Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fotrty-eight. Sunrise is 7:32 AM and sunset 5:43 PM, for 10h 10m 52s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.5% of its visible disk iluminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1804, a controversial treaty is agreed in St. Louis: “Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occured in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Betsy Woodruff reports Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Organized Crime:

Buried deep in Robert Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort is a new link between Donald Trump’s former campaign and Russian organized crime.

The indictment (PDF), unsealed on Monday, includes an extensive look into Paul Manafort’s byzantine financial dealings. In particular, it details how he used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States.

The Cyprus-based Lucicle Consultants Limited, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from a businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian named Ivan Fursin, who is closely linked to one of Russia’s most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich.

Mogilevich is frequently described as “the most dangerous mobster in the world.” Currently believed to be safe in Moscow, he is, according to the FBI, responsible for weapons trafficking, contract killings, and international prostitution. In 2009, he made the bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

“Ivan Fursin was a senior figure in the Mogilevich criminal organization,” Taras Kuzio, a non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Center for Transatlantic Relations and a specialist on the region told The Daily Beast.

Martin Sheil, a retired criminal investigator for the IRS, said the indictment, with its connections to Fursin, helps illuminate the murky world Manafort operated in before taking the reins of Trump’s presidential bid.

“This indictment strongly indicates the existence of a previously unknown relationship between an alleged Russian organized crime leader and Mr. Manafort,” Sheil told The Daily Beast….

(Trump surrounds himnself with men swimming in corruption and lies.)

Evan Perez, Pamela Brown and Shimon Prokupecz report Jared Kushner’s team turned over documents to special counsel in Russia investigation:

Jared Kushner has turned over documents in recent weeks to special counsel Robert Mueller as investigators have begun asking in witness interviews about Kushner’s role in the firing of FBI Director James Comey, CNN has learned.

Mueller’s investigators have expressed interest in Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a White House senior adviser, as part of its probe into Russian meddling, including potential obstruction of justice in Comey’s firing, sources familiar with the matter said.

Their questions about Kushner signal that Mueller’s investigators are reaching the President’s inner circle and have extended beyond the 2016 campaign to actions taken at the White House by high-level officials. It is not clear how Kushner’s advice to the President might relate to the overall Russia investigation or potential obstruction of justice….

John Santucci and James Meek report the White House was unaware top adviser testified before grand jury:

The White House first learned one of its senior staffers met with the grand jury hearing the case presented by the special counsel into alleged Russian meddling into the 2016 election not from the staffer but from media reports, sources with knowledge of the investigation tell ABC News.

Former Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis recently testified before that grand jury into his role on President Donald Trump’s campaign. Clovis currently serves as the senior White House adviser to the Department of Agriculture.

Clovis’ testimony comes on the heels of another Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities. As part of Papadopoulos’ admission of guilt, details of emails were disclosed that showed him describing to top Trump campaign officials communications he had with contacts in Russia….

(Manafort & Clovis: both campaign chairmen at different times during Trump’s campaign. And yet, Trump promised he’d hire only the ‘best people‘…)

Ben Collins and Joseph Cox describe how Jenna Abrams, Russia’s Clown Troll Princess, Duped the Mainstream Media and the World:

….Those same users who followed @Jenn_Abrams for her perfect Kim Kardashian jokes would be blasted with her shoddily punctuated ideas on slavery and segregation just one month later.

“To those people, who hate the Confederate flag. Did you know that the flag and the war wasn’t about slavery, it was all about money,” Abrams’ account tweeted in April of last year.

The tweet went viral, earning heaps of ridicule from journalists, historians, and celebrities alike, then calls for support from far-right users coming to her defense.

That was the plan all along.

Congressional investigators working with social media companies have since confirmed that Abrams wasn’t who she said she was.

Her account was the creation of employees at the Internet Research Agency, or the Russian government-funded “troll farm,” in St. Petersburg.

Jenna Abrams, the freewheeling American blogger who believed in a return to segregation and said that many of America’s problems stemmed from PC culture run amok, did not exist….

A panoramic view of Burgundy doesn’t disappoint —

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 7:31 AM and sunset 5:45 PM, for 10h 13m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and her Fire Department to have a board meeting at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1947, Howard Hughes’s Hughes H-4 Hercules (‘Spruce Goose’) makes its only flight:

The Hughes H-4 Hercules (also known as the Spruce Goose registration NX37602) is a prototype strategic airliftflying boat designed and built by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Intended as a transatlantic flight transport for use during World War II, it was not completed in time to be used in the war. The aircraft made only one brief flight on November 2, 1947, and the project never advanced beyond the single example produced. Built from wood because of wartime restrictions on the use of aluminum and concerns about weight, it was nicknamed by critics the Spruce Goose, although it was made almost entirely of birch.^[2][3] The Hercules is the largest flying boat ever built, and it has the largest wingspan of any aircraft that has ever flown.^{[4][N 1]} It remains in good condition and is on display at the Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, United States.^[5]

Recommended for reading in full —

Good morning.

A new month begins for Whitewater with afternoon showers and a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:30 AM and sunset 5:46 PM, for 10h 15m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1765, Parliament passes the Stamp Act of 1765 (Duties in American Colonies Act 1765; 5 George III, c. 12). On this day in 1863, George Safford Parker is born: ” George Safford Parker was born in Shullsburg. While studying telegraphy in Janesville, he developed an interest in fountain pens. In 1891 he organized the Parker Pen Company in Janesville. The company gained world-wide acclaim for innovations like the duo-fold pen and pencil. Parker served as president of the company until 1933. Parker died on July 19, 1937. [Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, p.280]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

David Graham writes John Kelly Is a Trumpist After All (“The White House chief of staff’s stylistic differences have obscured the extent to which he, like many Republicans, is aligned with the president on substance”):

….The most striking example of Kelly’s Trumpian views, however, is his commentary from Monday night on Fox News.

“I would tell you that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man,” Kelly said. “He was a man that gave up his country to fight for his state, which 150 years ago was more important than country. It was always loyalty to state first back in those days.  Now it’s different today. But the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War, and men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.”

As my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates explains in detail, this is an atrociously bad analysis of the causes of the war, but it is closely aligned with Trump’s own, bad historical sense. It is not surprising that Kelly and Trump might find common ground on issues like border security, but it is remarkable for Kelly to stick his neck out on the Civil War question, applauding the military chief of a treasonous rebellion and giving aid and comfort to neo-Confederates…..

(This is true of all those around Trump: they are in meaningful measure what he is.)

Ta-Nehisi Coates accurately describes What This Cruel War Was Over (“The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it”):

This examination should begin in South Carolina, the site of our present and past catastrophe. South Carolina was the first state to secede, two months after the election of Abraham Lincoln. It was in South Carolina that the Civil War began, when the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter. The state’s casus belli was neither vague nor hard to comprehend:

…A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

In citing slavery, South Carolina was less an outlier than a leader, setting the tone for other states, including Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

(Coates cites additional examples in his essay, and elsewhere. There is no honor in those who committed violent treason in defense of slavery. None.)

Katelyn Polantz reports Manafort has 3 passports, traveled to China with phone registered under fake name:

Among the highlights:
* Manafort currently has three US passports, each under a different number. He has submitted 10 passport applications in roughly as many years, prosecutors said.
* This year, Manafort traveled to Mexico, China and Ecuador with a phone and email account registered under a fake name. (The name was not disclosed in the filings.)
* Over the past year, Manafort traveled to Dubai, Cancun, Panama City, Havana, Shanghai, Madrid, Tokyo and Grand Cayman Island.
* Both Manafort and Gates were frequent travelers to Cyprus. “Extensive travel of this nature further evidences a risk of flight,” the prosecutor’s filing said.
* Manafort wrote on loan applications and other financial documents that his assets were worth between $19 million in April 2012 and $136 million in May 2016.
* In some months, like while he served as Trump’s national campaign chairman in August 2016, Manafort’s assessment of his total worth fluctuated. In August 2016 he said his assets were worth $28 million, then wrote he had $63 million in assets on a different application.
* Gates “frequently changed banks and opened and closed bank accounts,” prosecutors said. In all, Gates opened 55 accounts with 13 financial institutions, the prosecutors’ court filing said. Some of his bank accounts were in England and Cyprus, where he held more than $10 million from 2010 to 2013.

(And yet, Trump promised to hire only the ‘best people.’ His definition of best differs from that of every other English speaker on the planet.)

Jason Schwartz reports Murdoch-owned outlets bash Mueller, seemingly in unison:

After having generally avoided Trump’s efforts to de-legitimize democratic institutions, the Journal last week wrote an editorial calling for special counsel Robert Mueller to resign and featured a contributor op-ed Sunday afternoon that said Trump should issue a blanket pardon in the Russian scandal, including of himself.

The Journal has also called for an investigation into Democratic Party collusion with Russia, a conservative talking point in the wake of a Washington Post report that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid for some of the opposition research that led to the infamous “dossier” of anti-Trump information – but which made no suggestion of any collusion with Russia.

The points made in the pieces in the Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, not only tracked with White House talking points but were similar to those being hawked on other Murdoch properties, including the New York Post and Fox News. On October 28, the Post also ran an op-ed calling for Mueller’s resignation, while Fox News personalities have beat a steady drum calling for attention to shift away from any investigation of Trump and toward Hillary Clinton and the Democrats.

Reaction to the Journal pieces on Twitter was mostly unkind:

“WSJ edit page has gone full bats–t, now hosting an op-ed suggesting Trump pardon everyone, including himself,” tweeted Columbia Journalism School professor and former high-ranking Wall Street Journal editor Bill Grueskin.

“This is embarrassing for every good reporter at that paper,” New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted of the Journal editorial board’s call for Mueller to resign and Democrats to be investigated.

(It’s not unkind to call Murdoch’s foul approach what it is.)

So, Why are Buffalo Wings Called That? —

Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny as the day progresses with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:29 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 10h 18m 28s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1941, although not yet at war with the United States, a German U-boat sinks the USS Reuben James: “At daybreak on 31 October, she was torpedoed near Iceland^[2] by U-552 commanded by Kapitänleutnant Erich Topp. Reuben James had positioned herself between an ammunition ship in the convoy and the known position of a German “wolfpack“, a group of submarines poised to attack the convoy. Reuben James was hit forward by a torpedo meant for a merchant ship and her entire bow was blown off when a magazine exploded. The bow sank immediately. The aft section floated for five minutes before going down. Of a crew of seven officers and 136 enlisted men plus one enlisted passenger, 44 enlisted men and no officers survived.^{[1][2] “}

On this day in 1968, the Milwaukee Bucks win their first game: “the Milwaukee Bucks claimed their first victory, a 134-118 win over the Detroit Pistons in the Milwaukee Arena. The Bucks were 0-5 at the time, and Wayne Embry led Milwaukee with 30 points. Embry became the first player in Bucks history to score 30 or more points in a regular season game.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes assess Robert Mueller’s Show of Strength: A Quick and Dirty Analysis:

The first big takeaway from this morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III, and George Papadopoulos is this: The President of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team now admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some them.

Before we dive any deeper into the Manafort-Gates indictment—charges to which both pled not guilty to today—or the Papadopoulos plea and stipulation, let’s pause a moment over these two remarkable claims, one of which we must still consider as allegation and the other of which we can now consider as admitted fact. President Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators. One of them ran the campaign. The other, meanwhile, was interfacing with people he “understood to have substantial connections to Russian government officials” and with a person introduced to him as “a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” All of this while President Trump was assuring the American people that he and his campaign had “nothing to do with Russia.“….

(Forget Fox News: these are serious matters.)

Tony Romm and Kurt Wagner report Facebook says 126 million people in the U.S. may have seen posts produced by Russian-government backed agents:

Facebook, Google and Twitter plan to tell congressional investigators this week that the scope of Russia’s campaign to spread disinformation on their sites — and to potentially disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential race — is much broader than the companies initially reported.

At Facebook, roughly 126 million users in the United States may have seen posts, stories or other content created by Russian government-backed trolls around Election Day, according to a source familiar with the company’s forthcoming testimony to Congress. Previously, Facebook had only shared information on ads purchased by Kremlin-tied accounts, revealing that they reached more than 10 million U.S. users….

(The more one learns, the clearer Putin’s reach into America media becomes.)

Anne Applebaum asks Did Russia teach Paul Manafort all its dirty tricks?:

Years from now, historians may study the documents indicting Paul Manafort to understand just how the Russification of American public life was accomplished. Manafort is alleged to have laundered money, to have cheated on taxes and to have lied about his clientele. All of this he did in order to “enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States,” according to the indictment. Among other things it is alleged that he spent $1,319,281 of his money, illegally hidden from the U.S. Treasury, to pay a home lighting and entertainment company in Florida; to purchase $934,350 worth of rugs at a shop in Virginia; and to drop $655,500 on a landscaper in the Hamptons.

Some will find it ironic that Manafort did all of this while coaching candidate Donald Trump to run an “anti-elite” election campaign, one directed at “draining the swamp” and cleaning up Washington. But in fact, this is exactly the kind of tactic that Manafort perfected on behalf of Russia, in Ukraine, where he worked for more than a decade.

Manafort was first invited to work in Ukraine in 2004, by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. But Manafort left a real mark in 2006, when he brought dozens of American political consultants to Ukraine to assist in an ethnically charged election that pit Russian and Ukrainian speakers against one another, in an attempt to help Russia retain influence over the country. In 2008, he helped run an anti-NATO campaign, opposing Ukraine’s membership in the transatlantic alliance. In 2010, he was one of several advisers — the others were mostly Russians — who helped remake the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the ex-con whom the Russian government then supported for president of Ukraine. Yanukovych charged the sitting government with corruption, declared that the election would be “rigged” and finally won….

(Posterity will be rightly harsh, and view these Trump men as opponents of America’s democratic tradition.)

Greg Sargent describes The Trump authoritarian cult:

The Glorious Republican Civil War of 2017 isn’t really a battle over policy or ideology. It isn’t even quite the clash of grand agendas we constantly read about — the supposed showdown between populist economic nationalism on one side, and limited government conservatism, free trade and internationalism on the other.

Instead, the GOP civil war is really a battle over whether Republican lawmakers should — or should not — genuflect before President Trump. The battle is over whether they should — or should not — applaud his racism, his authoritarianism and his obvious pleasure in dispensing abuse and sowing racial division. It’s also over whether Republicans should submit to Trump’s ongoing insistence that his lack of major accomplishments is fully the fault of Republicans who failed his greatness….

If you’re a Stranger Things fan, 13 details you might have missed in ‘Stranger Things’ season 2:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 10h 21m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On Sunday evening, Orson Welles’s production of War of the Worlds, as the

17th episode of the CBS Radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast at 8 pm ET on Sunday, October 30, 1938.^{[2]:390, 394} The program’s format was a simulated live newscast of developing events. The setting was switched from 19th-century England to contemporary Grover’s Mill, an unincorporated village in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, in the United States.

The first two-thirds of the hour-long play is a contemporary retelling of events of the novel, presented as news bulletins interrupting another program. “I had conceived the idea of doing a radio broadcast in such a manner that a crisis would actually seem to be happening,” Welles later said, “and would be broadcast in such a dramatized form as to appear to be a real event taking place at that time, rather than a mere radio play.^[5]

On this day in 1914, the first 4-H club in Wisconsin is organized: “the Linn Junior Farmers Club in Walworth County was organized. This club was started five months after Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act which created the Cooperative Extension Service whereby federal, state, and county governments participate in the county agent system. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers].”

Recommended for reading in full —

Trump supporters are hyping the Uranium One deal, but their contentions are easily refuted:

.@JoyAnnReid expertly dismantles the Uranium One nonstory

“There’s actually nothing about the deal that is controversial”

Take notes @CNN pic.twitter.com/oj3n5Po6Ta

— Rantt News (@RanttNews) October 29, 2017

John Harwood debunks Trump’s claim that economic growth now is the best in the last eight years:

it did happen.

2014 Q2/Q3: 4.6%/5.2%

which actually is higher than:

2017 Q2/Q3: 3.1%/3.0%

magic https://t.co/TKlKQE24vZ

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 29, 2017

(Trump lies in the hope that his low-information voters won’t later learn the truth.)

Craig Silverman, Jane Lytvynenko, Lam Thuy Vo, and Jeremy Singer-Vine report Inside The Partisan Fight For Your News Feed:

The most comprehensive study to date of the growing universe of partisan websites and Facebook pages about US politics reveals that in 2016 alone at least 187 new websites launched, and that the candidacy and election of Donald Trump has unleashed a golden age of aggressive, divisive political content that reaches a massive amount of people on Facebook.

Thanks to a trinity of the internet, Facebook, and online advertising, partisan news websites and their associated Facebook pages are almost certainly making more money for more people and reaching more Americans than at any time in history. In some cases, publishers are generating hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue, with small operations easily earning five figures thanks to one website and at least one associated Facebook page.

At its root, the analysis of 667 websites and 452 associated Facebook pages reveals the extent to which American online political discourse is powered by a mix of money and outrage.

The result is hundreds of partisan news websites being run not only by dedicated American conservatives and liberals, but also by the now-famous Macedonian teens, by internet marketers, and by others who saw a business opportunity. As an example, BuzzFeed News’ analysis found that a conservative Facebook page being run by a 20-year-old Macedonian frequently outperforms some of the larger conservative pages operated by Americans.

The analysis also found that since Trump’s election, top liberal partisan Facebook pages and top-performing viral content from liberal websites are consistently generating more total engagement than their conservative counterparts….

(Propaganda arms of a  foreign power should be required to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, 22 U.S. Code § 611.)

Alex Finley writes The Recruitables: Why Trump’s Team Was Easy Prey for Putin:

From an intelligence point of view, the people surrounding Trump, and Trump himself, make easy targets for recruitment. This is not to say these people have definitely been recruited by Russian intelligence—and they’ve all denied it repeatedly—but you can be sure that Russia’s intelligence services took these factors into consideration when they approached the campaign.

So, what pressure points might Russian intelligence officers have used to get their desired outcome with Trump’s Recruitables?….

Paul Manafort: Money
Anyone who has lobbied on behalf of leaders ranging from Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko to the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos to Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang likely has no set ideology or moral compass and is motivated primarily by making money. People like this make very good targets. There is no emotion involved. Getting the person to do something is a fairly straightforward transaction. For example, getting someone to buy real estate to help launder Russian funds, in return for a handsome fee, would be a pretty simple transaction. As soon as the person has done it one time, it is much easier to get them to do something else for you…..

Michael Flynn: Money, Ideology, Ego
Flynn was at the top of his game as director of intelligence at JSOC, the Joint Special Operations Command. During his tenure, JSOC became a lean fighting machine, able to execute a hit on a target in a war zone and immediately process any actionable intelligence in order to hit the next target immediately, before the bad guys could move on. He moved up the intelligence ladder and landed the top spot at the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012. Here, the Peter Principle quickly set in. Castigated for his lack of vision for the agency, his inability to manage a large organization, his unconventional approach to counterterrorism, and his “Flynn facts,” it became evident in Washington circles that Flynn was over his head. President Barack Obama fired him….

Jared Kushner: Money, Coercion
Kushner had a rocky entrée into Manhattan real estate. His purchase of 666 Fifth Ave. at $1.8 billion in 2007—that is, just before the market tanked—was perhaps not the strongest display of business acumen. And now, with payments due and business going badly, he was in a pickle. Perhaps the Russians had a great way for him to get out of that pickle. So they introduced him in December 2016 to Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state investment bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, who would have made it clear that he was in a position to help….

A short video offers an overview of The Facts on America’s Opioid Epidemic:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 7:26 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 10h 23m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 65.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

It’s a Black Tuesday on this day in 1929, on which the United States suffers the worst stock market crash in her history, with the twelve-year Great Depression following. On this day in 1864, the 38th Wisconsin Infantry participates in a reconnaissance mission to Harper’s Run, Virginia.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Susan Hennessey, Benjamin Wittes ponder Seven Frequently Asked Mueller Indictment Questions for Which We Don’t Have the Answers:

Let’s start with what we know about the indictment in the Mueller investigation.

Late last night, CNN broke the bombshell story that Friday afternoon, the first charges in the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were filed:

A federal grand jury in Washington, DC, on Friday approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to sources briefed on the matter.

The charges are still sealed under orders from a federal judge. Plans were prepared Friday for anyone charged to be taken into custody as soon as Monday, the sources said. It is unclear what the charges are.

Reuters and the Wall Street Journal confirmed the report shortly thereafter.

In short, someone under investigation in the Mueller investigation appears to have been indicted for something and may be arrested at some point.

End of list.

And while that alone is a genuine bombshell, the much more important point at this stage here is how little we do know and, thus, how few conclusions we can reasonably draw at this point. Below is effort to walk through the many unanswered questions that are kicking around today. Our intention here to emphasize how little we can responsibly say about it and guide people away from getting too far ahead of the story.

Toward that end, here are seven frequently asked questions we don’t know the answer to [list follows]….

(Dine well: Hennessey and Wittes, and their colleagues at Lawfare offer a healthful meal; Trump and his ilk peddle & consume a foul analytical cusine, variously the worst of America or Russia.)

Paul Rosenzweig, also of Lawfare, offers Unpacking Uranium One: Hype and Law:

The latest instance of “what-aboutism” is the House Republican decision to open an investigation of the Uranium One transaction—the allegation that Hillary Clinton transferred control of 20% of America’s uranium mining output to a Russian company, in exchange for substantial contributions to the Clinton Foundation from the executives of that same Russian company. Perhaps fearing future revelations of Trump’s closeness to Russia, the evident purpose of the investigation is to establish a “Hillary too” counterpoint. Based on what is currently in the public record, little, if anything about the allegation is plausible. In this post, I want to summarize the legal context and known facts regarding the transfer and put the allegations of impropriety in context. (I focus exclusively on the transfer and the U.S. government’s approval of it. I am not, in this post, considering the evidence—such as it is—of donations to the Clinton Foundation. My reasoning is simple: if there is no “quo” to be given, the question of a “quid” is moot..)….

(Trumpism uses no rhetorical trick more often than whataboutism, the Soviet and Russian technique of diverting attention to one’s own wrongs by accusing another of misconduct rather than denying or refuting the original charges.)

Sharon LaFraniere and Andrew E. Kramer report Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin:

Natalia V. Veselnitskaya arrived at a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 hoping to interest top Trump campaign officials in the contents of a memo she believed contained information damaging to the Democratic Party and, by extension, Hillary Clinton. The material was the fruit of her research as a private lawyer, she has repeatedly said, and any suggestion that she was acting at the Kremlin’s behest that day is anti-Russia “hysteria.”

But interviews and records show that in the months before the meeting, Ms. Veselnitskaya had discussed the allegations with one of Russia’s most powerful officials, the prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika. And the memo she brought with her closely followed a document that Mr. Chaika’s office had given to an American congressman two months earlier, incorporating some paragraphs verbatim.

The coordination between the Trump Tower visitor and the Russian prosecutor general undercuts Ms. Veselnitskaya’s account that she was a purely independent actor when she sat down with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and Paul J. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman. It also suggests that emails from an intermediary to the younger Mr. Trump promising that Ms. Veselnitskaya would arrive with information from Russian prosecutors were rooted at least partly in fact — not mere “puffery,” as the president’s son later said….

(A connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, wishing to remain a connected lawyer in Putin’s Russia, would not have met members of Trump’s family without prior Kremlin support.)

Russia’s had an easy time of polluting Twitter with bots filled with Putin’s lies:

As Twitter prepares to face Congress next week, see how easy it was for Russians to deploy bot armies in 2016 @MSNBC https://t.co/iiVHuDotmd

— Jo Ling Kent (@jolingkent) October 27, 2017

(Nota bene: Putin’s lies become Trump’s talking points, and indeed Trump knows Russian techniques so well they come reflexively to him.)

Consider How Da Vinci ‘Augmented Reality’ — More Than 500 Years Ago:

We may think of Leonardo Da Vinci as an artist, but he was also a scientist. By incorporating anatomy, chemistry, and optics into his artistic process, Da Vinci created an augmented reality experience centuries before the concept even existed. This video details how Da Vinci made the Mona Lisa interactive using innovative painting techniques and the physiology of the human eye.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 5:51 PM, for 10h 26m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 55.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1726, the first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is published as two volumes. On this day in 1892, a fire strikes Milwaukee’s Third Ward: “an exploding oil barrel started a small fire in Milwaukee. It spread rapidly and by morning four people had died, 440 buildings were destroyed, and more than 1,900 people in the Irish neighborhood were left homeless. It was the most disastrous fire in Milwaukee’s history.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Jack Shafer writes Week 23: Mueller Bombs Trump’s Big Week (“The president was thrilled to turn the tables on the Democrats, but news the grand jury had filed charges made the celebration look premature”):

Fortified by news in the Washington Post that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the oppo-research outfit Fusion GPS to produce the Steele Dossier, President Donald Trump overran his opponents’ positions this week. Splattering them with half-truths and hyperbole, Trump charged that “the whole Russian thing” was a “hoax” and an excuse for Democrats unwilling to accept that they lost the election. Then he rolled in a grenade, calling the dossier “fake.” Finally, he sparked his flamethrower to life and hosed his political foes with rhetorical fire by invoking the uranium deal in none-dare-call-it-conspiracy style, describing Uranium One’s sale to a Russian company during the Obama era as the equal of Watergate.

At least that’s how it looked in Trump’s version of the war movie until late Friday, when it turned out that the president was rushing to take the wrong hill. First, the conservative Washington Free Beacon website—funded by a billionaire from the never-Trump movement—’fessed to having paid for Fusion GPS’s original anti-Trump work before the Clinton Democrats took over the payments. Then CNN reported that special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III had fired a bunker buster, bringing his first indictment in the probe. The identity of the person charged is under seal still, CNN reported, and will remain so until the person is arrested, possibly as soon as Monday. Will it be Paul Manafort, whom prosecutors reportedly all but promised to indict? It will be a long weekend of rampant speculation until the scoop is confirmed.

(Be not distracted: Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, etc. will say anything, however absurd the accusations, to distract from the methodical and lawful investigation Mueller leads. Obsessive, ignorant Fox viewers feast on lies, diversionary accusations, and contempt for – so to speak – the regular order of American political and legal tradition. Centuries of that evolving regular order are more powerful than their many lies.)

Josh Gerstein reports Manafort realtor called to testify before grand jury in Russia probe (“The realtor, who helped Manafort buy the Alexandria apartment recently raided by the FBI, was called last week by prosecutors working under special counsel Robert Mueller”):

The realtor who helped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort buy the Virginia condo that was recently raided by the FBI testified last week before the federal grand jury hearing testimony in Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, POLITICO has learned.

The real estate agent, Wayne Holland of Alexandria, Virginia-based McEnearney Associates, appeared before the Washington-based grand jury after a federal judge rejected the firm’s lawyer’s bid to quash subpoenas for testimony and records about various real estate transactions.

The broker’s appearance before the grand jury is one of few concrete indications of the leads Mueller’s prosecutors are pursuing as they investigate Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. The investigation encompasses lobbying work done by Manafort as well as possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials….

(Manafort, Flynn, Kushner, Trump, Putin: those are the real subjects of concern. Hillary Clintion colluding with Russia? Uranium One? No, those are distrations for deplorables, diversions for the dim-witted.)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner reports Cambridge Analytica used data from Facebook and Politico to help Trump (“Speech by company executive contradicts denial by Trump campaign that claimed the company used its own data and Facebook data to help the campaign”):

….This week, the group became the focus of a new controversy after the Daily Beast reported that the company’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, had contacted Julian Assange last year. Nix allegedly asked the WikiLeaks founder whether he could assist in releasing thousands of emails that had gone missing on a private server that had been used by Hillary Clinton. Assange confirmed the contact but said the offer was rejected.

The news prompted a top former campaign official, Michael Glassner, who was executive director of the Trump election campaign, to minimise the role Cambridge Analytica played in electing Trump, despite the fact that it paid Cambridge Analytica millions of dollars in fees.

In a statement on Wednesday, Glassner said that the Trump campaign relied on voter data owned by the Republican National Committee to help elect the president.

“Any claims that voter data from any other source played a key role in the victory are false,” he said.

But that claim is contradicted by a detailed description of the company’s role in the 2016 election given in May by a senior Cambridge Analytica executive.

Speaking at a conference in Germany, Molly Schweickert, the head of digital at Cambridge Analytica, said that Cambridge Analytica models, which melded the company’s own massive database and new voter surveys, were instrumental in day-to-day campaign decisions, including in helping determine Trump’s travel schedule.

The company’s models also helped drive decisions on advertising and how to reach out to financial donors.

Schweickert said Cambridge Analytica started working with the Trump campaign in June 2016….

(Of course Cambridge Analytica helped Trump. Bannon, Kushner, the Mercers: they were all leaderrs or key funders, for goodness’ sake.)

Rebecca Ballhaus reports Trump Donor Asked Data Firm If It Could Better Organize Hacked Emails (“August 2016 exchange between Rebekah Mercer and Cambridge Analytica’s CEO shows efforts to leverage Clinton-related messages”):

Trump donor Rebekah Mercer in August 2016 asked the chief executive of a data-analytics firm working for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign whether the company could better organize the Hillary Clinton-related emails being released by WikiLeaks, according to a person familiar with their email exchange.

The previously undisclosed details from the exchange between Ms. Mercer and Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix show how an influential Trump supporter was looking to leverage the hacked Clinton-related messages to boost Mr. Trump’s campaign.

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Nix emailed Ms. Mercer and some company employees that he had reached out to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to offer help organizing the Clinton-related emails the website was releasing. The new details shed light on the timing of Mr. Nix’s outreach to Mr. Assange, which came before his company began working for the Trump campaign….

(Cambridge Analytica even sought Russian catspaw Julian Assange’s help on behalf of Trump.)

Great Big Story tells of The Last of the French Cowboys:

Since the 1500s, the residents of Camargue, France, have been caring for and tending to the rare, all-white horses local to the area. The horses come from a long and storied legacy, thought to date back to prehistoric times. Marie Pagès, one of the Guardians of the Camargue, has been nurturing her horses for the past 28 years. Sadly, as the population of Camargue horses diminishes, so goes with it the tradition of the horsemen. Still, Marie hopes that the passion that she and her fellow cowboys share for their stewardship will keep their legacy alive.