Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater is sunny with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 16m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1835, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is born. On this day in 1864, the 24th Wisconsin Infantry takes part in the Battle of Franklin, Tennessee: “Major Arthur McArthur was wounded at Franklin as the 24th Infantry fought several hours in fierce combat that left seven of its soldiers dead or wounded.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Graham writes It’s Not an Act (“It’s no longer possible to pretend that President Trump is simply playing at bigotry, hypocrisy, and detachment from reality”):

Over the past 24 hours, President Trump has delivered a concentrated dose of misinformation, self-sabotage, hypocrisy, and bigotry that stands out even by the standards of his short and eventful political career….

Taken together, however, they offer yet another display of poor judgment and divisive leadership from the putative leader of the free world, and they again cast doubt on his fitness for his office. They are also further evidence that Trump’s hypocrisy, bigotry, and dishonesty are not an act. He means it all.

….the president has repeatedly demonstrated that he’s not just posturing, and it’s not simply a cynical ploy. Trump isn’t being hypocritical simply for sport or political gain. His bigotry isn’t just an act to win over a certain segment of the population. Of course it wasn’t: Trump has been demonstrating that since he arrived in the news, settling a case alleging that he had kept African Americans out of his apartment buildings, up through his demand to execute the Central Park Five. He isn’t spreading misinformation just to twist the political discourse—though he may be doing that—but because he can’t or won’t assess it. It is not an act.

All of this has been clear to anyone willing to see it for a long time, yet some people have convinced themselves it’s merely an act. That includes the Republican members of Congress who shake their heads but try to ignore the tweets. It includes the senator who chuckles at Trump’s enduring birtherism. And it includes the White House staffers who, according to The Times, are “stunned” to hear their boss denying the Access Hollywood tape. It’s stunning that they’re still stunned.

(Trump is, and always has been, what we who oppose him correctly understood him to be. We will oppose him unrelentingly until he meets his political ruin.)

Greg Jaffe, Carol D. Leonnig, Michael Kranish and Tom Hamburger report Inside the White House, Michael Flynn pushed proposal from company he said he had advised:

The week after President Trump’s inauguration, national security adviser Michael Flynn forwarded a memo written by a former business associate and told his staff to fashion it into a policy for President Trump’s approval, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

The proposal — to develop a “Marshall Plan” of investment in the Middle East — was being pushed by a company that Flynn said he had advised during the 2016 campaign and transition. The firm was seeking to build nuclear power plants in the region.

His advocacy for the project in the White House surprised some administration officials and raised concerns that Flynn had a conflict of interest. From August to December 2016, he said he served as an adviser to the company, IP3, reporting later on his disclosure forms that he ended his association with the firm just weeks before joining the administration….

(Of course it’s a conflict of interest. For it all, Flynn’s one brazen grifter in an administration of grifters, schemers, and self-promoters.)

Beth Reinhard, Aaron C. Davis and Andrew Ba Tran report Woman’s effort to infiltrate The Washington Post dated back months:

The failed effort by conservative activists to plant a false story about Senate candidate Roy Moore in The Washington Post was part of a months-long campaign to infiltrate The Post and other media outlets in Washington and New York, according to interviews, text messages and social media posts that have since been deleted.

Starting in July, Jaime Phillips, an operative with the organization Project Veritas, which purports to expose media bias, joined two dozen networking groups related to either journalism or left-leaning politics. She signed up to attend 15 related events, often accompanied by a male companion, and appeared at least twice at gatherings for departing Post staffers.

Phillips, 41, presented herself to journalists variously as the owner of a start-up looking to recruit writers, a graduate student studying national security or a contractor new to the area. This summer, she tweeted posts in support of gun control and critical of Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigrants — a departure from the spring when, on accounts that have since been deleted, she used the #MAGA hashtag and mocked the Women’s March on Washington that followed Trump’s inauguration as the “Midol March”….

(Money donated to James O’Keefe and Project Veritas is wasted money; if dim-witted donors want to waste their money on a reactionary mediocrity, one would hope they spend even more.)

Natasha Bertrand reports A key witness in the Russia probe had a ‘lengthy conversation’ with Trump at Mar-a-Lago:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey dined with President Donald Trump last weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida — where, a report said, they had a “lengthy conversation” at the main dining table surrounded by several of Trump’s friends, associates, and political allies.

A tipster told Politico’s Playbook about the conversation, which raised eyebrows given Woolsey’s centrality to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser.

Woolsey, who served on the board of Flynn’s lobbying firm, Flynn Intel Group, was at a meeting on September 19, 2016, with Flynn and Turkish government ministers in which they discussed removing the controversial Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen from US soil, Woolsey has said.

Woolsey apparently notified Vice President Joe Biden through a mutual friend about the meeting, which he thought could have been an illegal discussion, Woolsey’s spokesman, Jonathan Franks, said earlier this year.

Franks confirmed late last month that Mueller’s team had interviewed Woolsey about the meeting. He said Woolsey and his wife had been in touch with the FBI since before Mueller began overseeing the bureau’s Russia investigation in May….

(Curious…)

Hallie Detrick writes 2017’s Only Supermoon Is Happening This Weekend. Here’s How to See It:

The only supermoon of 2017 is coming to a night sky near you.

Sunday Dec. 3 is the only time this year that we’ll have a supermoon that is visible to the naked eye. The moon will actually be at its closest point to Earth at 4 a.m. ET on the morning of Dec. 4, but the best time to view it will be just after sunset on Sunday evening, when the ‘moon illusion’ will make it easier to see the difference.

Dec. 3 kicks off a three-cycle streak of the celestial phenomenon. The full moons on Jan. 2 and 31, 2018, will also be supermoons. The phenomenon is technically called perigee syzygy and occurs when the moon is at the closest point in its Earth orbit at the same time as the Earth, moon, and sun are aligned, creating a full moon.

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 17m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1961, Enos the Chimpanzee orbits Earth:

He was the first chimpanzee, and third hominid after cosmonautsYuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, to achieve Earth orbit. Enos’ flight occurred on November 29, 1961.

Enos was brought from the Miami Rare Bird Farm on April 3, 1960. He completed more than 1,250 training hours at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base. Training was more intense for him than for his predecessor Ham, because Enos was exposed to weightlessness and higher gs for longer periods of time. His training included psychomotor instruction and aircraft flights.

Enos was selected for flight only three days before launch. Two months prior, NASA launched Mercury Atlas 4 on September 13, 1961, to conduct an identical mission with a “crewman simulator” on board. Enos flew into space aboard Mercury Atlas 5 on November 29, 1961. He completed his first orbit in 1 hour and 28.5 minutes.^[1]“

Recommended for reading in full —

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin report Trump Once Said the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Was Real. Now He’s Not Sure:

Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about the “Access Hollywood” tape are part of his lifelong habit of attempting to create and sell his own version of reality. Advisers say he continues to privately harbor a handful of conspiracy theories that have no grounding in fact.

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers….

Mr. Trump’s friends did not bother denying that the president was creating an alternative version of events. One Republican lawmaker, who asked not to be identified, said that Mr. Trump’s false statements had become familiar to people over time. The president continues to boast of winning districts that he did not in fact win, the lawmaker said, and of receiving 52 percent of the women’s vote, even though exit polls show that 42 percent of women supported him….

(Trump’s serial lying makes him harder to overcome, but once overcome, will contribute to a legacy as a freakish misfit.)

Justin Glawe reports Trump Is Selling New Merchandise Made in China and Bangladesh:

President Donald Trump’s company started selling a new line of Trump-branded merchandise this month and some of the products are manufactured overseas, The Daily Beast found.

The Trump Organization launched Trumpstore.com and sells a $32 Trump Golf hat made in Bangladesh and a $25 faux gold bouillion “TRUMP” coin bank made in China. The Trump Organization is still owned by the president and is managed by his sons, Eric and Donald Jr. (who promoted the opening on his Facebook page). It appears then that Trump is profiting off of foreign-made goods despite his promise to put “America first” when it comes to manufacturing.

The Trump Organization and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

“Even though he’s taken some steps to separate himself from his business, we know that he can still receive reports about the Trump Organization and that he can directly profit from the sale of those goods,” said Larry Noble of the Campaign Legal Center, an ethics watchdog group in Washington, D.C.

Trump was criticized during the presidential campaign for bashing Mexico and China for “stealing” U.S. jobs even though his ties were made in Mexico and he applied for trademarks in China….

(Trump’s cheap trinkets, crudely designed and poorly made, are appealing only to the aesthetically stunted.)

Ari Berman reports Kris Kobach Wants to Make It Harder to Vote Nationwide—But He’s Already Failing Back Home in Kansas:

….To hunt for double voting, Kobach’s office administers the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is used by 30 states to compare their voter rolls to flag any voters who are registered in multiple states and might be voting illegally. Kobach has cited the program as a model for Trump’s fraud commission. Crosscheck “illustrates how a successful multistate effort can be in enhancing the integrity of our elections and in keeping our voter rolls accurate,” he said at the first meeting of the commission in July.

But Crosscheck has been found to produce false matches 99 percent of the time. Academics from universities including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania who studied Crosscheck found that purging the voter rolls based on the program “would eliminate more than 300 registrations used to cast a seemingly legitimate vote for every double vote prevented.” Because the program searches for double voting using only voters’ first and last names and dates of birth, it generates thousands of false matches, which make double voting seem far more common than it is and can cause people to be incorrectly taken off voter rolls and even wrongly prosecuted for illegal voting.

In addition to the program’s inaccuracy, Crosscheck has serious security flaws. It could easily be hacked because states are uploading voter data using a non-secure server, and election officials are exchanging the usernames and passwords to access the server over unsecured emails. “It’s completely vulnerable and wide open,” one security expert told me last month….

(Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and vice chair of Trump’s ‘voter fraud’ commission fits well with Trump: as Trump pushes to fables about Obama’s birthplace, Kobach pushes fables about voter fraud. These tales are appealing to ignorant nativists.)

Rebecca Ruiz reports Olympic Doping Diaries: Chemist’s Notes Bolster Case Against Russia:

The chemist has kept a diary most of his life. His daily habit is to record where he went, whom he talked to and what he ate. At the top of each entry, he scrawls his blood pressure.

Two of his hardback journals, each embossed with the calendar year and filled with handwritten notes from a Waterman pen, are now among the critical pieces of evidence that could result in Russia being absent from the next Olympic Games.

The chemist is Grigory Rodchenkov, who spent years helping Russia’s athletes gain an edge by using banned substances. His diaries cataloging 2014 and 2015 — his final years as Russia’s antidoping lab chief before he fled to the United States — provide a new level of detail about Russia’s elaborate cheating at the last Winter Games and the extent to which, he says, the nation’s government and Olympic officials were involved.

His contemporaneous notes, seen by The New York Times and previously unreported, speak to a key issue for Olympic officials: the state’s involvement in the massive sports fraud. In recent days, it has become clear that the International Olympic Committee is convinced of the authenticity of the notes and that they are likely to contribute to the group’s decision to issue severe penalties….

(Putin’s Russia, like Trump’s part of America, rests on a foundation of falsehoods.)

Josh Marshall observes Flynn’s Deeds Are Much Worse Than We Thought:

….Flynn looks like a man who was desperate to make money fast and seemingly willing to contemplate almost anything to get it. Think about it – being paid by a foreign government to kidnap a legal American resident and send them to another country? Or consider, as now seems to be the case, that he was discussing taking payments to protect an indicted sanctions buster while he was serving as the head of the National Security Council – the person in the US government who has access to more secret information than anyone save the President.

I don’t have any illusions that the highest echelons of the US officer corps are untouched by greed and corruption. There is a well-tended path that top generals can and often do take sitting on corporate boards of defense contractors or operating as consultants where they can make very good money after they retire. In Flynn’s case, two years running the NSC would have set him up for putting up a private sector shingle that could have netted him a small fortune in just a few short years. Clearly, there’s more going on here than the desire to make a lot of money, at least money that could have been scooped up over three or four years rather than seven or eight months.

It is very hard not to reach the conclusion that something happened to Flynn, some clear break or event that put him on the course he was on by 2015, only months after he left the DIA.

So, Could Robotic Birds Lead to Safer Air Travel?

Birds and planes don’t mix — so some airports are testing whether drones (with flapping wings) can scare flocks away. We take you inside a trial program in Alberta, Canada.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 19m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 69.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1942, the deadliest nightclub fire in American history kills hundreds:  “The Cocoanut Grove Fire was a nightclub fire in the United States. The Cocoanut Grove was a premier nightclub during the post-Prohibition 1930s and 1940s in Boston, Massachusetts. On November 28, 1942, it was the scene of the deadliest nightclub fire in history, killing 492 people (which was 32 more than the building’s authorized capacity) and injuring hundreds more. The scale of the tragedy shocked the nation and briefly replaced the events of World War II in newspaper headlines. It led to a reform of safety standards and codes across the US, and to major changes in the treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims internationally.”

On this day in 1901, UW football goes undefeated: “On this date the University of Wisconsin defeated the University of Chicago, 35-0, to finish its first undefeated football season in school history with a 9-0 record.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Andrew Van Dam writes Donald Trump is going to build a big, beautiful deficit and rely on China to help pay for it:

Republicans’ tax plans are going to clash headfirst with President Trump’s anti-China, anti-trade-deficit rhetoric. It’s just simple economics.

Assuming they pass, Republican tax plans are forecast to increase the federal debt by about $1.3 trillion to $1.6 trillion over the coming decade, though scoring and specifics vary. This is the same debt that, campaigning in Ohio, Trump called “a weight around the future of every young person in this country.” As the debt grew under his predecessor, Trump didn’t mince words:

And he didn’t stop once he was elected:

But now that it’s time to pass a tax plan that nonpartisan observers agree will require deficit spending, Republicans are on board with growing the federal debt. Large-scale borrowing will help make up the gap in lower tax revenue while avoiding some painful cuts to government programs.

[37 of 38 economists said the GOP tax plans would grow the debt. The 38th misread the question.]

To cover that shortfall, Trump’s government and its successors will be issuing additional Treasury bonds for decades to come, with Eric Toder, co-director of the Tax Policy Center, posting that one version of the bill would grow the debt as a share of the economy by 6 percentage points by 2017, and 10.1 percentage points by 2037….

(Trump is variously con man and ignoramus.)

Michelle Goldberg writes that Odds Are, Russia Owns Trump:

But three months feels like three decades in Trump years, and I mostly forgot about these reports [of collusion] until I read Luke Harding’s new book, “Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.” One uncanny aspect of the investigations into Trump’s Russia connections is that instead of too little evidence there’s too much. It’s impossible to keep it straight without the kind of chaotic wall charts that Carrie Mathison of “Homeland” assembled during her manic episodes. Incidents that would be major scandals in a normal administration — like the mere fact of Trump’s connection to Sater — become minor subplots in this one.

That’s why “Collusion” is so essential, and why I wish everyone who is skeptical that Russia has leverage over Trump would read it. This country — at least the parts not wholly under the sway of right-wing propaganda — needs to come to terms with substantial evidence that the president is in thrall to a foreign power.

Harding, the former Moscow bureau chief of The Guardian, has been reporting on shady characters like Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted last month, long before Trump announced his candidacy. He was able to interview Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier attempting to detail Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin, and who describes the conspiracy between the American president and the Russians as “massive — absolutely massive”….

(Harding’s book is available at Amazon: Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win.)

Michael M. Grynbaum reports Trump and Russia Seem to Find Common Foe: The American Press:

President Trump attacks CNN on a regular basis. But he usually focuses on the domestic side of the network — his least favorite cable news station — making his post on Twitter this weekend about CNN’s international arm something of a rarity.

“@FoxNews is MUCH more important in the United States than CNN, but outside of the U.S., CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly,” Mr. Trump wrote on Saturday. “The outside world does not see the truth from them!”….

“Trump’s eagerness to win the favor of autocrats remains one of the most concerning aspects of his presidency,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and communications director for Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential bid. “If the leader of the free world does not champion the free press, then who will?”

For months, press freedom groups have warned that Mr. Trump’s escalating attacks on the news media could inspire foreign governments to follow his lead, particularly in countries that lack the robust speech protections of the United States. In many other countries, journalists can face prosecution, jail time, and violence for reporting critically on the government.

On Sunday, a day after Mr. Trump’s tweet, the spokesman for Egypt’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs used Twitter to denounce CNN as “deplorable” for its coverage of a terrorist attack in Sinai….

(Trump and Putin see a common foe because they have common interests.)

Shawn Boburg, Aaron C. Davis and Alice Crites report A woman approached The Post with dramatic — and false — tale about Roy Moore. She appears to be part of undercover sting operation:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias….

(James O’Keefe, head of Project Veritas, reveals himself: (1) he’s a mediocre plotter, easily caught, and – far worse –  (2) he thought having a woman impersonate an assault survivor was a legitimate technique to boost Roy Moore’s candidacy by trying to discredit actual accounts of Moore’s conduct with underage women.)

So, why do screws tighten clockwise?

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 20m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1903, Green Bay Packer Johnny Blood is born: “Johnny Blood (aka John McNally) was born in New Richmond. Blood was an early NFL halfback playing for Green Bay from 1929 to 1933 and 1935 to 1936. He also played for the Milwaukee Badgers, Duluth Eskimos, Pottsville Maroons, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. An elusive runner and gifted pass receiver, he played a major role in the Packers’ drive to the first three championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931. Johnny Blood died on November 28, 1985, at the age of 82. Titletown Brewing Co. in Green Bay named their brew Johnny “Blood” Red Ale after the famed halfback.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Paul Schwartzman reports Why a historically conservative county in Virginia is making national Republicans nervous:

….Until Gov.-elect Ralph Northam (D) won Chesterfield County three weeks ago, the stretch of suburban and rural communities southwest of Richmond had been considered reliably Republican.

Democrat Ralph Northam won the Virginia governor’s race over Republican Ed Gillespie on Nov. 7. Here are some other takeaways from the state’s election.(Video: Amber Ferguson/Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)

Yet voters infuriated by Trump, many of them women and Hispanics who have migrated to the county in recent years, are redefining Chesterfield and alarming Virginia Republicans who have depended on the area to make up for the support the party lacks in urban areas.

The results in Chesterfield are also a potential harbinger of what looms beyond Virginia, in suburbs where anger toward Trump is motivating voters bent on defeating Republican candidates in next year’s midterm elections….

(National Republicans’ nervousness comes from their support of Trumpism, and it’s not nervousness but shame they should be feeling.)

Rick Wilson writes Roy Moore Is Deplorable, and Donald Trump Condoning His Sins Is Unforgivable:

A society where nothing is forgivable is as untenable as one where every transgression is hand-waved away. The things we forgive in the name of compassion should be many. The things we forgive in the name of comity should be large. That said, the things we forgive in service to partisan tribalism should be tightly constrained.

The things we should forgive for a child-molesting, law-breaking, edge-case whackjob who will stain the Senate and the Republican party with his creepy sexual predilections, his contempt for the rule of law, his thinly-veiled racial animus, and his role in the firmament of Bannonite political arsonists? Pretty much nothing.

The judge’s behavior is unforgivable, no matter what your ideological leanings and party identification may be. That hasn’t stopped President Trump and Steve Bannon from continuing to back Roy Moore. The only people in Washington with even vaguely clean hands are in the hated Establishment, which dropped Moore like a radioactive potato after his grotesque behavior with teenage girls made the news….

(Forgiveness would require a confession of wrongdoing, but Trump admits none.)

Raphael Satter, Jeff Donn, and Desmond Butler report FBI gave heads-up to fraction of Russian hackers’ US targets:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI failed to notify scores of U.S. officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year that the targets were in the Kremlin’s crosshairs, The Associated Press has found.

Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting.

“It’s utterly confounding,” said Philip Reiner, a former senior director at the National Security Council, who was notified by the AP that he was targeted in 2015. “You’ve got to tell your people. You’ve got to protect your people”….

(Silence is injury.)

Yoni Applebaum considers The Banality of White Nationalism:

The New York Times reporter Richard Faussett recently sat down to dinner with Tony Hovater [a white nationalist], and his wife, Maria, at an Applebee’s in Huber Heights. Faussett was struck by how ordinary Hovater seemed. “His Midwestern manners would please anyone’s mother,” he wrote, calling him “polite and low key.” They had turkey sandwiches at a Panera Bread. Faussett had come to Ohio, “amid the row crops and rolling hills, the Olive Gardens and Steak ’n Shakes,” to solve a riddle, as he later reflected: “Why did this man—intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases—gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?”

….Faussett went to Ohio, he wrote, determined to find Hovater’s “Rosebud,” the extraordinary, radicalizing experience that set him on a path to extremism. His reporting contrasts the “quotidian” details of Hovater’s life with the virulence of his beliefs. Ultimately, he conceded, “there is a hole at the heart of my story,” which “would have to serve as both feature and defect,” the inability to explain a white nationalist growing out of an ordinary suburban landscape.

But if Faussett was asking the right question, he may have been looking in the wrong places for answers. Faussett was looking for a radical disjuncture to explain Hovater. But the disjuncture in America’s history is not the emergence of virulent racism, it’s the uneven, often halting progress the nation has made toward greater equality, enlarged tolerance, and defensible rights. It’s a complicated story. It requires understanding what made a man like [black Air Force captain Ed] Dwight hold the nation to its articulated ideals, despite the risks. Or what made a man like Fuller, a mason who laid the bricks for many of his neighbor’s homes, insist that he, too, had the right to live in such a house….

(‘Greater equality, enlarged tolerance, and defensible rights’: a worthy, ongoing effort.)

Fiona the Hippo, of the Cincinnati Zoo, is ready for a nap:

Fiona ready for her after lunch nap. It’s too cold for Fiona to be outside today since it needs to be 50 degrees or warmer for her to be out. #teamfiona #cincinnatizoo #cincinnati #hippo #babyhippo

A post shared by Cincinnati Zoo (@cincinnatizoo) on Nov 11, 2017 at 10:29am PST

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 48.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin Legislature assembles in Madison for the first time: “after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City. Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accomodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished. On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government. [Source: Wiskonsan Enquirer, Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, 1838]”

Recommended for reading in full —

Michael Gerson, a religious conservative, considers The Religious Right’s Scary, Judgmental Old Men:

….On sexual harassment, our country is now in a much better ethical place. And how we got here is instructive. Conservatives have sometimes predicted that moral relativism would render Americans broadly incapable of moral judgment. But people, at some deep level, know that rules and norms are needed. They understand that character — rooted in empathy and respect for the rights and dignity of others — is essential in every realm of life, including the workplace.

And where did this urgent assertion of moral principle come from? Not from the advocates of “family values.” On the contrary, James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family (now under much better management), chose to side with GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama against his highly credible accusers. “I have been dismayed and troubled,” Dobson said, “about the way he and his wife Kayla have been personally attacked by the Washington establishment.”

It is as if Dobson set out to justify every feminist critique of the religious right. Instead of standing against injustice and exploitation — as the Christian gospel demands — Dobson sided with patriarchal oppression in the cause of political power. This is beyond hypocrisy. It is the solidarity of scary, judgmental old men. It is the ideology of white male dominance dressed up as religion.

This is how low some religious conservatives have sunk: They have left me sounding like an English professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Conservatives need to be clear and honest in this circumstance. The strong, moral commitment to the dignity of women and children recently asserting itself in our common life has mainly come from feminism, not the “family values” movement. In this case, religious conservatives have largely been bystanders or obstacles. This indicates a group of people for whom the dignity of girls and women has become secondary to other political goals.

We are a nation with vast resources of moral renewal. It is a shame and a scandal that so many religious conservatives have made themselves irrelevant to that task.

(These religious conservatives may have abandoned their responsibilities; there are many others of us who are religious, in opposition and in resistance, who will hold fast.)

Jim McDermott contends (rightly, to my mind) There’s no problem with praying after a mass shooting—but what does that prayer look like?:

….When we offer “thoughts and prayers,” the commitment we are making is both to ask God to help and to take some time to listen for his suggestions as how we might contribute to that, or his point of view on what is going on.

If I say I will offer thoughts and prayers but my own thoughts don’t change or grow in any way, if the process of prayer over time leads to nothing new, no fresh choices or insight, the fact is that I am missing something. Prayer is not supposed to be a substitute for action, but a means by which we learn the right actions to take.

(We are called to action.)

Sharon LaFraniere, Maggie Haberman, and Peter Baker report Jared Kushner’s Vast Duties, and Visibility in White House, Shrink:

WASHINGTON — At a senior staff meeting early in President Trump’s tenure, Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, posed a simple question to Jared Kushner: What would his newly created Office of American Innovation do?

Mr. Kushner brushed him off, according to people privy to the exchange. Given that he and his top lieutenants were paid little or nothing, Mr. Kushner asked, “What do you care?” He emphasized his point with an expletive.

“O.K.,” Mr. Priebus replied. “You do whatever you want.”

Few in the opening days of the Trump administration dared to challenge Mr. Kushner’s power to design his job or steer the direction of the White House as he saw fit. But 10 months after being given free rein to tackle everything from the federal government’s outdated technology to peace in the Middle East, the do-whatever-you-want stage of Mr. Kushner’s tenure is over.

Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who had been in seemingly every meeting and every photograph, has lately disappeared from public view and, according to some colleagues, taken on a more limited role behind the scenes. He is still forging ahead on a plan to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a goal that has eluded presidents and diplomats for generations, and he has been credited with focusing attention on the government’s technological needs. But he is no longer seen as the primary presidential consigliere with the limitless portfolio….

(A funny exchange between Priebus and Kushner: Priebus is stupid enough to think his question would matter within the Trump Administration, and Kushner arrogant enough to think it wouldn’t matter outside the Trump Administration.)

Christopher Ingraham writes How Americans lost the stars and how we might be able to get them back:

The United States is poised to get its first Dark Sky Reserve under the pristine nighttime skies of central Idaho. Pending approval from the International Dark-Sky Association, the designation would recognize the region’s clear skies, virtually untouched by light pollution, as “possessing an exceptional or distinguished quality of starry nights and nocturnal environment.”

If you’ve lived in or near cities most of your life and have never seen a truly dark sky you may not understand why anyone would bother with this. The night is dark, and dark is dark wherever you are, right?

Not exactly. The best way to explain what the Idaho Dark Sky Reserve backers want to preserve is to show it visually. Below are two photographs: on the left, a shot of the night skies in Washington, D.C. On the right, the sky above Idaho’s White Cloud mountains, which would make up part of the proposed reserve.

Lost in Light shows how light pollution affects one’s view of the night sky:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 23m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 39% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eighty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1783, the British evacuate New York City after the end of the Revolution: “Evacuation Day on November 25 marks the day in 1783 when British troops departed from New York City on Manhattan Island, after the end of the American Revolutionary War. After this British Army evacuation, General George Washington triumphantly led the Continental Army from his former headquarters, north of the city, across the Harlem River south down Manhattan through the town to The Battery at the foot of Broadway.”

On this day in 1863, at the Battle of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga, Tennessee, “[f]ourteen Wisconsin units — seven Wisconsin Infantry regiments and seven Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries participated in breaking the siege at Chattanooga. The 15th and 24th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were among the forces that charged up Missionary Ridge, broke through the Confederate ranks, and seized the strategic location on November 25.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Ryan Lizza reports A Russian Journalist Explains How the Kremlin Instructed Him to Cover the 2016 Election:

On a recent Saturday in November, Dimitri Skorobutov, a former editor at Russia’s largest state media company, sat in a bar in Maastricht, a college town in the Netherlands, with journalists from around the world and discussed covering Donald Trump. Skorobutov opened a packet of documents and explained that they were planning guides from Russian state media that showed how the Kremlin wanted the 2016 U.S. Presidential election covered.

Among the journalists, Skorobutov’s perspective was unique. Aside from Fox News, no network worked as hard as Rossiya, as Russian state TV is called, to boost Donald Trump and denigrate Hillary Clinton. Skorobutov, who was fired from his job after a dispute with a colleague that ended in a physical altercation, went public with his story of how Russian state media works, in June, talking to the U.S. government-funded broadcaster Radio Liberty. The organizers of the Maastricht conference learned of his story and invited him to speak. He flipped through his pages and pointed to the coverage guide for August 9, 2016, when Clinton stumbled while climbing some steps. The Kremlin wanted to play the story up big….

As is often the case with state censorship, the workings of Kremlin-controlled media, as Skorobutov described them, were far more subtle than is popularly imagined. He described a system that depended on a news staff that knew what issues to avoid and what issues to highlight rather than one that had every decision dictated to it. “We knew what is allowed or forbidden to broadcast,” he explained. Any event that included Putin or the Russian Prime Minister “must be broadcast,” while events such as “terroristic attacks, airplane crashes, arrests of politicians and officials” had to be approved by the news director or his deputy. He offered a list of embargoed subjects: “critique of the State, coming from inside or outside of Russia; all kinds of social protests, strikes, discontent of people and so on; political protests and opposition leaders, especially Alexey Navalny,” an anti-corruption figure despised by the Kremlin. Skorobutov said that he overcame censorship rules and convinced his network to cover stories only twice: for a story about a protest against the construction of a Siberian chemical plant and for one about the food poisoning of children at a kindergarten….

Tom Phillips and James Ball report Twitter Has Suspended Another 45 Suspected Propaganda Accounts After They Were Flagged By BuzzFeed News:

BuzzFeed News has uncovered a new network of suspected Twitter propaganda accounts – sharing messages about Brexit, Donald Trump, and Angela Merkel – that have close connections to the Russian-linked bot accounts identified by the social media platform in its evidence to the US Congress.

The 45 suspect accounts were uncovered through basic analysis of those that interacted or retweeted accounts cited by Twitter to Congress, yet none of them appeared on the company’s list.

The relative ease of discovery raises serious questions as to just how many Russian-linked bots may still be active on Twitter, how the company identifies and removes such accounts, and whether its process for identifying accounts for its evidence was inadequate.

Until BuzzFeed News approached Twitter on Tuesday afternoon with details of the accounts, they all remained active on the platform, though dormant. But within 24 hours, all 45 had been suspended….

Monika Bauerlein reports Journalism Is Imploding Just When We Need It Most (“But we may have one last shot at a reset”):

One of the few bright spots this past year was supposed to be the revival of journalism. And to be sure, it’s been a great time for muckraking, with newsrooms bringing home scoop after scoop on the Trump administration. Subscriptions to everything from the New York Times to Mother Jones are up. And for the first time in decades, trust in news media is rising too: Today, 54 percent of the public have confidence in journalists to tell the truth, while only 36 percent trust the president.

So: Will Donald Trump, perhaps the most anti-journalism president in modern times, actually end up saving journalism?

Here’s where the story turns more complicated. Look at this picture of newspaper circulation nationwide:

No “Trump bump” there. As a regional newspaper editor recently told me, “I showed that graph to our newsroom and said: If that line keeps going, there’s no one left working here in 10 years.” Right after that I watched a presentation on news robots—algorithms that can put together credible stories with stunningly little help from humans. It’s not at all hard to imagine newsrooms populated largely by artificial intelligence a few years hence.

And it’s not just legacy shops that are imploding. Virtually every news organization in America has seen its audience decline (and in some cases crater) since the record numbers of last winter. Some blame the Google and Facebook algorithms (could real news getting caught up in the fight against the fake stuff?). Others speculate that readers and viewers are simply tiring of the 24/7 onslaught of crazy….

But then Donald Trump came along and did the one thing that could reverse this spiral: He redrew the battle lines. He brutally humiliated reporters (especially women) who covered the campaign. He cheered his surrogates as they insisted on “alternative facts” and cast the press as “the enemy of the people.” He joked with Vladimir Putin, under whose government journalists keep mysteriously dying, about journalists being spies. Like authoritarian figures the world over, the only kind of coverage he tolerated was Hannity-style fawning.

When Trump lashed out at “fake news,” when Steve Bannon called reporters “the enemy of the people,” when a Congressional candidate body-slammed a reporter, they asked Americans to take sides—with them, or with a free, fact-oriented press. And, remarkably, a majority is coming down on the side of journalism….

(Note for Whitewater : Journalism, professional or its crude imitation, fails locally when it’s no more than stenography or boosterism. It has no future.)

Gardiner Harris reports Diplomats Sound the Alarm as They Are Pushed Out in Droves:

WASHINGTON — Of all the State Department employees who might have been vulnerable in the staff reductions that Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has initiated as he reshapes the department, the one person who seemed least likely to be a target was the chief of security, Bill A. Miller.

Republicans pilloried Hillary Clinton for what they claimed was her inadequate attention to security as secretary of state in the months before the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. Congress even passed legislation mandating that the department’s top security official have unrestricted access to the secretary of state.

But in his first nine months in office, Mr. Tillerson turned down repeated and sometimes urgent requests from the department’s security staff to brief him, according to several former top officials in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Finally, Mr. Miller, the acting assistant secretary for diplomatic security, was forced to cite the law’s requirement that he be allowed to speak to Mr. Tillerson.

Mr. Miller got just five minutes with the secretary of state, the former officials said. Afterward, Mr. Miller, a career Foreign Service officer, was pushed out, joining a parade of dismissals and early retirements that has decimated the State Department’s senior ranks. Mr. Miller declined to comment….

Frontline considers Child Hunger in America:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 9h 25m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.5% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1971, a man calling himself ‘Dan Cooper,’ and popularized in the media as D.B. Cooper,  hijacked a “Boeing 727 aircraft in Washington, on November 24, 1971. Utilizing knowledge that was virtually unique to the CIA, he escaped by parachute with over a million dollars at current values. A massive search failed to find any trace. After decades of fruitless inquiries, the lead investigators began to publicly suggest Cooper had been killed and all physical evidence lost in the wilderness, although the FBI nonetheless continued the hunt for Cooper until 2016.”

On this day in 1959, I-90 opens to traffic: “Interstate 90 opened to traffic between Janesville and Beloit. Work was temporarily halted north of Janesville as the exact route was not yet determined and property not yet acquired.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Michael S. Schmidt, Matt Apuzzo, and Maggie Haberman report A Split From Trump Indicates That Flynn Is Moving to Cooperate With Mueller:

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s former national security adviser, notified the president’s legal team in recent days that they could no longer discuss the special counsel’s investigation, according to four people involved in the case, an indication that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with prosecutors or negotiating such a deal.

Mr. Flynn’s lawyers had been sharing information with Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who is examining whether anyone around Mr. Trump was involved in Russian efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

That agreement has been terminated, the four people said. Defense lawyers frequently share information during investigations, but they must stop when doing so would pose a conflict of interest. It is unethical for lawyers to work together when one client is cooperating with prosecutors and another is still under investigation.

The notification alone does not prove that Mr. Flynn is cooperating with Mr. Mueller. Some lawyers withdraw from information-sharing arrangements as soon as they begin negotiating with prosecutors. And such negotiations sometimes fall apart.

Still, the notification led Mr. Trump’s lawyers to believe that Mr. Flynn — who, along with his son, is seen as having significant criminal exposure — has, at the least, begun discussions with Mr. Mueller about cooperating….

(The New York Times, above, first reported this story. Shortly afterward, the Washington Post confirmed the termination of defense cooperation between Flynn’s attoneys and Trump’s legal team. See from Carol D. Leonnig and Rosalind S. Helderman, Flynn’s lawyer shuts down communications with Trump’s team, a sign he may be cooperating with Mueller probe.)

Meanwhile, of Congressional probes, Mary Clarke Jalonick reports Congressional Russia probes likely to head into 2018:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Republicans are hoping lawmakers will soon wrap up investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election that have dragged on for most of the year. But with new details in the probe emerging almost daily, that seems unlikely.

Three congressional committees are investigating Russian interference and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign was in any way involved. The panels have obtained thousands of pages of documents from Trump’s campaign and other officials, and have done dozens of interviews.

The probes are separate from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Mueller can prosecute for criminal activity, while Congress can only lay out findings, publicize any perceived wrongdoing and pass legislation to try to keep problems from happening again. If any committee finds evidence of criminal activity, it must refer the matter to Mueller.

All three committees have focused on a June 2016 meeting that Trump campaign officials held in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer and others. They are also looking into outreach by several other Russians to the campaign, including involvement of George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty this month to lying to the FBI as part of Mueller’s probe. New threads continue to emerge, such as a recent revelation that Donald Trump Jr. was messaging with WikiLeaks, the website that leaked emails from top Democratic officials during the campaign….

Anna Nemtsova reports An Arrest in France Freaks Out the Kremlin Kleptocracy:

MOSCOW—He was one of Russia’s untouchables: the country’s 21st richest man, a senator in the upper chamber of parliament. He is part of the circle of businessmen known for their loyalty to President Vladimir Putin and the benefits they’ve reaped as a result, a billionaire member of Putin’s United Russia party who has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in important state projects to curry favor.

Such “pocket oligarchs” earn official status, even diplomatic immunity when they travel. And Suleiman Karimov, 51, reportedly has a Russian diplomatic passport. But according to the Russian press, when he landed in France earlier this week he was on a private trip, and didn’t bring it.

Then, almost as soon he got off the plane in Nice, he got arrested for alleged tax evasion and money laundering. And the vision of Karimov behind bars splashed in the Russian press shocked the country’s elite. Many of them, like Karimov, have gotten used to keeping their fortunes, their luxury properties, their yachts, and indeed their families abroad….

Olga Proskurina, who has been covering Russian business news as an independent observer since 1992, keeps a close eye on Karimov and many other Russian businessmen and officials enjoying their lives on the south of France.

“More than 350 Russian millionaires and eight billionaires own properties in Monaco and on the French Riviera,” says Proskurina. “Their real life is abroad, so they come to Russia just to make money, creating all sorts of schemes to cover up their true deals.”

Both liberal and conservative experts believe that Russians keep around $1 trillion abroad in offshore banks accounts.

“Karimov’s case made many in the elite concerned, as he seemed to be safe with his Russian diplomatic immunity,” Proskurina noted….

(Putin presides over an oligarchy of lies and corruption, where lies and corruption are the very least of his own wrongs.)

Peter Stone And Greg Gordon report an Exclusive: Manafort flight records show deeper Kremlin ties than previously known:

Good morning.

Thanksgiving in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 27m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 21.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred seventy-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1889, “44-year-old wild-haired inventor named Louis Glass installed in a corner of the bar [at 303 Sutter Street] his newest-fangled contraption: a coin-operated Edison Class M electric phonograph fitted inside a beautiful oak cabinet. Requiring a nickel to play and having four stethoscope-like listening tubes snaking out, Glass’s creation was met with curious glances and willing customers. This was the world’s first jukebox.”

On this day in 1909, a Wisconsin man goes on trial: “A.E. Graham of Janesville was put on trial for selling oleo as butter. Oleo, an early form of margarine, was outlawed in the dairy state of Wisconsin. On January 27, 1910, he was found guilty in federal court and sentenced to 18 months in Fort Leavenworth Prison.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Jeff Pegues reports Trump Jr. met with man with close ties to Kremlin:

CBS News has confirmed that Donald Trump Jr. met with Alexander Torshin – a man with close ties to the Kremlin — at an NRA event in May 2016. Torshin had been trying to set up a meeting with then-candidate Donald Trump but ended up being introduced to Mr. Trump’s son.

A source familiar with the meeting says the two men were introduced to each other by a third party and that the conversation only last about two or three minutes. The source says the conversation centered on the men’s mutual interest in firearms and, as far as the source could recollect, there was no discussion of the campaign.

The meeting prompted attention last week when the Senate Judiciary Committeefired off a letter to Jared Kushner and his attorney scolding them for not handing over documents about a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite.”  As CBS News reported last Friday, that “dinner invite” came in the form of a lengthy email from an intermediary who said that Torshin wanted to set up a meeting with Mr. Trump and that he was interested in setting up a meeting between Mr. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.  The email was sent to top Trump campaign officials including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, campaign official Rick Gates and eventually Jared Kushner who is the president’s son-in-law. Kushner’s attorney says his client said to “pass on this” and warned campaign officials to “decline such meetings.”  But in the end Donald Trump Jr. was introduced to Torshin anyway….

Matthew DeFour reports UW-Madison dean acknowledges failure to create safe environment:

The dean of UW-Madison’s College of Letters & Science acknowledged this week a failure to provide a safe environment in the wake of a Wisconsin State Journal report on a culture of persistent sexual harassment in a university department.

One of the women who spoke to the State Journal also wrote an open letter to UW-Madison leadership Tuesday, saying her efforts to report the behavior of one professor were met with skepticism from the department’s head and warnings from the university’s legal department that she would be on her own if she were sued by the professor for defamation.

“Due process cannot be a justification for inaction or a barrier to clear and confidential reporting options and tangible whistleblower protection,” former graduate student and current administrator of the art history department Clare Christoph wrote. “Without these, campus assurances that sexual harassment will not be tolerated will continue to be meaningless and women who experience this demoralizing and damaging behavior will not feel safe coming forward”….

(There should be – and so will be – no yielding on similar concerns in Whitewater.)

The Committee to Investigate Russia notes a New Book Reveals More On Russia Dossier And British Spy Behind It:

Karin Bruillard writes Here’s the deal with all those turkeys terrorizing the suburbs:

Wild turkeys are causing troubles across the American suburbs.

The birds of late have been accused of cracking roof tiles outside Sacramento, dangerously disrupting traffic in western New York and “terrorizing” residents near Akron, Ohio. Reports of turkey aggression in the Boston area have spiked in the past three years, forcing authorities to use lethal force at least five times, the Associated Press found. When the Cambridge, Mass., city council took up the matter recently, one member told of a turkey that chased a child and her dog outside church, and another recounted coming face-to-beak with a bird outside a community gathering where the large fowl had been discussed….

If turkey-human conflicts seem to be increasing, Chamberlain and Hatfield argue, it’s because urban and suburban birds are not hunted and so do not view humans as threats. Also, turkeys are generalists that can get by quite nicely so long as they have trees to roost in at night and space to strut — particularly in the spring, when males woo females with a show that requires a sizable stage.

“They want open areas. Well, lawns and golf courses? All of these are great open spots for wild turkeys,” Hatfield said. “Suburban areas are pretty good habitat.”

Humans have changed turkeys more than we may realize: