud in three states.

Their attempt to secure the fuel deal illustrates a reality that investigators have had to navigate in bringing a federal case against Ms. Butina. During her time in the United States, she surrounded herself not only with high-profile American conservatives but also with dubious characters who seemed bent on making a fast buck — and it was not always easy to tell one from the other.

….

The driving force behind the jet fuel negotiations appears to have been Mr. Erickson, 56, a former board member of the American Conservative Union who was accused of defrauding investors in California, South Dakota and Virginia. The other major players were the Keenes, who first raised the idea of brokering a sale of Russian jet fuel and then put Ms. Butina and Mr. Erickson in touch with prospective buyers.

  Nelson D. Schwartz and Steve Lohr report Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration:

The Trump administration is using the country’s vast and nearly opaque immigration bureaucracy to constrict the flow of foreign workers into the United States by throwing up new roadblocks to limit legal arrivals.

The government is denying more work visas, asking applicants to provide additional information and delaying approvals more frequently than just a year earlier. Hospitals, hotels, technology companies and other businesses say they are now struggling to fill jobs with the foreign workers they need.

With foreign hires missing, the employees who remain are being forced to pick up the slack. Seasonal industries like hotels and landscaping are having to turn down customers or provide fewer services. Corporate executives worry about the long-term impact of losing talented engineers and programmers to countries like Canada that are laying out the welcome mat for skilled foreigners.

  Aaron Blake ponders How big is the GOP’s Trump-can-shoot-a-guy-on-Fifth-Avenue caucus?:

Matthew Miller’s reaction to the new Washington Post-ABC News poll Friday caught my eye. The poll showed just 18 percent of Americans believed President Trump should pardon Paul Manafort.

“This is the ‘shoot someone on 5th Avenue’ caucus, and it’s much lower than Trump would have you believe,” the former Obama-era Justice Department official tweeted.

….

That reference, of course, is to Trump’s famous 2016 campaign claim that his supporters would stick by him even if he pulled out a gun and shot someone on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The implication was that Trump could do pretty much whatever he wants and his devotees wouldn’t blink. It doubles as an ego trip for Trump and a handy way for journalists and pundits to describe how Trump skates past controversies, no matter how jaw-dropping they are, because his base shrugs. (Rudy Giuliani rekindled it somewhat in a different context.)

Which got me thinking: How big is the “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue” caucus in America?

The answer I arrived at as anywhere from 1 in 8 to 1 in 5 Americans — between 12 and 20 percent, around where Miller pegged it. These are the people who seem prepared to justify and/or forgive pretty much anything Trump has done or even has threatened to do. It represents half or less of Trump supporters.

Here’s how I arrived at that number. [Analysis follows in full article.]

(Blake’s assessment is compelling.  Trump’s true hardcore – his diehard base – probably amounts to 20% or fewer of all Americans.  They’re cocooned, probably watch a steady diet of pro-Trump news, talk to like-minded supporters, and hear all sorts of stories about how they’re ‘winning,’ etc.  This twenty percent is on the losing side of a national conflict, but their intense support, and biases that confirm their views, leave them unwilling or unable to see that most Americans reject Trump and Trumpism.  It’s Trump vs. an America that works [that is, Trump versus a productive and dynamic America].)

   Consider The Logo Design Revolution:

The fields of graphic design and semiotics are inextricably linked. In this way, the first logo creators were most likely the ancient Egyptians, who designed images to convey socio-cultural values and established visual codes of representation. But as the industrial revolution began to give rise to consumer culture as we know it, logo design remained mostly utilitarian; images that represented brands often depicted either the product, the service, or something related to its manufacture, such as a factory.

Then came Paul Rand with his iconic rendering of the IBM logo in 1956. Many design historians see this as the definitive turning point in logo design. Shortly thereafter, Ivan Chermayeff and Tom Geismar founded a design firm that would take things one step further.

“They revolutionized the field when they created simple, bold, memorable, and whimsical identities for companies in a time when soulless corporate modernism was the trend,” said Dan Covert, whose short documentary, 60 Years of Logos, details the contributions of the grandfathers of logo design. “And because of that, their work has stood the test of time.”

These days, said Covert, it’s rare to find a logo that survives five years before it is redesigned. “If you look back at the list of companies Chermayeff and Geismar designed logos for that are still around in their original or slightly altered form, that’s enough to argue their staggering contribution to the field,” he added. Among the companies that boast a Chermayeff and Geismar-designed logo: Chase Bank, PBS, Barney’s, NBC, National Geographic, NYU, The Smithsonian, Cornell University, Brown University, HarperCollins, Showtime, Mobil Gas, PanAm, and Merck.

In the film, Chermayeff and Geismar say that their theory of design reflects a company’s identity more so than it does a company’s purpose. “We interview a lot of people, and you get a sense of the culture,” says Chermayeff. “[In the interviews,] we’re not talking about design; we are talking about what they do, who they are, and how might they best be portrayed. It’s a process of investigation, creativity, and politics.”

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will see showers and thunderstorms with a high of eighty-four.  Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:26 PM, for 13h 05m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 56.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1945, Imperial Japan formally surrenders:

The surrender of Imperial Japan was announced on August 15 and formally signed on September 2, 1945, bringing the hostilities of World War II to a close. By the end of July 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was incapable of conducting major operations and an Allied invasion of Japan was imminent. Together with the British Empire and China, the United States called for the unconditional surrender of the Japanese armed forces in the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945—the alternative being “prompt and utter destruction”. While publicly stating their intent to fight on to the bitter end, Japan’s leaders (the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, also known as the “Big Six”) were privately making entreaties to the still-neutral Soviet Union to mediate peace on terms more favorable to the Japanese. Meanwhile, the Soviets were preparing to attack Japanese forces in Manchuria and Korea (in addition to South Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands) in fulfillment of promises they had secretly made to the United States and the United Kingdom at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences.

On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 AM local time, the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Sixteen hours later, American President Harry S. Truman called again for Japan’s surrender, warning them to “expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” Late in the evening of August 8, 1945, in accordance with the Yalta agreements, but in violation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan, and soon after midnight on August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union invaded the Imperial Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Later in the day, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb, this time on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Following these events, Emperor Hirohito intervened and ordered the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War to accept the terms the Allies had set down in the Potsdam Declaration for ending the war. After several more days of behind-the-scenes negotiations and a failed coup d’état, Emperor Hirohito gave a recorded radio address across the Empire on August 15. In the radio address, called the Jewel Voice Broadcast….he announced the surrender of Japan to the Allies.

On August 28, the occupation of Japan led by the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers began. The surrender ceremony was held on September 2, aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri, at which officials from the Japanese government signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, thereby ending the hostilities.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Mary Kate McCoy writes More Than One-Third Of Wisconsin Households Can’t Afford Basic Necessities, Report Says:

More than one-third of Wisconsin households can’t afford the basic necessities, according to a new report from the United Way of Wisconsin.

The household survival budget includes housing, food, transportation, health insurance, for families that have children, child care, and new this year — the cost of a cell phone.

Statewide it takes about $60,000 to get by on those basic necessities for a family of four, according to the report, which also breaks cost of living down county by county. And that budget is very conservative, said Charlene Mouille, executive director of United Way of Wisconsin.

“What’s interesting too about the survival budget is this really is basic need,” said Martha Cranley, director of community impact for United Way of Dane County.

(There’s much to consider another time about this analysis, including areas where it falls short of the mark, and others where it is likely spot on.  It’s worth considering at length, in detail.)

  Patrick Marley reports ‘Absolute incompetence’: Prison nurses didn’t get teen at risk of dying to hospital for 3 days in 2016:

Nurses at the state’s troubled juvenile prison failed to detect for three days in 2016 that a 14-year-old inmate’s appendix was about to burst and gave him crackers and Gatorade instead of rushing him to a hospital — putting him at risk of dying, records show.

Prison officials fired one nurse over the situation but didn’t discipline others, including a nurse who failed to contact a doctor about the boy even though he should have under Department of Corrections policies because his pulse was so elevated.

The doctor who performed emergency surgery on the inmate said she saw widespread problems with the way he was treated at the prison.

“I mean, if this had happened at the hospital, I would demand that the nurse be fired for absolute incompetence,” physician Kristen Wells told a sheriff’s investigator without naming the nurse she was referring to. “She has no idea what she’s looking at. What we call it in the hospital setting is ‘failure to rescue.’ ”

  Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman report National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All:

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him.

But it turns out that Mr. Trump wanted to go even further.

He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on Mr. Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Mr. Trump’s associates.

….

“It’s all the stuff — all the stuff, because you never know,” Mr. Cohen said on the recording.

  Jennifer Rubin writes Voters don’t buy ‘No collusion!’:

Suffolk University’s latest poll has reassuring news for those concerned about the rule of law:

A majority of Americans (55 percent) trust special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, but 59 percent don’t trust President Donald Trump’s denial that his campaign was involved, according to a new Suffolk University/USA TODAY national poll. The survey also shows unfavorable views of President Donald Trump rising 6 points since June.

Fifty-eight percent of likely voters said they hold an unfavorable view of the president, compared to 52 percent in June, while his favorable rate has held steady at 40 percent since the early-summer poll. Trump’s job approval numbers tell a similar story, with 56 percent of voters either disapproving or strongly disapproving of his job performance, and 40 percent of voters saying they approve or strongly approve. . . . , with 57 percent saying that corruption in the nation’s capital has gotten worse under the Trump administration.

While Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight counts bolstered faith in Mueller, it’s surprising that the person who hurt Trump the most is none other than Michael Cohen. (“36 percent of voters said these convictions gave them more confidence in Mueller’s ongoing investigation, while 21 percent said less, and 35 percent said they had no effect.”). Voters seem to give a whole lot of weight to Cohen’s pointing to Trump as the man who directed the illegal campaign scheme with “61 percent saying that such legal developments raise significant questions about the president’s own behavior, while 27 percent said that the Cohen case has little to do with Trump.”

  Bird Is the Word in These Four Stories: