Good morning.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:29 PM, for 11h 32m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union launches the world’s first satellite into orbit: “The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by amateurs, and the 65° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the Cold War. The launch ushered in new political, military, technological, and scientific developments.”

On this day in 1897, a union is chartered: “At the time of organization, seven-eighths of the woodworkers labored for twelve-hour days, five days a week, for no more than $1.10 a day. Further, women were employed at lesser wages and boys worked for forty cents a day. Frank J. Weber, American Federation of Labor and Wisconsin Federation of Labor general organizer, visited the city and spoke to a large audience of Oshkosh woodworkers. Four days later Local 29 initiated one hundred new members and Local 49 gained thirty-nine laborers. [Source: The Oshkosh Woodworkers’ Strike of 1898: A Wisconsin Community in Crisis by Virginia Glenn Crane]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Manu Raju, Dylan Byers and Dana Bash report that Exclusive: Russian-linked Facebook ads targeted Michigan and Wisconsin:

A number of Russian-linked Facebook ads specifically targeted Michigan and Wisconsin, two states crucial to Donald Trump’s victory last November, according to four sources with direct knowledge of the situation.

Some of the Russian ads appeared highly sophisticated in their targeting of key demographic groups in areas of the states that turned out to be pivotal, two of the sources said. The ads employed a series of divisive messages aimed at breaking through the clutter of campaign ads online, including promoting anti-Muslim messages, sources said.

It has been unclear until now exactly which regions of the country were targeted by the ads. And while one source said that a large number of ads appeared in areas of the country that were not heavily contested in the elections, some clearly were geared at swaying public opinion in the most heavily contested battlegrounds.

Michigan saw the closest presidential contest in the country — Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by about 10,700 votes out of nearly 4.8 million ballots cast. Wisconsin was also one of the tightest states, and Trump won there by only about 22,700 votes. Both states, which Trump carried by less than 1%, were key to his victory in the Electoral College.

The sources did not specify when in 2016 the ads ran in Michigan and Wisconsin.

As part of their investigations, both special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees are seeking to determine whether the Russians received any help from Trump associates in where to target the ads….

Tony Romm reports that Twitter and Facebook haven’t stopped Russia-backed RT from advertising on their websites:

Twitter has continued to allow a Russian government-supported news network to advertise on its platform, even though the tech company sounded alarms about its ads to lawmakers investigating the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In a meeting with House and Senate investigators last week, Twitter executives shared more than 1,800 promoted tweets from Russia Today, known as RT, and its three main accounts on the site. Some of the ads, valued in total at about $274,000, sought to promote RT’s own stories, including those that sharply attacked Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Twitter’s decision to share that information with Congress followed a report by the U.S. government’s top intelligence agencies, which slammed RT in January as the “Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet.” Despite those concerns, though, the news network’s three Twitter accounts — @RT_com, @RT_America and @ActualidadRT — remain fully operational. And Twitter has not banned RT from advertising, according to a source familiar with the matter.

A spokeswoman for Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Facebook, meanwhile, similarly has not shut down RT’s official pages, one of which boasts more than 4.5 million followers. Nor has Facebook targeted any new advertising restrictions against the news network, a spokesman for the social giant told Recode, before adding they are monitoring the situation. Facebook nonetheless finds itself in congressional crosshairs for Russian-sponsored misinformation circulated in posts and advertisements before Election Day.

Google is still reviewing its platform for potential Russian interference. So far, it has not yet announced any findings or steps to harden its review process, and a spokeswoman declined to comment for this story. But RT videos had been viewed about 800 million times on Google-owned YouTube between the video platform’s founding in 2005 and the U.S. government’s January 2017 analysis of the election….

(See James Kirchick’s RT wants to spread Moscow’s propaganda here. Let’s treat it that way:”It should register as an agent of a foreign government.”)

Elias Groll reports GOP Congressman Met in Moscow With Kremlin-Linked Lawyer at Center of Russia Investigation:

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher met with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya during a 2016 trip to Moscow, a previously undisclosed tête-à-tête that sheds additional light on the extent to which Moscow-based political operatives sought to influence American officials in the run-up to last year’s presidential election….

While in Moscow, Rohrabacher and his staff met with a variety of Russian officials and received a collection of documents stamped “confidential” alleging that Browder had duped American lawmakers into passing the sanctions bill, according to the Daily Beast. The document was supplied by officials in the Russian prosecutor-general’s office and raised the possibility that repealing the sanctions law could lead to improved relations between Moscow and Washington.

Paul Behrends, a top Rohrabacher aide, was removed from his job as staff director of the foreign affairs subcommittee chaired by the California Republican after news of his involvement in the meeting was made public.

A vocal advocate of warmer relations between Russia and the United States, Rohrabacher has repeatedly gained the attention of Kremlin officials, who view him as one of their few reliable allies in Congress. In 2012, the FBI even warned Rohrabacher that Russian spies were attempting to recruit him, according to the New York Times.

News Front, based in Crimea, publishes a mix of aggregated and original news in six languages, including Russian and English. One former employee alleges that it is financed by Russian security services, a claim News Front denies.

Amy Howe has an Argument analysis: Cautious optimism for challengers in Wisconsin redistricting case?:

Today may have been only the second day of the Supreme Court’s new term, but it may also prove to be one of the biggest. The justices heard oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a challenge to the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. A federal court struck down the plan last year, agreeing with the plaintiffs that it violated the Constitution because it was the product of partisan gerrymandering – that is, the practice of purposely drawing district lines to favor one party and put another at a disadvantage. After roughly an hour of oral argument this morning, the justices seemed to agree that partisan gerrymandering is, as Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged, “distasteful.” But there was no apparent agreement about whether courts could or should get involved in policing the practice.The case arose after Republicans won majorities in both houses of the Wisconsin legislature and captured the governor’s office, giving them control over the maps that were drawn after the 2010 census. In the 2012 elections, Republicans won slightly less than half of the statewide vote, which translated into 60 seats in the state’s 99-seat assembly; by contrast, Democrats won just over half of the statewide vote but garnered only 39 seats. Two years later, Republicans won 52% of the vote and 63 seats, while Democrats won approximately 48% of the vote and 36 seats.

A group of challengers argued that the new redistricting plan amounted to an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander. They contended that the new plan sought to dilute Democratic votes across the state, using two methods: “cracking,” which divides up supporters of one party among different districts so that they do not form a majority in any of them; and “packing,” which puts large numbers of a party’s supporters in relatively few districts, where they win by large margins.

The dispute went to a divided three-judge district court, which Congress has designated as the forum for redistricting challenges. That court regarded the case as an easy one. Although it may sometimes be difficult to tell when politics plays too influential a role in redistricting, the lower court conceded, this case is “far more straightforward”: The Republican-controlled legislature drafted a redistricting plan to lock in the party’s control of the state legislature, even though it could have created a different plan that would have accomplished redistricting goals without giving Republicans such a partisan advantage….

(Howe published her analysis on her own website and at the highly-regarded SCOTUSblog.)

The Atlantic Series presents The Harrowing Personal Stories of Syrian Refugees, in Their Own Words:

“I don’t think the human mind is able to understand the suffering we’ve experienced,” says a man in Matthew K. Firpo’s short documentary, Refuge. Filmed on location in 2016 in four different refugee camps across Greece—outside Athens and on the islands of Lesvos and Leros—the film allows victims of the Syrian Civil War to share their experiences. One man describes how his sewing factory was completely destroyed, leaving him penniless and starving. Another man says he was jailed and tortured for attempting to distribute food; his brother was killed shortly thereafter. Some lost everyone and everything. “Wherever I went in Syria, I saw the injured and the dead,” yet another refugee recounts. For Firpo and his production team, Refuge was a passion project fueled by “wanting to know more about the people living these headlines. I wanted to know more about their stories, about what they had lost, what they had left behind, and where they hoped their lives were headed. While news coverage focused on the problem, it often forgot about the human being.”

For more information on the film, visit the Refuge website.

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:31 PM, for 11h 35m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 945.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1941, The Maltese Falcon premieres in New York City.

On this day in 1862, the 17th Wisconsin Infantry fights at Corinth: “On this date at Corinth, the 17th Wisconsin Infantry, also known as the Irish Brigade, led a bayonet charge with the Gaelic battle cry “Faugh a ballagh!” or “Clear the Way.” The 17th Wisconsin Infantry unit also participated in the Atlanta campaign and the March to the Sea during the Civil War, and was disbanded at the end of the war. [Source: Bishops to Bootleggers: A Biographical Guide to Resurrection Cemetery, p.94]”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Steve Kovach observes that Facebook’s response to fake Russian ads is not going to cut it:

Last month the company disclosed that it found about 3,000 ads that ran during the 2016 US election that were run by fake accounts linked to Russia. While the company hasn’t shown the ads publicly, there’s evidence that they were designed to influence voters by promoting polarizing topics. It was a wild abuse of Facebook’s automated ad platform.

Facebook’s answer: Throw bodies at the problem.

Facebook announced on Monday that it would hire 1,000 people in the coming months to monitor automated ads on the social network and remove those that don’t meet its guidelines. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s almost the same response Facebook had in May after a string of incidents where users live-streamed suicides and killings. Facebook said then that it would hire 3,000 new content moderators on top of the 4,500 it already had.

In addition to the 1,000 new hires announced Monday, Facebook said it’s going to beef up its algorithms using machine learning to automatically detect abusive ads.

Ignoring the obvious fact that these moves come far too late, there’s still a massive lack of transparency about what Facebook says will make its advertising more transparent.

Here’s what we still don’t know:

Are the new employees who will be monitoring content full time staffers or contractors?

Where are they based?

What kind of training will they go through and what specifically are they looking for?

What kind of machine learning improvements will Facebook make and what kind of content will the algorithm start flagging that it isn’t flagging today?

Is Facebook working with the FEC and other governments to come up with ad monitoring standards, or is it developing these standards on its own?

Facebook didn’t say, and a spokesperson declined to comment beyond the company’s formal announcement from Monday morning….

Adam Entous, Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin report that Russian Facebook ads showed a black woman firing a rifle, amid efforts to stoke racial strife:

One of the Russian-bought advertisements that Facebook shared with congressional investigators on Monday featured photographs of an armed black woman “dry firing” a rifle — pulling the trigger of the weapon without a bullet in the chamber, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Investigators believe the advertisement may have been designed to encourage African American militancy and, at the same time, to stoke fears within white communities, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the probe. But the precise purpose of the ad remains unclear to investigators, the people said.

The apparent tactic underscores how the Russians used U.S.-based technology platforms to target Americans with highly tailored and sometimes-contradictory messages to exploit divisions in American society over the past two years….

David Frum hears A Presidential Speech Steeped in Hypocrisy (“Trump would have done better to say a few things that sound real than a great many that sound false”):

….Trump’s speech to the nation after the Las Vegas atrocity, however, was steeped in hypocrisy. He is the least outwardly religious president of modern times, the president least steeped in scripture. For him to offer the consolations of God and faith after mass bloodletting is to invite derision. “It is love that defines us,” said President Trump, and if we weren’t heartbroken, we would laugh….

But whereas Vice President Pence could have pronounced those words with sincerity, or a convincing simulacrum thereof, Donald Trump looked shifty, nervous, and false. Speeches are watched as well as heard, and the viewer saw a president who wished he were somewhere else because he had been compelled to pretend something so radically false to his own nature….

What he can do is acknowledge his own nature and character, and speak as himself, in his own tones and accents, and without the religion in which he gives no evidence of believing and in which he is so poorly at home. “This is a terrible day. We are all saddened and outraged. We’ll learn more. If any criminals are still at large, we’ll hunt them down.” It’s better to say a few things that sound real than a great many that sound false….

(Frum is a secular Jew, and so easily discerns how unaccustomed to religious discussion Trump is, however different Trump & Frum are in every other respect; others of us are religious, and candidly, we can hear the same from an opposite perspective.)

Stef W. Knight offers Good news: 10 things humanity is getting right [listing three of her full list]:

Teen pregnancies are down by 51% from ten years ago, an extraordinarily fast social change compared to adult smoking, which took 40 years to reduce by half. Experts attribute the phenomenon to better use of birth control, as teenage girls were found to be just as likely to be sexually active in 2007 as 2012.

Oil independence: The U.S.’s dependence on foreign oil continues to decrease, with even fewer imports in 2016, a new 30 year low.

The hole in the earth’s ozone layer is on the mend with the help of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which helped phase out ozone-destroying chemicals.

Scientists have solved one of Pluto’s most puzzling mysteries:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 6:33 PM, for 11h 38m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 88.4% of its visible disk illuminated.Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-seventh day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold’s accomplice, British officer John André, is hanged for espionage. (Arnold escaped capture by traveling to occupied New York in HMS Vulture.) On this day in 1958, Janesville’s auto workers strike: “On this date 4,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals 95 (Fisher Body) and 121 (Chevrolet) at Janesville’s two GM plants walked off the job as part of a national strike over GM’s refusal to agree to a contract patterned after those reached with Ford and Chrysler. The desired contract demanded pay increases of 24 to 30 cents an hour and raises in supplemental unemployment benefits and severance pay.”

Recommended for reading in full —

James West reports Leaked White House Memo Details Puerto Rico Spin: “The Storm Caused These Problems, Not Our Response” (“Meanwhile, Trump is blaming “politically motivated ingrates” for criticism):

When White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert returned from a trip to Puerto Rico last week, he got to work telling his colleagues exactly how the Trump administration could put a positive spin on the government’s troubled hurricane relief efforts, according to a leaked memo obtained by Axios.

“I hope to turn the corner on our public communications,” he wrote to White House staff, before detailing new, more-upbeat “themes” he’d like to see the administration highlight over the next couple of days. “Planned hits, tweets, tv bookings and other work will limit the need for reactionary efforts,” he wrote.

One of Bossert’s talking points for responding to criticism of the relief efforts: “The storm caused these problems, not our response to it.” Here’s a longer excerpt from the memo (and go over to Axios for the full report):

I recommend that today and tomorrow we use the general theme of supporting the governor and standing with the people of Puerto Rico to get them food, water, shelter and emergency medical care. Monday and Tuesday we can pivot hopefully to a theme of stabilizing as we address temporary housing and sustaining the flow of commodities and basic government services, including temporary power. After that we focus on restoration of basic services throughout next week and next weekend. Then we start a theme of recovery planning for the bright future that lies ahead for Puerto Rico. Planned hits, tweets, tv bookings and other work will limit the need for reactionary efforts.

The storm caused these problems, not our response to it. We have pushed about as much stuff and people through a tiny hole in as short a timeframe as possible.

Meanwhile, it didn’t take my colleague AJ Vicens long to find a town in Puerto Rico entirely cut off from the help Bossert asserts is making such a difference on the island.

“You are the first person to come here,” a woman told him. According to residents Vicens interviewed, none of the 10,000 federal workers on the island had made it to Ciales, just 45 minutes from San Juan, by the time he got there yesterday. People in the town described a scene of utter desperation. (Follow Vicens on Twitter for regular updates from the island.)

Denise Clifton reports Fake News on Twitter Flooded Swing States That Helped Trump Win (“A new study reveals how junk content—including from Russia—hit Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, and beyond”):

….Efforts by Vladimir Putin’s regime were among the polarizing content captured in the new Oxford study. “We know the Russians have literally invested in social media,” Bradshaw told Mother Jones, referring to reports of Russian-bought Facebook ads as well as sophisticated training of Russian disinformation workers detailed in another recent study by the team. “Swing states would be the ones you would want to target.”

The dubious Twitter content in the new study also contained polarizing YouTube videos–including some produced by the Kremlin-controlled RT network, which were uploaded without any information identifying them as Russian-produced. All the YouTube videos have since been taken down, according to Bradshaw; it’s unclear whether the accounts were deleted by the users, or if YouTube removed the content.

The Oxford researchers captured 22 million tweets from November 1 to November 11 in 2016, and they have been scrutinizing the dataset to better understand the impact of disinformation on the US election. The team has also analyzed propaganda operations in more than two dozen countries, using a combination of reports from trusted media sources and think tanks, and cross-checking that information with experts on the ground. Their recent research has additional revelations about how disinformation works in the social-media age, including from Moscow.

Putin’s big investment in information warfare

In studying Russia’s propaganda efforts targeting both domestic and international populations, the Oxford researchers found evidence of increasing military expenditures on social-media operations since 2014. They also learned of a sophisticated training system for workers employed by Putin’s disinformation apparatus: “They have invested millions of dollars into training staff and setting targets for them,” Bradshaw says. She described a working environment where English training is provided to improve messaging for Western audiences: Supervisors hand out topical talking points to include in coordinated messaging, workers’ content is edited, and output is audited, with rewards given to more productive workers….

John Barlow writes How partisan is too partisan? Wrong question:

The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to tackle one of the most divisive issues in election law: partisan gerrymandering. The June announcement that the court will review the problem in a case from Wisconsin has caused some to wonder: Do we really want the Supreme Court to decide how partisan is too partisan?

This misstates the problem. The question is not whether the courts should decide how partisan is too partisan. It is how to make it possible for voters to decide that for themselves.

Right now, due to a combination of polarized voting and partisan gerrymandering, primary voters rule the roost. As a result, a relatively small number of primary voters are vastly overrepresented in our legislative bodies while voters who show up only in general elections are vastly underrepresented. The most partisan voters end up deciding how partisan is too partisan. That’s the problem….

Bill Barrow reports GOP governors launch ‘news’ site critics call propaganda:

ATLANTA (AP) — Republican governors are getting into the “news” business.

The Republican Governors Association has quietly launched an online publication that looks like a media outlet and is branded as such on social media. The Free Telegraph blares headlines about the virtues of GOP governors, while framing Democrats negatively. It asks readers to sign up for breaking news alerts. It launched in the summer bearing no acknowledgement that it was a product of an official party committee whose sole purpose is to get more Republicans elected.

Only after The Associated Press inquired about the site last week was a disclosure added to The Free Telegraph’s pages identifying the publication’s partisan source.

The governors association describes the website as routine political communication. Critics, including some Republicans, say it pushes the limits of honest campaign tactics in an era of increasingly partisan media and a proliferation of “fake news” sites, including those whose material became part of an apparent Russian propaganda effort during the 2016 presidential campaign.

“It’s propaganda for sure, even if they have objective standards and all the reporting is 100 percent accurate,” said Republican communications veteran Rick Tyler, whose resume includes Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign….

Fields of Sunflowers in Castilla-La Mancha:

Good morning.

A new month begins in Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:34 PM, for 11h 41m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Valentin Blatz is born this day in 1826: “On this date Valentin(e) Blatz, founder of the Blatz Brewing Co., was born at Miltenberg-on-the-Main, Bavaria. The son of Casper and Barbara Blatz, his father owned a brewery in Miltenberg. Valentine Blatz migrated to New York in August 1848 and moved to Milwaukee in 1849. Blatz operated one of the most successful breweries in Milwaukee. [Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Archive]” On this day in 1861,  On this day in 1861, the 4th and 5th Wisconsin Light Artillery Batteries muster in: “Recruited in various towns around the state, the batteries gathered at Camp Utley in Racine for training. They spent three months learning how to transport and operate cannons before heading to different parts of the Southern front in January 1862.”

Recommended for reading in full — 

Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn writes that These Numbers Show Just How Bad Trump Has Been for Immigrants:

Between January and July of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests of undocumented immigrants with no criminal history skyrocketed by more than 200 percent, according to a Reuters analysis—jumping from 1,411 arrests in January to a whopping 4,399 in July. Arrests of immigrants with criminal records have also increased but by a much smaller margin of 17 percent.

Reuters’ findings demonstrate the chilling effects of President Trump’s crackdown—and that his policies have led to repercussions across the justice system and multiple borders….

While Reuters only looks at data through July, the Washington Post reports the trend is ongoing; immigrants without criminal records have become the fastest-growing category of ICE arrests this year….

Reuters also found that immigrants’ lives in the US are more imperiled because those who were previously spared from deportation orders under the Obama administration are now seeing their cases reopened. Between March and May, the Trump administration has requested the courts reopen more than 1,300 cases. During that same period, the Obama administration requested 430.

John Burnett reports Border Patrol Arrests Parents While Infant Awaits Serious Operation:

When 2-month-old Isaac Enrique Sanchez was diagnosed with pyloric stenosis, a condition that causes vomiting, dehydration and weight loss in infants, his parents were told that their son’s condition was curable. The problem was that no hospital in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas had a pediatric surgery team capable of performing the operation on his stomach.

To make Isaac well, Oscar and Irma Sanchez would need to take their infant son to Driscoll Children’s Hospital, in Corpus Christi, Texas. It was just a couple of hours up the highway, but for them it was a world away.

The Sanchezes, who are undocumented, would need to pass a Border Patrol checkpoint.

“The nurse told us we had to go there,” Oscar says in Spanish. “We said we couldn’t go.”

While they pondered their predicament in a Harlingen, Texas, hospital, a Border Patrol agent showed up in the waiting room — Oscar Sanchez suspects a nurse turned them in — and said he could arrange for officers to escort the parents through the checkpoint to Corpus. But the agent said when they arrived, they would be arrested and put into deportation proceedings. The couple agreed.

The events that followed at the Corpus Christi hospital are the latest developments in a national controversy over so-called sensitive locations. Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a policy that immigration agents should avoid enforcement actions at hospitals, schools, churches and public demonstrations unless there are special circumstances….

Advocates are puzzled why the Border Patrol chose to put the Sanchezes under such intense supervision, which one would expect for higher-value targets like drug traffickers or MS-13 gang members. The couple has no criminal records. They overstayed visitors visas that were issued 12 years ago. He works construction and landscaping; she stays home with their four children, all of whom are citizens.

David Corn asks Who’s Telling the Truth About the Russia Meeting: Kushner or Trump Jr.?:

For months, Donald Trump and his lieutenants insisted there was no collusion between the Trump crowd and Vladimir Putin’s regime during the 2016 election. But after news broke of the June 9, 2016, meeting that brought Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort together with a Kremlin emissary bearing dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of a secret Russia government effort to help Trump, no one could accurately say there had been no collaboration between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. So the Trump crew then shifted its denials and claimed that nothing came out of the meeting. But given that the Trump camp first covered up the existence of the meeting and then lied about its origin and purpose—until Trump Jr. was forced to release emails about the gathering—there is no good reason to accept the assertion that the session was a bust. Moreover, a review of the recent statements issued by Trump Jr. and Kushner about the meeting reveals an important contradiction between their accounts.

The emails sent before the meeting indicated that a representative of the Russian prosecutor general would be conveying government information that the Trump campaign could use against Clinton, and Trump Jr. expressed enthusiasm about this prospect. Kushner and Manafort received those emails, as well. Both Kushner and Trump Jr. have recently put out similar statements that dismiss the whole episode as a nothing-burger. But there is an intriguing difference in their recollections….

What’s different? Trump Jr. recounted that Kushner was present when Veselnitskaya discussed contributions to Clinton and the DNC that the Russians thought could somehow be used against Clinton. Kushner asserted he only heard the Russian lawyer talk about the adoption issue.

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 6:36 PM, for 11h 44m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1938, British Prime Minister Chamberlain, after signing the Munich Agreement conceding Nazi Germany’s annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia, declares ‘peace for our time.’ On this day in 1859, Lincoln visits Wisconsin and observes of agriculture that “Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure.” Lincoln’s full speech is online, and concludes hopefully:

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.” How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! “And this, too, shall pass away.” And yet, let us hope, it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us, and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.

Recommended for reading in full — 

Abby Phillip, Ed O’Keefe, Nick Miroff and Damian Paletta report on a Lost weekend: How Trump’s time at his golf club hurt the response to Maria:

As Hurricane Maria made landfall on Wednesday, Sept. 20, there was a frenzy of activity publicly and privately. The next day, President Trump called local officials on the island, issued an emergency declaration and pledged that all federal resources would be directed to help.

But then for four days after that — as storm-ravaged Puerto Rico struggled for food and water amid the darkness of power outages — Trump and his top aides effectively went dark themselves.

Trump jetted to New Jersey that Thursday night to spend a long weekend at his private golf club there, save for a quick trip to Alabama for a political rally. Neither Trump nor any of his senior White House aides said a word publicly about the unfolding crisis.

Trump did hold a meeting at his golf club that Friday with half a dozen Cabinet officials — including acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke, who oversees disaster response — but the gathering was to discuss his new travel ban, not the hurricane. Duke and Trump spoke briefly about Puerto Rico but did not talk again until Tuesday, an administration official said.

Administration officials would not say whether the president spoke with any other top officials involved in the storm response while in Bedminster, N.J. He spent much of his time over those four days fixated on his escalating public feuds with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with fellow Republicans in Congress and with the National Football League over protests during the national anthem.

(Trump, having wasted days on golfing and culture-war feuds, now blames Puerto Ricans: “…Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They…….want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.” It’s a lie that racial minorities in America work less industriously than others, but music to the ears of self-satisfied bigots. Indeed, Jennifer Rubin is right: it’s the core of Trump’s support that is, in fact, less productive than the majority of America that opposes him. See Trump vs. an America that works.)

Ronald Radosh writes that Steve Bannon Is Winning With the Old Communist Party Playbook:

As Bannon, who see himself as a student of history, may know, his tactics mirror those that gave hope to American Communists in the 1940s, but finally fell short. The CPUSA had established a third party, the Progressive Party, which ran Henry A. Wallace for president in 1948. Their hope was that the unions and others on the left would actually put Wallace in the White House, since Truman was running against Republican Thomas Dewey and racist Southern Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

That February, a special election was held to fill a vacancy in New York City’s 24th Congressional District. Four candidates ran: a Democrat, a Republican, a member of the Liberal Party, and a pro-Communist supporter of the Wallace third party, Leo Isacson, who ran on the ticket of the Communist-led American Labor Party. Unexpectedly, and to the great shock of the political establishment, Isacson won.

Isacson’s victory, said Wallace—sounding something like Bannon now—proved that his “so-called third party would be the first party in 1948.” National Democrats panicked, thinking that this race showed Wallace’s strength. They were all wrong. The local victory had no national implications, and was not repeated anywhere else. Wallace was defeated overwhelmingly in November, without winning even one electoral vote.

Likewise, Judge Moore’s victory in Alabama’s very peculiar and particular race this week does not mean Bannon can repeat his success in other states in 2018. As they say, all politics is local.

There are, though, other parallels between Bannon’s strategy and that used by the American Communist Party during the New Deal, from 1935 to 1939 and then from 1941 through 1945. During those years, one part of FDR’s coalition was the American Communist Party. At home in the United States, the party called for a “Popular or Democratic Front” against fascism, uniting Communists with Socialists and Liberals, in support of the Roosevelt administration. The party’s leader, Earl Browder, his biographer James G. Ryan writes, “strove passionately to make the Communists not merely the left’s largest party, but a fully legitimate component of the Roosevelt coalition.” Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes write that “the essence of the Democratic Front policy, a variant of the Popular Front line officially adopted in 1938, was that the Communist Party had agreed to accept a junior and hidden role in the New Deal and labor movements”….

John Meyer reports NSA warned White House against using personal email:

The National Security Agency warned senior White House officials in classified briefings that improper use of personal cellphones and email could make them vulnerable to espionage by Russia, China, Iran and other adversaries, according to officials familiar with the briefings.

The briefings came soon after President Donald Trump was sworn into office on Jan. 20, and before some top aides, including senior adviser Jared Kushner, used their personal email and phones to conduct official White House business, as disclosed by POLITICO this week.

The NSA briefers explained that cyberspies could be using sophisticated malware to turn the personal cellphones of White House aides into clandestine listening devices, to take photos and video without the user’s knowledge and to transfer vast amounts of data via Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth, according to one former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the briefings.

The briefings were held in the White House Situation Room because of the sensitivity of the topics discussed, according to that official and three other former officials familiar with such briefings, which have been given to each incoming administration….

James Hohmann explains Why the divider in chief embraces culture wars:

….This scorched-earth strategy has taken a toll on Trump’s image, but it has also kept his core supporters relatively loyal.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll published Sunday finds that most Americans already see Trump as a divisive figure. “Overall, Trump’s image continues to be negative, with 39 percent of Americans approving and 57 percent disapproving of the president’s job performance,” Scott Clement and Philip Rucker report. “More broadly, more than twice as many Americans say Trump is doing more to divide the country than to unify it, 66 percent vs. 28 percent. The margin is significantly more negative than those recorded for Obama and Bush; at most, 55 percent of Americans said Obama or Bush was dividing the country.”

“Among registered voters who identify as independents — a group Trump won by four percentage points in last year’s election — 62 percent say Trump has done more to divide the country than unite it,” per Scott and Phil. “Among Republican voters, however, about 6 in 10 say Trump is making strides toward unity. Still, confidence in Trump as a unifying force has declined even among those in his party. While 9 percent of Republican voters in a poll last November by The Washington Post and George Mason University’s Schar School had expected that Trump would divide the country, the new Post-ABC poll finds 31 percent of Republicans say Trump’s actions are dividing the country today” [Hohmann offers more examples]….

Here’s what it’s like Living With 80,000 Birds to Make Bird Nest Soup:

Resting on a steep hill on the island of San Pascual, Philippines, is a house that’s home to one man and 80,000 birds. These tiny black-and-brown birds are known as “swiftlets,” and they’re a hot commodity in the country. Their nests are formed from hardened saliva, the very special ingredient used to make bird’s nest soup, a Filipino delicacy. So, when the little creatures began to infiltrate his home, Eddie “Macoy” Espares welcomed them — he even gave them a floor in his house. And, despite the noticeable stench his new roommates bring, Espares has no problem “nesting” with his unlikely boarders.

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 6:38 PM, for 11h 47m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred twenty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1957, the Packers dedicate a new stadium: “On this date the Green Bay Packers dedicated City Stadium, now known as Lambeau Field, and defeated the Chicago Bears, 21-17. In the capacity crowd of 32,132 was Vice president Richard Nixon.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Elizabeth Dwoskin, Adam Entous and Karoun Demirjian report Twitter finds hundreds of accounts tied to Russian operatives:

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter said Thursday that it had shut down 201 accounts that were tied to the same Russian operatives who posted thousands of political ads on Facebook, but the effort frustrated lawmakers who said the problem is far broader than the company appeared to know.

The company said it also found three accounts from the news site RT — which Twitter linked to the Kremlin — that spent $274,100 in ads on its platform in 2016.

Despite the disclosures, Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) questioned whether the company is doing enough to stop Russian operatives from using its platform to spread disinformation and division in U.S. society.
Warner said Twitter’s presentation to a closed-door meeting of Senate Intelligence Committee staffers Thursday morning was “deeply disappointing” and “inadequate on almost every level.” Twitter also made a presentation to House Intelligence Committee staffers in the afternoon.

The company “showed an enormous lack of understanding .?.?. about how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions,” a visibly frustrated Warner said….

(Honest to goodness, Twitter executives must think every senator is a dolt – there’s no reputable analyst anywhere who thinks the number of Russian propaganda accounts is in the hundreds – the number is surely far larger, by orders of magnitude.)

Natasha Bertrand and Sonam Sheth write A clear picture is emerging of how Russia used Facebook to sway the election — here’s what we know so far:

Here’s what we know so far about how the Russians used one of the biggest tech companies in the world to energize and influence American voters:

They created Facebook events for rallies in several states.Russia-linked Facebook groups like Heart of Texas and SecuredBorders tried to organize anti-immigrant rallies in Texas and Idaho in the months leading up to the election. Another group, Being Patriotic, organized pro-Donald Trump flash mobs across Florida in August 2016, according to The Daily Beast.

They purchased ads that promoted outsider candidates and exploited racial tensions. The ads boosted Trump, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, and at least one ad centered on the Black Lives Matter movement. A group impersonating a California-based Muslim organization was also set up to push fake stories about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

They created accounts to amplify emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Members of the hacking group connected to the GRU created the DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 accounts in June 2016 to help spread the emails stolen in late 2015, The Post reported.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been criticized by those who say he shrugged off warnings about the fake-news epidemic on the platform. The Post reported that President Barack Obama asked him just after the election to take it seriously, but that Zuckerberg replied that the company’s power to control the spread of information was limited.

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman write that Trump’s N.F.L. Critique a Calculated Attempt to Shore Up His Base:

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump, while with a small group of advisers in the dining room of his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., asked a few members what they thought of his attack on Mr. Kaepernick. The response, according to one Trump associate, was polite but decidedly lukewarm.

Mr. Trump responded by telling people that it was a huge hit with his base, making it clear that he did not mind alienating his critics if it meant solidifying his core support.

“The president’s critics have it wrong,” Kellyanne Conway, a White House adviser who served as Mr. Trump’s campaign manager and pollster in 2016, said Monday. “They call him impulsive. He is intuitive.”

(On the contrary, Conway has it wrong: we don’t think he’s impulsive, we think he’s a bigoted American autocrat under the thumb of a Russian autocrat.)

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II has published a new book, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement Is Overcoming the Politics and Division of Fear, and here’s an excerpt:

I started to share a bit of insight I’d learned from my son, who studied environmental science in college. He told me, “Daddy, if you ever get lost in mountainous terrain, it’s important to know that there’s something called a snake line. Below the snake line, you might run into a copperhead or a rattlesnake sunning on the rocks of our Blue Ridge Mountains. But if you can get above the snake line, you’re safe, because those venomous creatures can’t live up there.” Moral Mondays were exposing the extremism of venomous politics in our state and helping folk see what dangerous terrain we had gotten ourselves into. But I kept telling them that there was a snake line somewhere on the mountain. If we could just move together toward higher ground, we’d be all right. The important thing was not to give up. The important thing was to keep on climbing. Every week I cried out against the nightmare we were witnessing to hold out the hope of higher ground.

This public proclamation was essential to our liturgy, but it was not the end. Every week when I was finished preaching, I invited people to come forward and make a public profession of their faith in a new North Carolina by exercising their constitutional right to petition their legislators in the General Assembly. They knew, of course, that they were risking arrest. Each person who had decided to make this public witness wore an armband to signify that they’d spent the afternoon doing nonviolence training at a local church. But it was an awe-inspiring sight, week after week, to watch the crowd part and make way for these nonviolent foot soldiers who were ready to sacrifice their own freedom to put our proposed future into practice. A Presbyterian minister from Charlotte, attending his first Moral Monday, said, “Never in my life have I seen the proclaimed Word put on flesh and move into such a direct action.” Some of us who’d been doing liturgy all of our lives began to realize its power in the public square….

Lior Suchard will have you see what you don’t believe: