Fall in Whitewater begins with sunny skies and a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:50 PM, for 12h 06m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 4:30 PM.
On this day in 1979, a bright flash (the ‘Vela Incident’), resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.
A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used for making things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.
The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed roughly 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.
The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s original intent.
The payments were made even though U.S. health officials believe there are still major funding gaps in responding to the pandemic. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. There remains a severe shortage of N95 masks at numerous U.S. hospitals. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow who worked on the epic mole hunts that captured the American turncoats Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, told me that Trump has the classic vulnerabilities that Russian intelligence could and would exploit: his greed, his corruption, his trysts and above all his ego. Trump openly courted Putin. (A 2013 tweet: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?”) In turn, Putin, a veteran KGB officer trained to manipulate people, flirted with Trump and flattered him. Putin and his social media minions supported him openly — and with secret political warfare operations. So perhaps Putin had only to influence Trump to win influence in return.
Mowatt-Larssen wonders whether that’s all there is to it. “Is it only because Putin is such a master manipulator and that Trump is so vain that he loves it?” he asked. “Because I could never have imagined that an American president could — whether it’s witting or unwitting — betray American interests so thoroughly to the Russians as has occurred in the last four years.”
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:52 PM, for 12h 09m 32s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) saw a severe decline in the rate of on-time delivery of first-class mail after Louis DeJoy took over as postmaster general, according to new data obtained by the Guardian that provides some of the most detailed insight yet into widespread mail delays this summer.
Shortly after taking the helm, DeJoy – a major Republican donor with no prior USPS experience – implemented operational changes he said were intended to make the financially beleaguered agency more efficient. Those changes, which included an effort to get postal trucks to run on time, led to severe delays and widespread public outcry this summer.
In late August, DeJoy announced he was putting the changes on hold until after the election, and last week a federal judge in Washington blocked USPS from implementing them. The changes were clearly aimed at “voter disenfranchisement”, given the increased role USPS will play in this year’s presidential election, the US district judge Stanley Bastian wrote in his ruling.
“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” Bastian wrote.
Lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s extradition trial in Britain have accepted the claim that the WikiLeaks founder was offered a presidential pardon by a congressman on the condition that he would help cover up Russia’s involvement in hacking emails from the Democratic National Committee.
Jennifer Robinson, a lawyer, told the court that she had attended a meeting between Assange, then Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and pro-Trump troll Charles Johnson at Assange’s hide-out, the Ecuadorian embassy in London, on August 15, 2017.
Robinson said the two Americans claimed to be emissaries from Washington and “wanted us to believe they were acting on behalf of the president.” The pair allegedly told Assange that they could help grant him a pardon in exchange for him revealing information about the source of the WikiLeaks information that proved it was not the Russians who hacked Democratic emails.
“They stated that President Trump was aware of and had approved of them coming to meet with Mr. Assange to discuss a proposal—and that they would have an audience with the president to discuss the matter on their return to Washington, D.C.,” Robinson said.
The White House has denied that Trump took part in any such plan.
….
After Robinson read her testimony in a London courtroom on Friday, lawyers representing the U.S. accepted the witness statement as accurate and confirmed they had no intention of cross-examining the claim. They did dispute, however, that President Donald Trump gave his blessing for the pardon offer.
This Tuesday, September 22th at 10 AM or 1 PM, there will be a showing of Little Women @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
(Drama/Romance)
Rated PG
2 hours, 15 minutes (2019)
Based on the classic Louisa May Alcott novel, this is the sixth film version of the beloved story of the March sisters: four young women determined to live life on their own terms, in the years following the Civil War. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, and Timothée Chalamet. Directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, 2017).
Masks are required and you must register for a seat either by calling, emailing or going online at https://schedulesplus.com/wwtr/kiosk. There will be a limit of 10 people per movie time slot. No walk-ins.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 6:53 PM, for 12h 12m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1893, Charles Duryea and his brother road-test the first American-made gasoline-powered automobile.
That idea of civic breakdown in America looks terrifyingly real. “In the past, groups that have felt disenfranchised have turned to protest, a peaceful attempt to persuade well-meaning elites or beneficent institutions to expand democracy,” wrote Franklin Foer in the Atlantic. “But in the Trumpian worldview, those elites and institutions are conspiring against him. By delegitimizing the American political system, he has given his followers the impression that they have no choice but to assert themselves through nonpolitical means.”
“I don’t think a lot of Americans understand how fragile democracy is,” Raul Torrez, a Democratic district attorney in New Mexico who is seeking to restrict the actions of a far-right militia there, told my colleagues. “One of the early signs of a troubled democracy is when people decide that they’re no longer going to address their political differences at the ballot box — or in elected legislatures or in Congress — but they’re going to do it on the street, and they’re going to do it with guns.”
A new study purporting to show that the novel coronavirus was manufactured in a Chinese lab was published by a pair of nonprofit groups linked to Steve Bannon, the former top Trump strategist now facing felony fraud charges.
The study, co-authored by a Chinese virologist who fled Hong Kong this year, claims that “laboratory manipulation is part of the history of SARS-CoV-2.” Its findings were quickly picked up by a handful of prominent news organizations such as the New York Post, which hyped the “explosive” allegations that run counter to virtually all existing scientific literature on the source of the virus.
The study is the work of the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, sister nonprofit organizations that Bannon was instrumental in creating. According to documents posted on the Society’s website last year, he served as that group’s chair. The Bannon connection was first spotted by Kevin Bird, a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University, and shared by Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, who called the study “bizarre and unfounded.”
A search of Google Scholar and the Rule of Law Society and Rule of Law Foundation websites indicates that the organizations have not previously published scientific or medical research, and it’s unclear whether the paper received any peer review. It was posted on Monday on the website Zenodo, a publicly available repository of scientific and academic research to which anyone can upload their work.
Thanks to the brilliance of these four computer programmers we can play Solitaire on our computers, discover Easter eggs in video games, write emails and resumes using the not-so-serious the comic sans font (even though everyone says we really shouldn’t) and shut our computers down with a simple Ctrl-Alt-Del command when they just won’t behave.
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 6:55 PM, for 12h 15m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1832, representatives of the Sauk and Fox sign a treaty ending the Black Hawk War: “The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands.”
Changing voters’ minds is famously difficult. Recent national campaigns have spent more effort on increasing turnout—getting sympathetic voters to go to the polls—than on winning over new supporters. Political scientists and pollsters have found that as the country grows more negatively polarized, fewer true swing voters are up for grabs.
But the Wisconsin effort, notable for both its approach and its scale, seems to have found some success. From February to May, the advocacy group Opportunity Wisconsin, with help from a progressive advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., called the Hub Project, managed to do remarkable damage to Trump’s standing with a group of persuadable voters. The effort sought to identify voters who took a favorable view of Trump’s record on the economy but who might still be receptive to alternative perspectives, then spent weeks targeting them with messages arguing that the economy was actually not working for Wisconsin, and that Trump’s policies weren’t helping.
“The most impressive thing is that they clearly had some effect in changing how people think about Donald Trump, and that’s just really difficult to do,” says David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies persuasion. “For a real program to have effects on what people think about Trump in the field, not an artificial setting like a focus group, is quite impressive. There’s very little I’ve seen this election cycle that has found that.”
Trump claimed again that Biden “wants to wipe out 180 million private health care plans that people love.” Facts First: Biden does not. While Biden does endorse a “public option” to allow people to opt in to a Medicare-like government insurance plan, Biden has not agreed to anything like the “Medicare for All” single-payer proposal Sanders is known for, which would eliminate most private insurance plans. In fact, Biden and Sanders clashed on the issue during the Democratic primary.
It’s possible that, over time, a popular public option would affect private insurers’ willingness to offer some private plans. But the Trump campaign is suggesting Biden is actively proposing to wipe out private insurance, and that’s not the case at all.
Farmers unleash the ducks en masse so they can tear up weeds, eat pests, and leave duck droppings that then serve as fertilizer for plants. The technique, which farmers have used for centuries, is known as ‘integrated rice-duck farming
Whitewater’s public comment periods are lawful rights worth defending, and there has never been a time when respecting public comment – humbly and gratefully – has been more important for the city.
Since June, there have been three meetings during which Whitewater’s current council president has deprecated public comment, or wrongly set the order of comments. These occasions have been an unsound departure from this city’s better practice of the last decade.
The paragraphs below describe each of these three occasions, with an applicable video clip, a transcript of the clip, and remarks about that occasion.
First, a bit of background —
One can describe the principal laws pertaining to Whitewater, Wisconsin’s public meetings simply and plainly: the comment periods at public meetings of the City of Whitewater (its council and its various committees and boards) are matters under state statutes and local ordinances. (For today, one needn’t look farther or deeper.)
Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law. The Wisconsin Open Meetings Law — part of state statutes (Wis. Stat. §§ 19.81-19.98) — does not require public comment at meetings, absent other statutory requirements for specific types of public meetings.
If only state statutes described rights of public comment, then public comment would mainly rest on government officials’ occasional condescension to the residents from whom government’s political authority derives.
And yet, Whitewater has her own ordinances that recognize and describe rights of public comment, provisions that lawfully acknowledge more expansive rights for residents than does state law.
Whitewater Transparency Enhancement Ordinance. For the last ten years, Whitewater has recognized public comment rights through her own Whitewater Transparency Enhancement Ordinance. Whitewater, Wisconsin Municipal Code §§ 2.62.010-2.62.050. The provisions of that chapter, in full, appear below. (Some of these provisions govern public participation in city meetings, others the recording of public meetings.) Where the city’s departure from convention is sometimes to her detriment, in this chapter of the municipal code her recognition of residents’ rights is wholly to her credit. Whitewater’s former council president (Singer) respected consistently this chapter of the local code; the city’s current council present (Binnie), although a long-serving councilman, has taken a different path.
The Section 2.62.010 explains “The purpose of this chapter is to maximize public awareness and participation in City of Whitewater Government. (Emphasis aded.)
Section 2.62.040 describes meeting procedures:
(a) All council, committee, commission and board meetings shall have a public input agenda item to allow citizens to make statements on matters that are not on the agenda.
(b) All council, committee, commission and boards shall allow the public an opportunity to comment on substantive items on the meeting agenda. The council, committee, commission or board shall have the discretion to impose time limits and other reasonable procedural rules concerning the public comment.
(c) If the agenda for a council, committee, commission or board meeting includes staff reports or other reports, a specifc description of the item to be reported on shall be listed on the agenda and said report(s) shall be limited to the speci”c items listed in the agenda.
In recent months, departing from years of respect for these promises, Whitewater’s new council president has deprecated public comment or manipulated public comment beyond a reasonable procedural rule.
Discussion of those occasions appears below along with a recording and transcript. After each, I’ve added a few remarks.
Common Council Session of 6.16.20. (Relevant clip below. The full session recording and agenda are available online.)
City Attorney (Video, beginning of clip):
One thing that is sort of something that we have, a unique ordinance, our transparency ordinance, does require giving the opportunity for public input on pretty much anything that’s on the agenda. That’s not the general rule, and that’s not common that that’s allowed in public meetings. It may be that, to some extent, there would have to be a suspension of that rule if we weren’t allowing people to come, to come meetings, or limited the number of people. But most subjects we have on the agenda would not require the right to the public to actually speak on them but for our transparency ordinance. Some exceptions of course are public hearings and things that’s an important aspect of it. So that’s just one of the many considerations when the council decides to more forward, if it does, in a limited way.
City Council President [Video clip at 4:00]:
We are, as Wally indicated, going beyond what the office of open government [sic] says is required. For one, public comments are not normally required by law except for public hearings, they view telephone conferences as being acceptable with the public, we’ve gone beyond that to having these virtual meetings online. Some bodies require citizens to submit their comments in writing in advance, not allowing for contemporary comments like we allow for. I’d even mention that the school board, up until I’ve now pointed it out, hasn’t even been listing a telephone number for the public to call in on, which we have been doing since the beginning.
Whitewater’s city attorney is right that but for Whitewater’s transparency ordinance there would be fewer lawful opportunities for public comment. The ordinance is to Whitewater’s credit, that she properly recognizes – as she has for years – rights of residents to address their local government. That others have done less does not justify that Whitewater should return to less. A solution of negative equality only imposes the acquiescence to lower standards rather than the expansion of higher standards.
Liberty is more than a consequence of rights government allows; it is the flourishing of rights that government is obligated to recognize.
Whitewater’s new city council president implies that Whitewater’s legal recognition of contemporaneous comment on agenda items is superfluous – or some kind of generosity to Whitewater’s residents – because other communities require that citizens submit comments in advance. It should be obvious that a rule requiring prior submissions denies residents the ability to respond most effectively to remarks made in a meeting on a particular item. The opportunity for truly responsive comments comes only if one can speak in reply to what others have said during that meeting. Anyone could send in a message beforehand, in any event. A community that truly respects its residents would care about the opinions they formed while hearing the most current information presented during a public meeting.
Before the pandemic, during the pandemic, after the pandemic, in person, via telephone, via videoconferencing, or combinations of these formats — any of them could accommodate public comment on each meeting topic. Nothing has happened in Whitewater that would suggest – to a person committed to public participation – that Whitewater should retreat from her ten-years’ long legal commitment to public participation.
On the contrary – this city has never need robust public participation more than now.
Common Council Session of 7.21.20. (Relevant clip below. The full session recording and agenda are available online.)
City Council President [Video, beginning of clip]:
It’s not necessary for us to hear the same information repeatedly, so, if you are making a comment that is lengthy and really amounts to clapping for somebody else’s comment, if you can just kind of make your comments succinct so that we don’t have a great deal of repetition in the comments.
There’s much that’s wrong with this preface to public comments. It assumes that comments are only for the benefit of governmental deliberations. On the contrary, they are properly – as Whitewater has previously acknowledged them – an intrinsically valuable, vital part of the governmental process.
Cautions like this act produce a chilling effect, where some residents may question whether, in fact, what they say is sufficiently ‘unique’ to topic. Of course it will be unique to the topic – each person will – within a uniformly-applied time limit – have something different or particular to say. Deciding whether someone is simply ‘clapping’ for someone else is condescending and disrespectful to individual residents. And, in fact, if they are supporting each other, should that not be their right within a common time limit?
Residents do not serve this council or its president; the council should humbly serve and respect its residents. It shouldn’t be too hard for ordinary men and women who hold offices of limited authority to listen patiently and without condescension.
A reminder, true now and forever: everyone who resides in Whitewater is an equal resident. There is no other kind of resident.
Common Council Session of 9.9.20. (Relevant clip below. The full session recording and agenda are available online.)
City Council President [Video, beginning of clip]:
After a straw poll in which only the council present voted for a draft ordinance, he chose to limit by viewpoint which public comments would first be heard:
So my suggestion, unless I hear objections from council, would be that we focus at this point in time on comments from citizens, or university members, business owners, etc., who are in favor of one of these ordinances, because after all, if we hear from everyone who wishes to speak in favor, and then, perhaps, take another straw poll at that point, then I would see it as not being a worthwhile use of anyone’s time to hear from everyone who’s opposed to the ordinance if all those who are in favor of consideration speak and we don’t have sufficient interest. Is that acceptable to council members? [No dissent.]
No one should accept this arrangement. It’s wrong first and foremost because it makes public comment a mere instrumentality to council’s actions. Public comment is an independent right and value.
If residents want to speak on the topic, then it’s worth their time, and therefore it’s worth the time of this council president to listen patiently and fully. If that’s too hard or too tiring for a politician, then he or she is unsuited to the office.
There’s a second, obvious wrong here: allowing one side to speak about the ordinance, to change minds, gives that side an advantage without allowing the opposing side – during the same comment segment – to reinforce to a prevailing view. Under the method from 9.9.20, the council president, while himself in the minority, gave a first chance to those who would try to turn the vote around (to the position he wanted). Those who, in a random queue of commenters, might have spoken against turning the vote around were denied the same chance to speak. Their views in reinforcement of the original straw poll were assigned to a lower priority.
This was a crude manipulation that denied all commenters the chance to exercise their rights before a second vote (in this case, a second straw poll).
At a time when this local government should encourage all the public comment it can – and recognize that public comment in Whitewater is a right under law – this these three occasions have taken the city in the wrong direction.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:57 PM, for 12h 21m 04s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 1.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1984, Joe Kittinger completes the first solo balloon crossing of the Atlantic.
President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic showed a “flat-out disregard for human life” because his “main concern was the economy and his reelection,” according to a senior adviser on the White House coronavirus task force who left the White House in August.
Olivia Troye, who worked as homeland security, counterterrorism and coronavirus adviser to Vice President Pence for two years, said that the administration’s response cost lives and that she will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden this fall because of her experience in the Trump White House.
“The president’s rhetoric and his own attacks against people in his administration trying to do the work, as well as the promulgation of false narratives and incorrect information of the virus have made this ongoing response a failure,” she said in an interview.
Troye is the first Trump administration official who worked extensively on the coronavirus response to forcefully speak out against Trump and his handling of the pandemic. She joins a growing number of former officials, including former national security adviser John Bolton and former defense secretary Jim Mattis, who have detailed their worries about what happened during their time in the administration while declaring that Trump is unfit to be president.
Another 860,000 people applied for unemployment insurance claims last week — the 26th-straight week that unemployment claims remained above a pre-pandemic record dating to the 1960s.
And 659,000 people had claims processed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the program for self-employed and gig workers, a drop of about 200,000 after those numbers had risen for weeks.
The total number of people claiming unemployment insurance went up by about 100,000, to 29.7 million, as of Aug. 29, the most recent week available for this statistic.
The number of new unemployment claims has come down gradually over the last few months, but claims remain above the historical levels from before the pandemic, a sign of the continued economic head winds the country is facing.
Joe Brusuelas, the chief economist at RSM, wrote that the continued high levels of unemployment claims were a “reflection of the deep scarring in the domestic labor market and economy.”
A prominent American former magazine columnist who accused Donald Trump of raping her in the 1990s has joined a chorus of voices supporting the latest woman to accuse Trump of sexually assaulting her, Amy Dorris.
Dorris, a former model and actor, said in a Guardian interview published on Thursday that Trump had forced his tongue down her throat and groped her at the 1997 US Open.
“I feel sick, violated – it makes me sick,” Dorris told the Guardian.
Dorris became the 25th woman to make accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump, ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape.
In his Thursday morning newsletter, David Leonhardt of the New York Times writes of The College Money Crisis:
The coronavirus has caused severe budget problems for American higher education. But many colleges’ financial troubles are much larger than the virus. They have been building for years and stem, above all, from a breakdown in this country’s hodgepodge system of paying for higher education.
The current system arose after World War II and depended on three sources of money: students (and their parents); the federal government; and state governments. Of those, state governments were supposed to provide the most money. That’s why many Americans attend something known as a state college.
Over time, though, state officials came to a realization. If they cut their higher-education budgets, colleges could make up the shortfall by raising tuition. Many other state-funded programs, like health care, highways, prisons and K-12 education, have no such alternative.
These budget cuts have left most colleges struggling for resources, even as elite colleges, both private and public, can raise substantial revenue from tuition and alumni donations. Not surprisingly, inequality in higher education has grown. Many poor and middle-class students who excel in high school attend colleges with inadequate resources and low graduation rates — and end up with student debt but no degree.
Now that universities face the emergency of a pandemic, they are stuck. Calling a halt to on-campus operations and going totally online, thereby waiving on-campus fees, was the right, moral choice. And yet it was the option that this reckless system could never take, because those inflated fees were needed to pay the fixed costs of the business model. Without sufficient state funds, universities are reliant on federal grant money, which requires students to enroll. If online courses drive away even a fraction of those students, the house of cards will collapse. For the university to do the right thing would be financial suicide.
This problem doesn’t exist just for big state schools. Even smaller schools are caught in the trap, because they are forced to compete in the ecosystem created by the state schools. What is to be done?
An obvious point: no one should take satisfaction in the economic distress in which colleges find themselves. Although I have been a critic – strongly and rightly – of serial administrative failures on our local campus, I have always believed in university life for persons individually and for society collectively.
Among even my earliest memories are especially happy ones of my father and uncle often taking me through a university campus.
Financial strains, made worse by the pandemic, are calls for lasting change long after the pandemic fades.
