Former governor and current UW System president Tommy Thompson spoke at a UW-Whitewater Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday. Thompson addressed a campus that confronts statewide funding reductions, a tuition freeze, repeated administrative scandals and failures over the last decade, a decline in the conventional student-age demographic, and competitive pressures from other universities.
Thompson said bad news about the university can hurt enrollment. He said he wants employees to share the good news coming out of UW-W.
Men and women of the university, your problems are solved — you can all sleep well tonight.
Thompson’s (more than) a day late and a dollar short: the last decade at UW-Whitewater has been riddled with grandiose press releases in place of sound policy. More precisely, grandiose press releases have been a significant part of policy.
Whitewater’s tried Thompson’s suggestion for years, and yet… here we are.
Boosterism hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and won’t work.
The university cannot talk its way out of its problems.
Thursday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 5:13 PM, for 10h 08m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commisison meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3:30 PM.
The Milwaukee Police Department has admitted making mistakes in the sexual assault investigation of a prominent Milwaukee real estate developer and agreed to transfer the case to another law enforcement agency, according to a legal settlement filed this week.
The settlement, reached in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, creates a path for crime victims throughout Wisconsin to ensure their rights are protected. While state law lays out those rights, the responsibility for enforcement falls to police and prosecutors. Before now, victims had little recourse if those agencies failed.
The settlement resolves the civil rights case of a woman (identified publicly only as Jane Doe) who says Milwaukee police mishandled her rape complaint against Kalan Haywood Sr., who has received millions in taxpayer-backed incentives for city redevelopment projects.
Haywood has denied the allegations and has not been arrested or charged.
A former Ohio police officer who fatally shot an unarmed Black man while responding late last year to a noise complaint was indicted Wednesday on murder and other charges, the state’s attorney general said.
Adam Coy, now fired from the Columbus police force, shot 47-year-old Andre Hill on Dec. 22 as Hill held a cellphone inside a friend’s garage. Coy did not turn on his body camera but the incident was captured thanks to the 60-second “look back” function on the device that records video but not audio, police said.
Wednesday’s charges came amid calls for law enforcement officers to face accountability in deadly use of force against Black Americans, an issue that sparked historic protests across the country last year. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R), who acted as the special prosecutor in the Hill case, said Coy was charged with murder in the commission of a felony, felonious assault and two counts of dereliction of duty.
McKinsey & Company, the consultant to blue-chip corporations and governments around the world, has agreed to pay $573 million to settle investigations into its role in helping “turbocharge” opioid sales, a rare instance of it being held publicly accountable for its work with clients.
The firm has reached the agreement with attorneys general in 47 states, the District of Columbia and five territories, according to five people familiar with the negotiations. The settlement comes after lawsuits unearthed a trove of documents showing how McKinsey worked to drive sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller amid an opioid epidemic in the United States that has contributed to the deaths of more than 450,000 people over the past two decades.
McKinsey’s extensive work with Purdue included advising it to focus on selling lucrative high-dose pills, the documents show, even after the drugmaker pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it had misled doctors and regulators about OxyContin’s risks. The firm also told Purdue that it could “band together” with other opioid makers to head off “strict treatment” by the Food and Drug Administration.
The Whitewater Common Council met last night, 2.2.21.
The recording of the meeting is embedded above. The agenda for the meeting is available.
A few remarks, on selected items of the agenda —
1.Term Limits. Whitewater has relaxed term limits for boards and commissions. A city that has an admitted same-ten-people problem will now allow some of these same people to stay longer (or – more significantly – a few to return to the commissions they’ve so ill-served). Whitewater has a same-ten-people problem because she has a metaphorically narrow perimeter fence. To satisfy an entitled few, Whitewater aggravates her frail condition.
2. Pandemic Stats. The pandemic now stretches over a year, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, impaired the health of many more, and pushed the economy into recession. These many individual injuries are more than a week of data here or there; following the ups and downs of weekly data is myopic. It’s both an intellectual and rhetorical failure for laypeople to pore over week-to-week charts: laypeople are unskilled at interpreting this data, they fixate too much on favorable or unfavorable short-term trends, and this focus allows both sides of the debate to seize on a week’s waxing or waning counts (it’s getting better!, it’s getting worse!).
No, and no again. Assessments of short-term epidemiological trends should be left to epidemiologists. There’s nothing learned from an unlearned analysis.
From the beginning, a sound approach: recognize accumulating harm, rely on professional analyses and recommendations, and for assessments from laypeople (i.e., non-epidemiologists) look back when the pandemic is over when there is a more comprehensive view.
3.Redeeming a Bond. Council voted to pay off an existing bond early (the bond being a type municipal debt).
That’s a reasonable decision. It matters more what Whitewater does next with her tax incremental districts. There is no evidence – none – that she will do anything other than what she’s done before.
4. Smoking, Vaping. The Whitewater Common Council decided against adopting a proposal to ban smoking and vaping in public parks. In a community of greater sense, no one would smoke or vape. There may be class preferences for or against smoking, but it’s unhealthful for anyone. I would not have supported this ordinance, but one should be candid about the sadness of smoking and vaping: people are choosing incontrovertibly destructive habits. In Whitewater, disregard of a regulation would be (regrettably) widespread.
In the end, this is a cultural failure of great magnitude. (I have supported a mask ordinance as a temporary pandemic measure, for example, but with doubts about its efficacy. People are convinced – rightly or wrongly – long before government comes to call.) If we taught better – in the widest sense of teaching – we’d be living better.
5. Meetings by Audiovisual Conferencing. Whitewater’s Common Council will continue to conduct meetings online and by phone.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 5:11 PM, for 10h 06m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
A trio of executive orders signed on Tuesday reflect a reimagining of America’s place in the world after four years of Mr. Trump’s “America First” vision. But administration officials and immigration advocates cautioned that will not happen immediately. Mr. Biden’s government is wary of flinging open the border until it has rebuilt an asylum and refugee system that can process potentially large influxes of people.
With thousands of migrants already living in squalor on the Mexican side of the border, a crisis could develop quickly, and that would be a nightmare for the new president this early in his term. And the effort to locate parents and children separated in the summer of 2018 will take months, if not years.
….
Mr. Biden said the orders would also begin to address “the root causes” of migration toward the southern border and begin a “full review of the previous administration’s harmful and counterproductive immigration policies.”
“There’s a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I have signed,” he added. “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy.”
For months, conservative attorney L. Lin Wood loudly spread former president Donald Trump’s false claims that widespread fraud had flipped the election. Wood spoke at rallies and filed unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to undo President Biden’s victory in Georgia, which Biden won by nearly 11,700 votes.
Now, Georgia officials have launched a voter fraud probe with a new target: Wood.
On Monday, the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office confirmed to CNN it is investigating whether Wood was a legal resident of the state when he cast his ballot in the Nov. 3 presidential election. The news was first reported by WSB-TV.
The inquiry was prompted by an email Wood allegedly sent a WSB-TV reporter stating that he had been living in South Carolina for “several months” after buying a home there in April, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office told the Atlanta TV station.
For years, Sandy Galef has received complaints and questions from many of her constituents over the Donald J Trump state park in suburban New York.
And since Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol earlier this year, lawmakers, advocates and residents are once again pushing to rename the underdeveloped 436-acre park in hopes of sparking a dialogue on social justice and spurring much-needed private contributions to improve the space.
Galef, a New York assemblywoman who started investigating whether the park’s name could be changed at the start of Trump’s presidency, chose earlier this month to push to rename the park after the former New York governor George Pataki, who also represented the park area as an assemblyman and a state senator.
Groundhog Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 5:10 PM, for 10h 03m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 74.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
The post-mortem, a copy of which was obtained by POLITICO, says the former president suffered from voter perception that he wasn’t honest or trustworthy and that he was crushed by disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And while Trump spread baseless accusations of ballot-stuffing in heavily Black cities, the report notes that he was done in by hemorrhaging support from white voters.
The 27-page report, which was written by Trump chief pollster Tony Fabrizio, shows how Trump advisers were privately reckoning with his loss even as the former president and many of his supporters engaged in a conspiracy theory-fueled effort to overturn the election. The autopsy was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump’s top political advisers just before President Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
….
The findings are based on an analysis of exit polling in 10 states. Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — are states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — are states that Trump won in both elections.
The report zeroes in on an array of demographics where Trump suffered decisive reversals in 2020, including among white seniors, the same group that helped to propel him to the White House. The autopsy says that Trump saw the “greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men,” and that he “lost ground with almost every age group.” In the five states that flipped to Biden, Trump’s biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older.
Suburbanites — who bolted from Trump after 2016 — also played a major role. The report says that the former president suffered a “double-digit erosion” with “White College educated voters across the board.”
The picture of the election presented in the report is widely shared by political professionals in both parties, if not by Trump and his legions of his supporters.
How can anyone view the trashing of our founding tradition as evidence of patriotism? Because some have adopted a very different political philosophy than the Founders held. This approach to government promises the recovery of a mythical past. It feeds a sense of White victimhood. It emphasizes emotion over reason. It denigrates experts and expertise. It slanders outsiders and blames them for social and economic ills. It warns of global plots by Jews and shadowy elites. It accepts the lies of a leader as a deeper form of political truth. It revels in anger and dehumanization. It praises law and order while reserving the right to disobey the law and overturn the political order through violence.
This is a reality that I have resisted naming. The 45th president and a significant portion of his supporters have embraced American fascism. And Trump’s buffoonery does not disprove the point. Though he probably cannot name the political theory he has embraced, his own recklessness, vanity and authoritarian instincts have led him down fascist grooves. He displays an intuitive affinity for leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Hungary’s Viktor Orban. And Trump would have subverted the legitimate result of the 2020 presidential election if he could have, which would have broken a constitutional continuity that has endured over two centuries.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-eight. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 01m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1893, Thomas Edison finishes construction of the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey.
For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason. That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.
As traditional Republican donors withdrew, a new class of Trump-era benefactors rose to finance data analysts and sleuths to come up with fodder for the stolen-election narrative. Their ranks included the founder of MyPillow, Mike Lindell, and the former Overstock.com chief executive Patrick Byrne, who warned of “fake ballots” and voting-machine manipulation from China on One America News Network and Newsmax, which were finding ratings in their willingness to go further than Fox in embracing the fiction that Mr. Trump had won.
As Mr. Trump’s official election campaign wound down, a new, highly organized campaign stepped into the breach to turn his demagogic fury into a movement of its own, reminding key lawmakers at key times of the cost of denying the will of the president and his followers. Called Women for America First, it had ties to Mr. Trump and former White House aides then seeking presidential pardons, among them Stephen K. Bannon and Michael T. Flynn.
As it crossed the country spreading the new gospel of a stolen election in Trump-red buses, the group helped build an acutely Trumpian coalition that included sitting and incoming members of Congress, rank-and-file voters and the “de-platformed” extremists and conspiracy theorists promoted on its home page — including the white nationalist Jared Taylor, prominent QAnon proponents and the Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio.
Much like during the campaign, Biden is betting big on how post-Trump governance will work. Biden wants to keep the White House focused on high-priority issues such as the pandemic and ameliorating the economic downturn. He is delegating secondary issues to other components of the executive branch. And his White House is not going to comment on everything that animates political Twitter.
Journalists and commentators can debate whether this strategy will work (no doubt it helps that the former excessively online president is cut off from his waning agenda-setting power). For the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts, it represents an interesting reversal in presidential power.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 58m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91% of its visible disk illuminated.
The U.S. economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged factories, businesses and households, pushing U.S. economic growth to a low not seen since the United States wound down wartime spending in 1946.
Overall, the economy was surprisingly resilient in the second half of the year, given the falloff at the start of the public health crisis, according to data released Thursday from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Yet, the 1 percent growth in the fourth quarter signaled a faltering recovery and a long road ahead, with 9.8 million jobs still missing and 23.8 million adults struggling to feed their families.
“2020 has no precedent in modern economic history,” said David Wilcox, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former director of the domestic economics division at the Federal Reserve. “The influenza of 1918 and 1919 predates our modern system of economic statistics, and since World War II, there’s never been a contraction that even remotely approached the severity and the breadth of the initial collapse in 2020.”
The union representing U.S. Capitol Police officers says the force’s leadership failed to relay the known threat of violence adequately ahead of the Jan. 6 deadly riot, calling the acting chief’s recent admission of prior knowledge of the threat to Congress “a disclosure that has angered and shocked the rank-and-file officers.”
The statement Wednesday from the Capitol Police Labor Committee comes a day after acting Chief Yogananda Pittman testified to Congress, saying in prepared remarks:
By January 4th, the Department knew that the January 6th event would not be like any of the previous protests held in 2020. We knew that militia groups and white supremacists organizations would be attending. We also knew that some of these participants were intending to bring firearms and other weapons to the event. We knew that there was a strong potential for violence and that Congress was the target.
Pittman, who apologized in her testimony for her department’s “failings” during the insurrection, told Congress that the former police chief, Steven Sund, had asked the Capitol Police Board, a three-member oversight body, on Jan. 4 to declare a state of emergency for Jan. 6 and to request National Guard assistance.
Adam Goldman, Katie Benner, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs report How Trump’s Focus on Antifa Distracted Attention From the Far-Right Threat (‘Federal law enforcement shifted resources last year in response to Donald Trump’s insistence that the radical left endangered the country. Meanwhile, right-wing extremism was building ominously’)
Federal prosecutors and agents felt pressure to uncover a left-wing extremist criminal conspiracy that never materialized, according to two people who worked on Justice Department efforts to counter domestic terrorism. They were told to do so even though the F.B.I., in particular, had increasingly expressed concern about the threat from white supremacists, long the top domestic terrorism threat, and well-organized far-right extremist groups that had allied themselves with the president.
White House and Justice Department officials stifled internal efforts to publicly promote concerns about the far-right threat, with aides to Mr. Trump seeking to suppress the phrase “domestic terrorism” in internal discussions, according to a former official at the Department of Homeland Security.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy, a daytime high of thirty-one, and snow later this evening. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:06 PM, for 9h 56m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1930, the Politburo of the Soviet Union orders that a million prosperous peasant families be driven off their farms.
One member of an antigovernment group accused of plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan last fall pleaded guilty on Wednesday in federal court, with documents revealing new details about the group’s plans to storm the Michigan Capitol and commit other violence.
Ty G. Garbin, a 25-year-old airplane mechanic, agreed to testify against the other five defendants charged in federal court in Western Michigan, according to the plea agreement filed by prosecutors. Eight other men have been accused in state court of cooperating with the violent plans, and Mr. Garbin will serve as a witness against them, too, it said.
Under questioning by Judge Robert J. Jonker in court, Mr. Garbin said he realized that his testimony might end up hurting people he knows. His sentencing was scheduled for July 8.
According to prosecutors, members of the Proud Boys used walkie-talkie-style communication devices to coordinate during the attack. On [Dominic] Pezzola’s computer, [Assistant U.S. Attorney Erik] Kenerson said, FBI agents found information on making homemade firearms, poisons and explosives. Once inside the Capitol, authorities say, Pezzola and the Hughes brothers engaged in a confrontation with Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman at the foot of a staircase, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit, “advancing .?.?. in a menacing manner.” While Doug Jensen, 41, of Des Moines is identified as the “primary aggressor,” the Hughes brothers “followed immediately” behind him, the agent wrote. Pezzola, according to prosecutors, was also part of the group.
Towards the end of 1636, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Netherlands. The concept of a lockdown was not really established at the time, but merchant trade slowed to a trickle. Idle young men in the town of Haarlem gathered in taverns, and looked for amusement in one of the few commodities still trading – contracts for the delivery of flower bulbs the following spring. What ensued is often regarded as the first financial bubble in recorded history – the “tulip mania”.
Nearly 400 years later, something similar has happened in the US stock market. This week, the share price of a company called GameStop – an unexceptional retailer that appears to have been surprised and confused by the whole episode – became the battleground between some of the biggest names in finance and a few hundred bored (mostly) bros exchanging messages on the WallStreetBets forum, part of the sprawling discussion site Reddit.
As the son of a billionaire, Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry is used to jumping to the front of the line.
The 33-year-old New York native is even thinking of running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin, despite his lack of political experience.
But Lasry said Thursday that he didn’t receive any favoritism when he got a COVID-19 vaccination on Monday afternoon at Ovation Chai Point Senior Living on Milwaukee’s east side.
“I just got lucky,” Lasry said.
Lasry, the son of Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry, said his wife, Lauren, got a call on Monday from her uncle, who is rabbi at Chai Point, saying the senior living center had some extra, unused doses of the vaccine.
Because she is pregnant, Lasry said, his wife chose not to get a shot. So Lasry said he stepped forward so the medicine wouldn’t go to waste.
(Emphasis in original.)
By his own account, Lasry admits that “Honestly, if I wasn’t married to Lauren, I don’t know that I would have gotten a call or known about it.”
That’s not luck – that’s nepotism.
On Twitter, Jud Lounsbury wryly observes that whatever Lasry’s political ambitions might be, his actions will prove “Disqualifying. There is no greater sin in the Midwest than cutting in line.”
Indeed. Before this story, Lasry had little chance of winning a U.S. Senate primary contest in Wisconsin.
Former governor and current UW System president Tommy Thompson spoke at a UW-Whitewater Faculty Senate meeting on Tuesday. Thompson addressed a campus that confronts statewide funding reductions, a tuition freeze, repeated administrative scandals and failures over the last decade, a decline in the conventional student-age demographic, and competitive pressures from other universities.