Rolling over to those three coyotes was not an option Max was willing to entertain, clearly. Instead, he arched his back, raised the hair on his neck and poofed out his tail to make himself look as large and threatening as possible. He slowly swayed his black tail like a battle flag.
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With his tail erect and white paws out for blood, Max strategically swatted away the beasts.
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She and her husband [Max’s owners] supervised his outdoor time and noticed he would often return after 30 minutes or a couple of hours of exploring, she said.
That’s no longer enough given recent events, so the Gurrins are working out a compromise that would ensure Max’s safety and give him the freedom to smell the outdoors in the form of a catio or cat patio, which is an enclosed outdoor structure for cats still tapped into their wild side.
The structure will be built in coming days, she said.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with snow in the afternoon, and a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM, for 9h 27m 41s of daytime. The moon is in its third-quarter with 50% of its visible disk illuminated.
That same evening in Milwaukee, Donald Trump was doing what he always does — spouting hate, telling lies — and simply being bizarre. “Trump went on another rambling rant about ‘worthless’ new dishwashers, weak showers, and lightbulbs that make you ‘look orange’ at a Milwaukee rally,” said the Business Insider headline.
Two asides. One, does he really think it’s lightbulbs that make him look orange?
Two, I recall covering President Ronald Reagan’s speech many years ago in the same Milwaukee arena. Reagan was relentlessly sunny, all optimism and opportunity. Trump has moved the GOP 180 degrees — it’s all about anger, illusory threats and grievances.
It was another in a seemingly endless string of rallies in which Trump surrounds himself with sycophants. Borrowing a passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Trump’s was a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Sadly, the Democratic debate also signified little. It was another tedious, mixed-decision event that probably attracted the already decided and few others. I’d imagine many here were tuned instead to Badgers basketball as they beat Maryland on a last-second shot.
President Trump made a stark appeal to black Americans during the 2016 election when he asked, “What have you got to lose?” Three years later, black Americans have rendered their verdict on his presidency with a deeply pessimistic assessment of their place in the United States under a leader seen by an overwhelming majority as racist.
The findings come from a Washington Post-Ipsos poll of African Americans nationwide, which reveals fears about whether their children will have a fair shot to succeed and a belief that white Americans don’t fully appreciate the discrimination that black people experience.
While personally optimistic about their own lives, black Americans today offer a bleaker view about their community as a whole. They also express determination to try to limit Trump to a single term in office.
More than 8 in 10 black Americans say they believe Trump is a racist and that he has made racism a bigger problem in the country. Nine in 10 disapprove of his job performance overall.
The pessimism goes well beyond assessments of the president. A 65 percent majority of African Americans say it is a “bad time” to be a black person in America. That view is widely shared by clear majorities of black adults across income, generational and political lines. By contrast, 77 percent of black Americans say it is a “good time” to be a white person, with a wide majority saying white people don’t understand the discrimination faced by black Americans.
(These poll respondents are right about Trump, and right in their dedication to cast him into a political outer darkness.)… Continue reading
Last night (1.15.20), Rachel Maddow aired an interview with Trump & Giuliani operative (and federal criminal defendant) Lev Parnas. (Parnas sat with his lawyer while speaking to Maddow.)
Parnas played a key role in Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine, a campaign designed to compel Ukraine to help Trump smear an American political opponent.
If you’ve not heard the interview, there’s an opportunity to listen to the show as a podcast. I’ve embedded Maddow’s interview with Parnas below, and have linked to a transcript of the interview.
There’s more news about the Palmyra-Eagle School District since a state advisory board voted (6-1) against the dissolution of that district. The policy lessons are valuable to many places, including Whitewater. (Earlier posts opposing dissolution appear at the end of this post.)
Motions Before the School District Boundary Appeal Board on 1.9.20. Motion 1 (Motion to Deny) and Motions 2-4 (dissolution options, not acted on as the Motion to Deny was approved).
Unsubstantiated Savings. Although some proponents of dissolution have argued that dissolution would have worked a cost-saving overall, they’ve shown no persuasive analysis to support that contention. Nothing about dissolution would have caused a discharge of prior obligations or indebtedness, and a reallocation of obligations for past expenditures and ongoing public education is markedly different from a reduction in costs. (This is especially true overall — Mukwonago and her state representative strongly dissolution, but the effects of dissolution would not have been confined to that one district and her politician-advocate.)
Very few small communities in this area see well-considered studies on economic policy. There’s a lot of guessing, estimating, supposing, etc. – but back-of-the-envelope conjecture cheats residents of the solid standard that America can and should meet. A headline is not an analysis.
Three of the seven members of the Palmyra-Eagle Area School Board, including the president and vice president, have resigned following the state’s denial of the district’s dissolution attempt.
School board president Scott Hoff, vice president Tara Bollmann and clerk Carrie Ollis announced their resignations at the Jan. 14 board meeting, effective at the end of the meeting.
The resignations come five days after the School District Boundary Appeal Board, a panel made up of school board members from around the state, denied the district’s dissolution by a 6-1 vote.
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Hoff said one of the reasons he stepped down is because during the SDBAB’s hearing process, a member of a citizens group came forward and said a community member was willing to give $100,000 in matching donations to help the district if the current school board would step down.
“They need the money far more than they need me,” Hoff said.
One can be sure that about this, if little else, Hoff is right.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of sixteen. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 25m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 61.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, facing defeat on all fronts, Hitler moves into his underground Fuhrerbunker located near the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Recommended for reading in full —
Bruce Murphy writes Why a Voter Purge Is So Critical (‘The goal is to reelect Trump. Even if that means purging some Republican voters, too’):
Nationally and in Wisconsin, purging the voting list has been proven a great way to remove Democratic-leaning voters. “The number of purged voters has been especially dramatic in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two heaviest Democratic strongholds, where nearly one in four voters have been removed from the rolls,” the CMD found. “Milwaukee County has lost 150,954 voters since the end of 2016, a 26% decrease; Dane County has lost 88,254, a 23% drop.”
Yes, the system drops some voters in Republican areas, but GOP strategists are willing to disenfranchise some of their likely voters in return for wiping out much larger numbers of Democratic voters. Moreover, Milwaukee and Dane County have by far the most outmanned election polls, where the confusion caused by purged voters could cause the most problems. “It is very likely that thousands of voters will show up to vote in November only to find that they are no longer registered,” said CMD’s David Armiak. “Fortunately, Wisconsin allows election day registration, but this could lead to confusion and delays during what is expected to be a high turnout election.”
Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s reelection campaign, recently told told influential Republicans in Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states. Esenberg and his ever-growing staff of Harvard degree lawyers are doing their best to assure that happens.
And never has that strategy made more sense than for a president who has never had the approval of a majority of the voters. Republicans need to find every way possible to suppress or discourage voting by Democrats and independents in the 2020 election or President Trump won’t be reelected. And no state is more critical to that effort. The vote in Wisconsin, many experts believe, could decide the election, and even the purging of a small percent of the state’s voters could do the trick. Trump won this state in 2016 by just 22,748 out of about 2.9 million cast.
To Jacobs, the giveaway is that [Rick] Esenberg and others pushing to purge the voter lists only want efforts “to kick voters off the rolls,” not to add any voters who were mistakenly removed. “That tells you what this is all about.”
Conservative-backed Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly raised more than double the amount of liberal-backed opponent Jill Karofsky in the last half of 2019, and he garnered President Donald Trump’s endorsement at a rally Tuesday evening.
As the state nears the Feb. 18 primary, preliminary reports show Kelly raised $556,184, compared with $227,553 for Karofsky, a Dane County Circuit Court judge. The other liberal-supported candidate in the race, Marquette Law School professor Ed Fallone, hasn’t yet provided detailed fundraising figures for the last half of the year, but his campaign says he raised $150,000 during all of 2019.
President Trump: "Anybody have a new dishwasher? I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for that, it's worthless. They give you so little water. You ever see it? Air comes out." pic.twitter.com/uRGj7bDHOa
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM, for 9h 24m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 72.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Americans who have been wondering why President Trump has taken the extraordinary step of trying to block every document from being released to Congress in his impeachment inquiry need wonder no longer. The new documents released Tuesday evening by the House Intelligence Committee were devastating to Trump’s continuing — if shifting — defense of his Ukraine extortion scandal, just days before his impeachment trial is likely to begin in the Senate. These new documents demolish at least three key defenses to which Trump and his allies have been clinging: that he was really fighting corruption when he pressured Ukraine on matters related to the Biden family; that Hunter Biden should be called as a witness at the Senate impeachment trial; and that there’s no need for a real, honest-to-goodness trial in the Senate.
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The documents released Tuesday show what Trump has been so afraid of. For starters, they prove that Trump’s already-eyebrow-raising claim to have been fighting corruption in Ukraine was bogus. Notes taken by an associate of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, Lev Parnas — now facing federal criminal charges — show what his and Giuliani’s mission was when they got in touch with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: “get Zalensky to Announce that the Biden case will Be Investigated.” Look hard at the real goal here: not to prompt an investigation of Hunter Biden, but to score an announcement of a Biden investigation. Pursuing an announcement, rather than an investigation, makes sense only if Trump’s objective was to dirty the reputation of a leading political rival, Joe Biden.
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Trump’s push had nothing to do with what Biden did or didn’t do, and everything to do with whether Trump could extort and bully the Ukrainian leadership into casting aspersions on Biden regardless of what he did or didn’t do. That leaves Biden with nothing of relevance to say at a Senate impeachment trial — the final word on Trump’s preposterous effort to refocus scrutiny on the Biden family. That was, of course, the very push that got Trump into this mess in the first place, so to allow him to succeed now through the mechanism of impeachment would be irony bordering on tragedy.
Before Tuesday, he was best known as a little-known, scandal-scarred Republican congressional candidate who tweeted an obscene joke at Kamala Harris. But new documents from the House Intelligence Committee have put a completely different kind of spotlight on Robert F. Hyde, the Trump donor who appears to have tracked U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s movements in Ukraine.
In WhatsApp messages exchanged in March 2019 with Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who provided the committee with the files, Hyde and Parnas discussed Yovanovitch’s location. Hyde, a retired Marine, appeared to have associates in Ukraine monitoring her.
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“They will let me know when she’s on the move… They are willing to help if you/we would like a price.”
‘Innovation Center’ as Empty Rhetoric: “As a general term, innovation center doesn’t say anything specific to us, so we were from the start trying to understand what they meant by that” — Matt Jewell, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, writing of Foxconn’s chimerical ‘innovation’ centers.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 9h 22m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 82.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Nearly two-thirds of everything Americans buy from China will face tariffs, compared with less than 1 percent before the president began his anti-China campaign, according to an analysis.
Some consulting firms have already received thousands — and in one case, millions —of dollars working on the project for the state, Racine County and Mount Pleasant.
In total, among the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., Racine County and the Village of Mount Pleasant, consultants and other firms have been paid more than $5.3 million from 2017 to October 2019.
Mount Pleasant has paid out the most, more than $3.6 million during that time period. Much of that money is related to work done to secure the land and infrastructure needed for the project.
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According to documents obtained through open-records requests, in 2017 Kapur and Associates received $86,700 from Mount Pleasant. In 2018, it received $240,000; in 2019, through October, the firm had received $208,000.
That is a total of $534,700 from Mount Pleasant, and the total is growing.
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Besides Kapur and Associates, Mount Pleasant has paid the law firm of von Briesen and Roper, S.C., $2.26 million in total since 2017. Alan Marcuvitz, attorney with von Briesen, has been working with the village on land acquisition for the village and other legal matters with Foxconn.
Mueller Communications LLC, communication consultant for the village on Foxconn, has received more than $684,000 since 2017.
Ehlers, Inc., financial adviser to the village on Foxconn, has received more than $114,000 from the village since 2017.
Since 2017, the county has paid Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren, S.C., more than $575,000 for legal services; PFM received more than $259,000 for financial services; Quarles and Brady, LLP, received more than $138,000 for legal services; and Moody’s Corp., received $18,500 for financial services.
The county also paid more than $545,000 toward an underwriter discount related to bonding the county did on the project.
Since 2017, the state has paid Foley and Lardner, LLP, more than $177,000 for legal services; Baker, Tilly, Vircho, Krause, LLP received $16,500 for “third-party analysis;” and Display Supply Chain Consultants, LLC received $2,500 for a “display industry tutorial.”
Foxconn bought buildings in the cities’ downtowns, promising to employ hundreds of workers at each site. The company said it would recruit from nearby colleges.
Two years later, nothing has opened. And none of the 1,200 jobs have been filled.
The innovation centers themselves were vaguely explained as a place to foster entrepreneurship.
Matt Jewell, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, said he hoped his students could work at Foxconn. But he’s unclear what the company is doing.
“As a general term, innovation center doesn’t say anything specific to us, so we were from the start trying to understand what they meant by that,” Jewell said.
Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay: Martha Ross and Nicole Bateman highlight one of the failures of public subsidies for businesses in places like Whitewater — Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay (article linked in today’s Daily Bread post). Subsidized job-creation in those circumstances is more politicalpoint than practical achievement.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 9h 20m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s school board meets tonight at 5:45 PM.
On this day in 1922, radio station WHA is first licensed as a broadcasting station, to the Department of Physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison
Each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its Employment Situation report (better known as the “jobs report”) to outline latest state of the nation’s economy. And with it, of late, have been plenty of positive headlines—with unemployment hovering around 3.5%, a decade of job growth, and recent upticks in wages, the report’s numbers have mostly been good news.
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. Are these jobs any good? How much do they pay? Do workers make enough to live on?
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In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year. These low-wage workers are concentrated in a relatively small number of occupations, including retail sales, cooks, food and beverage servers, janitors and housekeepers, personal care and service workers (such as child care workers and patient care assistants), and various administrative positions.
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Two-thirds (64%) of low-wage workers are in their prime working years of 25 to 54.
More than half (57%) work full-time year-round, the customary schedule for employment intended to provide financial security.
About half (51%) are primary earners or contribute substantially to family living expenses.
Thirty-seven percent have children. Of this group, 23% live below the federal poverty line.
Less than half (45%) of low-wage workers ages 18 to 24 are in school or already have a college degree.
These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low wages.
Mississippi appears to be the only state where judges lock people up for an indefinite time while they work to earn money to pay off court-ordered debts. While there is no comprehensive data, legal experts who study fines, fees and restitution say Mississippi is unusual at the very least.
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A handful of states experimented with restitution programs starting in the 1970s, but abandoned them as expensive and ineffective.
Not Mississippi. Judges have sentenced hundreds of people a year to four restitution centers around the state, almost always ordering them to stay until they pay off court fees, fines and restitution to victims, according to four years of government records analyzed by Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project.
People sent to the centers had been sentenced for felonies but didn’t commit violent crimes, according to the program rules. When we tracked down the cases of more than 200 people confined there on Jan. 1, 2019, we found that most originally got suspended sentences, meaning they did not have to go to prison.
Created in direct response to the Australian Bushfire crisis, Darcy Prendergast’s new film #TomorrowsOnFire is a rallying cry for hope, in a country increasingly scarce of it.
This Tuesday, January 14th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Art of Racing in the Rain @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Dog lovers believe their canine family members understand language, comprehend events, have opinions, and can exude loyalty. Through his bond with his owner, a Formula 1 race car driver, golden retriever Enzo learns that the techniques needed on a racetrack can also be used to successfully navigate the journey of life. Stars Milo Ventimiglia (of “This Is Us” TV series), Kevin Costner, and Amanda Seyfried.
