FREE WHITEWATER

Monthly Archives: November 2016

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.20.16

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-six.  (The average November high here is about forty-six.)  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 32m 18s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 58% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading (or hearing) in full —

Katherine J. Cramer observes that For years, I’ve been watching anti-elite fury build in Wisconsin. Then came Trump: “Almost a decade ago, I selected 27 communities in Wisconsin and asked locals to help me identify a coffee klatch in each. Some of these communities were urban or suburban, but the majority were rural. (I selected the communities by first dividing the state into eight regions, based on a variety of political, economic, and social characteristics, and then sampling a small town and a larger one in each. I later supplemented those selections with additional ones, to add variety. The result was a fairly representative swath of non-urban Wisconsin.)  I then walked into the gas station — or diner or other location — that I’d been directed to, at the appropriate time, and introduced myself as a public opinion scholar from the state’s flagship university. They tended to be welcoming, maybe in part because my thick Wisconsin accent made me less of a stranger.  Once I passed out my business cards, handed out tokens of appreciation like Badger football schedules, and turned on my recorder, I asked them, “What are the big concerns of people in this community?”  Regardless of geography, people in most of these communities talked about their concerns about health care, jobs, and taxation. But in the rural places and small towns, people expressed a deeply felt sense of not getting their “fair share” — defined in different ways. They felt that they didn’t get a reasonable proportion of decision-making power, believing that the key decisions were made in the major metro areas of Madison and Milwaukee, then decreed out to the rest of the state, with little listening being done to people like them.”

Anne Applebaum contends that The Radical Populism Phenomenon in Politics Offers a Kind of Magical Thinking:

Daniel Kahn Gillmor and Jay Stanley offer A Few Easy Steps Everyone Should Take to Protect Their Digital Privacy: “Much of the privacy protection we need in today’s world can’t happen without technological and legislative solutions, and the ACLU will continue leading the fight for digital security and privacy through our litigation and advocacy efforts. But there are simple steps that everyone can take to improve their digital privacy. While there are many advanced techniques that expert technologists can deploy for much greater security, below are some relatively basic and straightforward steps that will significantly increase your protection against privacy invasions and hacks.”

In the WSJ, Nick Timiraos finds Inside Donald Trump’s Economic Team, Two Very Different Views: “One group, which appeared ascendant in the closing weeks of the campaign, largely rejects mainstream economic thinking on trade and believes eliminating trade deficits should be an overarching goal of U.S. policy. That camp views sticks—tariffs on U.S. trading partners and taxes on companies that move jobs abroad—as critical tools to reverse a 15-year slide in incomes for middle-class Americans.  The opposing camp is closer to the traditional GOP center of gravity on taxes and regulation and includes many policy veterans staffing the transition team and advising Vice President-elect Mike Pence.  Those advisers have long championed supply-side economics and reject the hard-line position on trade that one side’s gain must come at the other’s expense. By offering more carrots—slashing red tape and taxes to make the U.S. the top destination for businesses—they say stronger growth will obviate any need for trade protectionism.  “It is the supply-siders versus the zero-sum crowd,” said Andy Laperriere, political strategist at research firm Cornerstone Macro LP who closely watches such policy developments.”

Filmmaker JT Singh’s recorded A Quick, Visual Journey Through Shanghai.  Shanghai, at a fast pace —

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.19.16

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

We’ve a cloudy & windy day ahead in this city, with a high of thirty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 34m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full — 

Steven Horwitz writes about The double thank you of the market: “It is a constant struggle to persuade people that the market is not an arena of battle where one side defeats the other. It is a process of social cooperation built on the foundation of mutual benefit. Critics of markets continue to argue they make us meaner and nastier and that they create and exploit oppositional behavior. These arguments are at least as old as Marx, but they never seem to go away despite piles of evidence to the contrary.  As Deirdre McCloskey has argued in her trilogy on the bourgeoisie, not only does the market allows us to express a variety of virtuous behavior, but our participation in exchange and profit-seeking inculcates and encourages those virtues. Markets call upon our good behavior and cause us to engage in more of it as a result, and we have experimental evidence to support these claims.  The problem is many of the most frequent manifestations of the civilized behavior markets instill in us are so deeply habitual that we only notice them when we are faced with a striking contrast.”

At the Times, Adam Goldman offers Why Democrats Now Need the F.B.I. Director, James Comey: “The positions [on terrorism] taken by Mr. Comey in recent years could put him at odds with not just Mr. Sessions but other members of Mr. Trump’s national security team. “Given the recent slate of appointments from the president-elect, F.B.I. Director Comey may well turn out to be a bulwark against the worst abuses and provide some defense of the rule of law,” said Faiza Patel of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, who is a frequent critic of the F.B.I.”

A decade ago, Daniel Golden wrote a book about how students’ families bought their way into elite schools. Trump’s current son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was one of the book’s subjects: “I would like to express my gratitude to Jared Kushner for reviving interest in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” I have never met or spoken with him, and it’s rare in this life to find such a selfless benefactor. Of course, I doubt he became Donald Trump’s son-in-law and consigliere merely to boost my lagging sales, but still, I’m thankful.  My book exposed a grubby secret of American higher education: that the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations. It reported that New Jersey real estate developer Charles Kushner had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard University in 1998, not long before his son Jared was admitted to the prestigious Ivy League school. At the time, Harvard accepted about one of every nine applicants. (Nowadays, it only takes one out of twenty.)  I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision. “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard,” a former official at The Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey, told me. “His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not.”

Rich Kirchen writes that the Milwaukee Bucks’ entertainment-block design is modern interpretation of [the] city’s industry: “The entertainment block is a central element of the master design plan for the $500 million arena and surrounding development.  The Bucks said the area is being designed for year-round community use and will feature a mixture of dining, entertainment and retail.The block will serve as an important connection between the new arena and existing commercial activity along Old World Third Street, the Bucks said.  A promenade along the arena will include public art, gardens, a signature water feature and event lawns, the Bucks said.”

So how are names and words formed?  Name Explain briefly…explains:

America, City, Federal Government, Local Government, Politics

The National-Local Mix

by  •  • 2 Comments

localI’ve written at FREE WHITEWATER for over nine years, and I’ll be writing here for far longer to come.  A good friend asked me today if I’d given up on local coverage, and the easy answer is…not at all.  We’ve a small and beautiful city, well worth talking about and contending over.   A few quick remarks for longtime readers, and for some new readers who’ve come to FW since the election —

Plain Views.  I’ve written plainly before, and I’ll do the same now.  My views are libertarian, from a family that was liberty-oriented before the term libertarian became popular. (Dean Russell sometimes gets credit for boosting the word libertarian in 1955, but of course the ideas involved are far older.)  My family came here before the Revolution, and they and many others have held liberty-centric political views throughout their time on this continent, using other descriptions for their politics before libertarian took off in the second half of the twentieth century.

One could say less in the hope of pleasing more, but that’s likely futile.  I would happily decline an invitation to a gathering that favored acceptance over conviction (in the improbable & unwelcome event that anyone would send such an invitation to me).

The Limits of Local.  One of the themes of this site is that towns like ours accomplish the most when they embrace American and not local standards for politics & economics.  In fact, hyper-local standards in politics & economics are lesser standards, easy and comfortable for the myopic but inadequate for a competitive people.  There are a few websites or newspapers nearby that are hyper-local in focus.  That makes sense if one’s writing about a sewing club; it’s both sad and laughable as one’s way of considering political, economic, or fiscal policy.  If hyper-local politics were enough, then one might as well embrace a small village in authoritarian Russia as a small town in democratic America.

Putin’s not detestable because he speaks Russian; he’s detestable because he’s returned oppression to Russia.  The undeniable prettiness of particular Russian villages lessens Putin’s many sins, and Russia’s hardships, not in the slightest.

In same way, Whitewater is not beautiful simply because, so to speak, she’s beautiful; she’s beautiful because America is a free country of which Whitewater is one part.  Hyper-localism at the price of national standards reminds of nothing so much as Socrates’s remarks on the unexamined life.

Whitewater’s Near Term.  I’m an optimist about Whitewater’s longterm, but these next several years will prove difficult for this small, midwestern city.  Whitewater has significant poverty (especially child poverty), and limited growth.  Considering the principal possibilities of a drastic change of course now or a renaissance after continued decline, I’d guess we’ll prove an example of a city that chooses poorly, declines relatively, and rebounds only afterward.   (It needn’t have been this way, but too many mistakes have taken us past the point of a different course.)

Many have enjoyed the James & Deborah Fallows American Futures series on thriving small towns, and it’s disappointing to write that Whitewater’s near future probably will not be like that of those growing towns; there’s much that’s disconcerting about surveying a city – however naturally pretty – that’s a cautionary tale of what not to do.  Disconcerting, but not hard – the hardship of the wrong course will not fall on someone writing about our city, but on the many vulnerable people within it.

The future will write the history of the present; with few exceptions, it will be unkind to the last generation of local policymakers.

Logo.  When I write about local topics, I’ll add the logo that appears in the upper-left corner of this post.

The Mix of National and Local.  Most people in our city, or any other, are naturally sharp.  It’s a libertarian teaching – because it is true and always has been – that the overwhelming number of people are capable and clever (and so need less governmental meddling than they receive).  People who voted for one major party candidate or another are not worse for doing so.  It’s impossible that Americans were fundamentally good until a few weeks ago.

Voting for Clinton or Trump did not make the average person better or worse.  I don’t write this to ingratiate – that wouldn’t be my way, one can guess – but because saying so is consistent with what I have always believed about people.  (In any event, if someone who voted his or her conscience needs reassurance now, he or she should think more carefully.)

Trump is a fundamentally different candidate from those who have come before him.  Not grasping this would be obtuse.  Writing only about sewing circles or local clubs or a single local meeting while ignoring Trump’s vast power as president – and what it will bring about – would be odd.

Someone in Tuscany, circa 1925, had more to write about than the countryside.

One may think otherwise, of course.  It’s simply unrealistic to expect a libertarian to think otherwise (at least if the term is to have any meaning).

I’m not worried about posting both national and local topics, as though some nationally-focused posts will detract from local coverage.  The local die has been cast.  Describing near term local events is now careful narration more than advocacy.  There’s much to say, and in detail, but for local policymakers in this town there’s little room to move.  Perhaps the shifts they can make in the near future will still help those in need.

These will prove, I think, challenging times for those both near and far.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.18.16

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

The week winds down in Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of sixty-six.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 4:28 PM, for 9h 36m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full:

Brendan Nyhan asks Is the Slide Into Tribal Politics Inevitable?: “Donald J. Trump’s victory could well push the American party system toward a clash between an overwhelmingly white ethnic party and a cosmopolitan coalition of minority groups and college-educated whites….Mr. Trump’s campaign may set in motion a process that reorients American politics toward the cosmopolitanism versus nationalism divide that he emphasized, reconfiguring our party system and shaping our politics for decades to come. The power of social identity suggests that such a dynamic could be difficult to stop once set in motion…Despite all the attention paid to economic anxiety as the basis for Mr. Trump’s appeal, the evidence to date is more consistent with his brand of identity politics being the most important cause of this shift in voting patterns from 2012 (though of course economic anxiety and group animus are not mutually exclusive).”

Conservative Jennifer Rubin wonders Who will stand up to Trump?: “Over and over again during the campaign, GOP Senate and House incumbents and challengers swore up and down that they would speak up and act as a brake on Trump. They have done virtually nothing so far. If they don’t keep their word, voters in 2018 and 2020 should boot them out. Conscientious center-right candidates should be prepared to challenge spineless Republicans in the primaries or general elections. There may even be instances in which a sensible centrist Democrat needs defending or support to bolster the backstop against Trump excesses. Millennials, in particular, should be prepared to go up against the new insiders, the Trumpkinized GOP. Remember, dissent can be the highest form of patriotism.”

At Reason, Shikha Dalmia explains Why Minorities Will Save American Constitutional Traditions in the Age of Trump: “The American right has long been telling itself a simple morality tale that goes something like this: The white Christian establishment is the original source and continuing guardian of America’s tradition of liberty, free markets and limited government and minorities are a threat to it because they don’t share the same attachments. One of the major arguments that restrictionist right-wing pundits make for clamping down on immigration is that immigrants, hailing from Big Government countries, dilute these American principles.  This has always been nonsense. But Donald Trump’s election has turned this story on its head given that whites are the ones who voted for him because they wanted economic nationalism and protectionism….Trump is a natural authoritarian who ran on a platform that blended populist economic policies with an aggressive law-and-order state. So he has promised to shut down trade and immigration to protect the American working class and use the strong arm of the government to bend businesses to his will – forcing them to stay in the country and hire workers at wages he mandates. (Hence his flirtation late in the campaign with a $15 minimum wage, even though it departs from his party’s orthodoxy.)”

For Russia, The Hacking Must Go On: “The U.S. election may be over, but Russia is still hacking the United States.  But the goal appears to have shifted from sowing chaos to gathering intelligence — at least for the time being. According to cybersecurity experts, the November 9 attacks was carried out by the hacking group known as Cozy Bear, which is believed to be tied to the FSB.  It targeted think tanks, NGOs, and academic researchers focusing on international security issues.  And according to the same experts, it specifically targeted people who may be associated with the incoming U.S. administration…Vladimir Putin clearly believes he is on a roll, racking up one victory after another over the West.  He sees his goal of undermining NATO, the EU, transatlantic relations, and the post-Cold War security order as being in sight.  And he’s not going to let up until he reaches it.”

Visitors to Central Park will notice a new welcoming committee:

Federal Government, Language, Trump

Kakistocracy

by  •  •  Comments

There’s a vast difference between the average Trump supporter (similar in most ways to most people) and the people who served in the Trump Campaign and who will serve in a Trump Administration (composed of generous helpings of mediocrities, liars, or bigots).

Ryan Lizza’s found the Greek term kakistocracy, a term that will apply nicely to a Trump Administration:

The Greeks have a word for the emerging Trump Administration: kakistocracy. The American Heritage Dictionary defines it as a “government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.” Webster’s is simpler: “government by the worst people.”

The term’s likely to grow in use: Trump’s doing his very best to build an administration of the very worst officials.

History, Immigration, Law, Liberty

Trump Surrogate Defends Precedent of Internment Camps

by  •  •  Comments

Carl Higbie, a Trump surrogate, while speaking to Megyn Kelly on Fox News suggested the internment of the Japanese during the Second World War as a precedent for a registry of Muslim immigrants to America. Kelly rightly rejected the precedent, as the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War and the Korematsu decision upholding that internment have been considered – at least until recently, it seems – among the worst civil liberties violations of that era.

What was unmentioned only weeks ago is now part of our political discussion; what is part of our political discussion now may yet become policy in the new administration.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.17.16

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

Thursday in this small Midwestern city will be unseasonably mild, with a high of sixty-nine under partly cloudy skies. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 4:29 PM, for 9h 38m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 87.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Worth reading in full —

Leonid Ragozin contends that The ‘us and them’ divide worked for Putin and it will work for Trump: “I can see how Trump can appeal to African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics. I met members of these communities at Trump rallies while driving through the midwest swing states the week before the election, and I am now writing from Brighton Beach, a Russian-speaking Jewish district of New York that is overwhelmingly and vehemently pro-Trump. The local residents, mostly ageing Soviet-era immigrants who have switched from voting Democrat to Republican in the past 10 years, love the new president-elect for the same reason their former compatriots in Russia love Putin: he makes them feel great and important again, while legitimising their hatred towards liberals. The likes of Putin and Trump don’t create ethnic movements, they create gangs in which the only criterion that really matters is whether you are “with us” or “against us”, whether you are ready to insult or hurt the “others” no matter who they are and what you used to feel about them. They are mob artists, they are majoritarians or – translating the latter term into Russian – Bolsheviks. Their advantage is that they are not bound by logic or intellectual decency.”

Graham Vyse believes that Libertarians and Democrats Need to Fall in Love Again: “American liberty faces unprecedented peril. President-elect Donald Trump is so indifferent to the Constitution, when he’s not openly hostile to it, that there’s reasonable discussion of liberal democracy collapsing during his tenure. Democrats need all the allies they can find to fight him, and many Americans with genuinely libertarian values could be part of an opposition coalition….[Cato Institute Vice President Brink] Lindsey’s dream of a permanent fusion between liberalism and libertarianism may be impossible, but this is another moment when issue-based cooperation between these two factions is vital. If they unite where they agree—organizing together and pressuring Washington—it could help to neutralize some of the worse of Trump’s authoritarian agenda.”

Senate Democrats have other ideas, including a Surprising Strategy: Trying to Align With Trump: “On infrastructure spending, child tax credits, paid maternity leave and dismantling trade agreements, Democrats are looking for ways they can work with Mr. Trump and force Republican leaders to choose between their new president and their small-government, free-market principles. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, elected Wednesday as the new Democratic minority leader, has spoken with Mr. Trump several times, and Democrats in coming weeks plan to announce populist economic and ethics initiatives they think Mr. Trump might like.”

Local governmemts aren’t a refuge from closed-government policies, but often these Local governments hide public records, face few consequences: “But when residents asked for those documents, they hit a wall: Montgomery County [Maryland] government officials said they could not find many emails, letters and calendars related to their search. This seemed preposterous, so the residents took the only route available to them — they went to court. A skeptical county judge urged the government to look anew for missing documents. Officials soon managed to find most of what the residents had sought. The details weren’t pretty. Documents showed that County Executive Isiah Leggett, a Democrat less than a year from his next election, had been pushing behind closed doors for the private soccer club to take over the site and attempting to pressure a reluctant school board, even though in theory he had no power over school system decisions. The Maryland Open Meetings Compliance Board also found that the school board had violated the state’s open meetings law by discussing the lease deal in closed session.”

How big are big things? Here’s some perspective:

Press, Trump, Twitter

Blaming the Press Won’t Slake Trump’s Thirst

by  •  •  Comments

CNN Money’s Jill Disis writes that Trump attacks ‘fools’ at The New York Times.  There’s a short self-life to attacks on the press.  Admittedly, the attack’s good for a headline, and similar insults probably helped in his campaign.  Yet, all campaigns blame the press, and the blamecasting is like a narcotic to which addicts slowly become both addicted and inured.

Trump – unlike a conventional leader of conventional appetites – will soon need more tangible targets than the New York Times.  The Times?  In six months the high from complaints against that paper won’t quicken the political pulse.  Few will show up at the rallies he plans to keep holding to hear Trump rail at the Times.  They’ll want more; they’ll want a list of tangible results, a list of particular names.

Trump will move on to much stronger stuff than Twitter.

Federal Government, Trump

Eliot Cohen’s Wise Advice: Don’t Serve Trump

by  •  •  Comments

Conservative foreign policy scholar (and member of the Bush Administration) Eliot Cohen admits, “I told conservatives to work for Trump. One talk with his team changed my mind” —

Nemesis pursues and punishes all administrations, but this one will get a double dose. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures. With the disarray of its transition team, in a way, it already has.

My bottom line: Conservative political types should not volunteer to serve in this administration, at least for now. They would probably have to make excuses for things that are inexcusable and defend people who are indefensible. At the very least, they should wait to see who gets the top jobs. Until then, let the Trump team fill the deputy assistant secretary and assistant secretary jobs with civil servants, retired military officers and diplomats, or the large supply of loyal or obsequious second-raters who will be eager to serve. The administration may shake itself out in a year or two and reach out to others who have been worried about Trump. Or maybe not.

By staying away, prospects will preserve their integrity while in opposition; those who join will prove to be – or soon become – as unsuitable as the man they serve.

Alt-Right, Bigotry, Politics

Trump’s Surrogates Know Exactly What the Alt-Right Is

by  •  •  Comments

A few days ago, during a panel discussion, New York Times columnist Charles Blow and Trump surrogate former Congressman Jack Kingston clashed over the racism of Trump’s alt-right supporters.  Kingston claimed not to know what the term alt-right meant, and Blow scolded Kingston for Kingston’s professed ignorance.  (Their exchange begins after 6:30 on the video.)

As a rhetorical matter, Blow’s response (‘your deficiencies of understanding are not my problem’) works well; but one should be plain that Kingston, a longtime politician with close ties to the Trump team, surely knows what alt-right means.

Kingston’s either a liar or an ignoramus to profess ignorance of the alt-right.  Breitbart Media, of which incoming Trump strategist Steve Bannon is CEO, published a guide to the alt-right in March (see, An Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right).

The so-called guide begins as an exoneration of the alt-right from charges of racism, but quickly elides into praise for white nationalists, racial supremacists, and their publications.   The whole purpose of the guide is to acquaint traditional Americans with an ideological future under the alt-right: “[a] specter is haunting the dinner parties, fundraisers and think-tanks of the Establishment: the specter of the “alternative right.” Young, creative and eager to commit secular heresies, they have become public enemy number one to beltway conservatives — more hated, even, than Democrats or loopy progressives.”

The authors (Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulis) aim to shock conventional sensibilities; they aim to awe a traditional audience.

One will excuse me if, upon considering all this, I don’t find myself shocked or awed, let alone haunted: the last century was filled with false theories of racial supremacy, and this new clique pulls from those ideas, while pulling any number of obscure theorists to power.  (In any event, the play on Marx’s famous lines from the Communist Manifesto doesn’t shock, either: a theorist whose entire work went to the dustbin presents no insurmountable threat.)

This is how Trump surrogates will begin: denying connections while simultaneously appointing a few alt-rightists (like Bannon) to high posts. In six months there’ll be no denying – there’ll be celebrating by the same ilk while they simultaneously welcome more into the government.

Politics, Trump

Forget the Tactical (For Now)

by  •  •  Comments

This year hasn’t been a great one for polling, data operations, or vaunted GOTV efforts.  If it had been so, then Hillary Clinton would now be president-elect.  So much conventional tactical analysis (much of which I accepted) has proved erroneous.

There’s no gain, and much harm, in focusing on the tactical now.  Even if one were to overcome the deficiencies of previous analyses,  tactical considerations matter little at the moment, and won’t matter much in the next two years or so.  Where one places the chairs, how one sets the table, and whether someone wins an upcoming state or local election (as a supposed portent of something) is mere banality.

One reads that Trump’s transition team is filled with backbiting and disorder.  Yes, of course: did one expect otherwise?  His claims to competency were a confidence game, and what one sees now is like a an imitation of a mafia family’s squabbles.  (Not an actual mafia family, perhaps, but more like the kind one would see on B-grade television show or film.)

The fitting critique of Trump, apart from upcoming elections or single events, is a substantive, principled, ideological one.  Before one builds a house, there are blueprints to draw, and materials to ponder and collect.  We’ve years of critique and rumination ahead, and deep rumination is more than a consideration of which cog fits where in the Trump wheel.

It’s the grinding and direction of the wheel that matters.  Trump’s rise to federal power is not an abomination because of small matters of style, or even larger ones of self-promotion; Trump’s an abomination because he’s a mediocrity, a liar, and a bigot (in order of moral severity, from least to worst failings).

In fact, that’s probably the easiest way to describe him, a description the Ancients would have understood well from their own observations of human nature, without need to consider an unconscious mind or complicated psychoanalysis: mediocrity, liar, bigot.

Such a man can, and will, do much damage, but his early fumbling will scarcely be the half of it.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.16.16

by  •  •  Comments

Good morning.

This small city will see abundant sunshine and a high of thirty-six today. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 40m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Department meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

Worth reading in full —

Jennifer Rubin offers conservatives opposed to the incoming administration The independent center-right’s Trump survival guide: “First, tell the truth. Bret Stephens, a #NeverTrump journalist, explains:

What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it. …

Many things explain Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory, but not the least of them was the ability of his core supporters to shut out the inconvenient Trump facts: the precarious foundations of his wealth, the plasticity of his convictions, the astonishing frequency of his lying. Mr. Trump attracted millions of voters thirsty to believe. That thirst may hold its own truth, but it doesn’t lessen a columnist’s responsibility to note that it won’t be slaked by another hollow slogan of redemption.

This is the distinction between cheerleaders (e.g., Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity) and actual journalists. The former’s loyalty is to a person, the latter’s to intellectual integrity and accuracy. It will be more important than ever, as Stephens says, for the latter to remain stalwart, calling it as they see it. The instinct to “give him a chance” and “pick your fights” may apply to activists, lawmakers and interest groups as part of strategic calculations; there is no similar obligation for journalists to suspend judgment or be lenient on liars.”

Tyler Kingkade considers What A Trump Presidency Could Mean For Combating Campus Rape: “Now, many are bracing for Donald Trump’s administration to take a more conservative approach to addressing to sexual assault on college campuses, largely due to the people he’ll appoint to lead the US Department of Education.  Policy wonks, higher education consultants, and rape victims’ advocates tell BuzzFeed News they are preparing for possible changes under Trump. Many expect the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — the agency investigating more than 200 colleges, and nearly 100 K-12 school districts for mishandled sexual assault cases — to be less active. Republicans will also likely try to roll back a consequential “Dear Colleague” letter issued to schools by the Obama administration in 2011. The letter detailed what the gender equity law Title IX requires schools to do about sexual assault reports, including what standard of evidence should be used in campus disciplinary cases.”

Andrew Flowers writes that Most Welfare Dollars Don’t Go Directly To Poor People Anymore: “The 1996 reform didn’t result in a reduction in total spending on welfare, now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Since 1998, the first year for which we have complete data, total TANF spending — both from federal block grants as well as required state matching funds — has remained essentially flat, after adjusting for inflation,1The monthly average of the Consumer Price Index was used to deflate the annual spending statistics. according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that is critical of welfare reform. Per-person spending has fallen, however: In 2014 there were about 12 million more people below the poverty level than in 1998, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. population has grown nearly 20 percent during that time….The result has been a dramatic shift of resources away from cash assistance and toward spending on other programs. In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.”

George Selgin’s started the countdown (3, 2, 1…) until Trump blames the Federal Reserve for Trump’s own ignorance & policy failures: “A newly-elected president Trump will quickly turn from making the Fed a scapegoat for his own campaigns’ tribulations to blaming it for his economic policy failures — starting with the equities market nose dive that’s likely to follow his surprise victory. But instead of continuing to rail against the Fed’s supposedly easy policy stance, you can bet that president-elect Trump would soon be blaming it for keeping money too tight.  In any event, a newly-elected Trump administration, through its unveiled hostility toward the Fed, could not fail to make that already “political” institution even more so, for the Fed knows very well that, if it wants to preserve its vaunted independence, it had better heed the administrations’ wishes. That’s what former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, who understood the true nature of the Fed’s independence better than anyone, meant when he explained that the Fed was independent, not “from,” but “within,” the government.”

What if everything worked backwards? That would be Preposterous: