For all the discussion of politics over these last three years, America now comes to a critical year ahead. In these next twelve months, we’ll see primaries, conventions, a general election, and thereafter possible challenges to, and necessary defenses of, the constitutional order.
When was there another year so important to America as 2020 looks to be? Perhaps 1864, or before that 1776.
There have been significant losses these last three years, but graciously some gains that offer hope for the future.
These losses – and they have been grievous – have reached all parts of America, affecting millions, and threatening countless more, at home and abroad. A loss to Trumpism would leave nothing unsoiled. Even the smallest and most beautiful places, like Whitewater, would be stained.
Those scheming political men in Whitewater who have for years encouraged the antecedents of Trumpism deserve now only opposition; those other political men who have carried on with heads down and eyes averted deserve no deference. People choose freely — sometimes well and sometimes poorly. Those in Trump’s thrall, and those who have claimed a futile neutrality, have chosen poorly.
There is something profoundly ridiculous about men who hungrily strive for small things while ignoring large things.
Other years will follow this one; the conditions in those years will depend greatly on our commitment in this year.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 12m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1901, Robert Marion La Follette is inaugurated as governor of Wisconsin. (Fighting Bob was the first Wisconsin-born person to serve as governor.)
The latest data from the state Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection shows there were 7,292 registered dairy herds in the state as of Jan. 1.
That’s 818 fewer than at the start of 2019 and the largest decline since state records started in 2004. Wisconsin lost just over 7 percent of its herds in 2018.
Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Wisconsin usually sees a 4 percent decline in herd numbers each year. But the prolonged period of low milk prices from 2014 to 2019 have forced many farms to sell their herds.
And Stephenson warns the decline will likely continue, even though milk prices have started to improve.
“I think we’re going to find that this has a long tail. Our milk prices are recovering right now and it’s a much better time for milk prices than it was say at the beginning of 2019,” Stephenson said. “But there are a lot of farms that just have such damaged balance sheets that I don’t think they’re going to recover from this. It’s a matter of when they decide they need to exit the industry.”
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Republican lawmakers have resurrected a bill that would make English the official language in Wisconsin, renewing their argument that the measure will push immigrants to learn the language and make them more attractive to employers.
Sens. Andre Jacque, Dave Craig and Steve Nass began circulating the bill for co-sponsors Monday. The trio is among the most conservative members of the Republican majority.
The proposal would declare English as Wisconsin’s official language and require all state and local government officials to write all their documents in English. The bill would allow for the use of other languages in certain situations, including to protect a citizen’s health or safety, to teach another language, to facilitate census counts and to protect criminal defendants’ rights. The measure wouldn’t restrict the use of other languages for non-governmental purposes.
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Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ spokeswoman, Kit Beyer, didn’t immediately respond to an email inquiring about the bill’s chances. Alec Zimmerman, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, had no immediate comment.
The clock is already ticking for Jacque, Craig and Nass; with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers poised to veto any major GOP initiatives, Vos and Fitzgerald are expected to convene only a handful of floor periods before the 2019-20 session ends this spring.
Tonight, on the American Experience on PBS, an episode on Sen. Joe McCarthy:
McCarthy chronicles the rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator who came to power after a stunning victory in an election no one thought he could win. Once in office, he declared that there was a vast conspiracy threatening America — emanating not from a rival superpower, but from within. Free of restraint or oversight, he conducted a crusade against those he accused of being enemies of the state, a chilling campaign marked by groundless accusations, bullying intimidation, grandiose showmanship and cruel victimization. With lawyer Roy Cohn at his side, he belittled critics, spinning a web of lies and distortions while spreading fear and confusion. After years in the headlines, he was brought down by his own excesses and overreach. But his name lives on linked to the modern-day witch hunt we call “McCarthyism.”
Honest to goodness – there have been years of reports, and years of analyses, that made clear to any reasonable person that this project was destined for failure. Anyone and everyone has had years of signs. Romell (who is reportedly retiring from the JS) tells readers what any reasonable person expected and saw at each stage of the project.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:36 PM, for 9h 11m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater United School District’s board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt delivers his Four Freedoms speech (officially the 1941 State of the Union address).
President Donald Trump on Sunday repeated a threat to target Iranian cultural sites, which critics say could amount to a war crime, if Tehran retaliates for a U.S. drone strike that killed its top military general.
“They’re allowed to kill our people. They’re allowed to torture and maim our people. They’re allowed to use roadside bombs and blow up our people,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on his way back to Washington, D.C, from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. “And we’re not allowed to touch their cultural site? It doesn’t work that way.”
Trump’s comments appeared to contradict Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who earlier on Sunday vowed the administration would “behave lawfully” in regards to a list of targets the U.S. would strike if Iran launched a retaliatory attack for the death of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force.
And, according to the International Red Cross, because such sites are “normally civilian in nature, the general provisions of humanitarian law protecting civilian property apply.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and State Department subordinates vigorously argued Friday that the justification for killing Iranian general and terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani was intelligence that an attack was “imminent.”
It is easy to understand why such a rationale would be advanced. An imminent threat would arguably obviate the need for a declaration of war from or even prior consultation with Congress. Exercising the right of self-defense, an established principle of international law, would satisfy allies and sidestep nasty questions about violation of an executive order in place with only minor changes since 1976 that prohibits assassination.
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Americans have every reason to be skeptical of anything and everything coming out of this administration. The president has lied more than 15,000 times on matters small and large. Pompeo misled the Congress and American people in suggesting there was not convincing evidence of Mohammed bin Salman’s involvement in the slaughter of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Pompeo repeatedly misrepresented to Congress that progress was being made in talks with North Korea. Moreover, given Pompeo’s own fiery rhetoric that essentially demands regime change in Iran (if not using that term), it is logical to assume this was not a defensive action nor one intended to de-escalate violence. Pompeo needs to come before Congress and testify under oath.
It’s a crime (and a repulsive wrong) for someone to relieve himself repeatedly – over years – on the grounds of a public park. (The park where this happened was Natureland, a small, lovely spot in this area where visitors deserved none of this.) Someone who does so should be – and recently was – assessed a criminal fine and restitution costs. A story about this sad and aberrant conduct appeared in the Janesville Gazette, was picked up by at least two news services (TNS and AP), and became a national and international story.
It’s easy to see why this story spread – the conduct is simultaneously prurient and infuriating.
I would guess that the Gazette (reporter, Pierce; editor Schwartz) is delighted with a story that received far-reaching attention and re-publication.
They’ve no reason, however, to be delighted. The story didn’t draw attention because it was well written or insightful – it drew attention because the subject matter was so strange.
As local newspapers decline, becoming part of newspaper chains that look like nothing more advertising-delivery networks, they’re left relying on one-point-of-view feature stories and scatological crime stories.
There should be feature stories and there should be crime stories; the failure of local journalism is that there isn’t much more. One doesn’t write this as a reporter or journalist – one writes this as someone who grew up in a literate, newspaper-loving family.
These young reporters at the Gazette (and they are young) do not reach the standards of work from even a generation ago. Perhaps some of them cannot reach these standards, but it’s more likely they’re not being taught properly. It’s almost certain that they, themselves, cannot see any deficiencies in their instruction.
Proper mentoring, after all, requires more than offering confidence-building platitudes while the aging mentor marks his time until retirement.
There’s little evidence on the page that local reporters at the Gazette receive and apply proper instruction.
One reason we might see a resurgence of blogs is the novelty. Tell someone you’re starting a new newsletter and they might complain about how many newsletters (or podcasts) they already subscribe to. But tell them you’re launching a blog and see how that goes: Huh. Really, a blog? In 2020? Wow.
It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected.
NcNeil’s spot on about the mood of many publishers today, and the relative influence of newsletters as against blogs. There likely is a shift back to blogging.
And yet, and yet, blogging never went away. Many of us have had increasing success each year, and have seen both absolute and relative gains as other publications have declined (local newspapers are weaker than ever, for example, and often look like little more than advertising-delivery vehicles).
Bloggers are, however, neither newspaper publishers nor reporters; at bottom, bloggers are modern-day pamphleteers. America’s founding era depended on pamphleteers, as they were critical to the Revolutionary and early Constitutional periods. SeeThe Ideological Origins of the American Revolution for Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitizer-winning history of the role of pamphleteering in America’s founding.
(I read Bailyn’s fine work in the early 1980s, long before the development of the web, and thought from the moment I read it how satisfying it would have been to live in a time of pamphleteering. That era of independent publishing seemed gone forever. Yet, when the web arrived, countless Americans could exercise their free-speech rights through a contemporary version of pamphleteering. In my own case, months of concern after the Star Packaging raid led me to publish FREE WHITEWATER beginning in 2007.)
For some of us, who have embraced an older medium’s new form, there is the work of the day, and the days ahead. We are right where we want to be.
Sunday in Whitewater will be intermittently cloudy with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:35 PM, for 9h 10m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
The latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows Wisconsin farms produced 193 million eggs in November. That’s about 19 percent higher than in 2018 and the second month in a row that the state’s producers have set a new record high.
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Scott Schneider owns Nature Link Farms in Jefferson and has produced cage-free eggs for the last 15 years.
“It seems to me anyway that that will be sort of the standard in the future, whereby most egg production will be cage-free,” Schneider said. “The big purchasers of eggs, the McDonald’s, the mayonnaise companies, those types of uses for eggs and egg products, those will be the ones that will start leading the pack. And I think it will take a little bit longer for the retail consumer to really start making those decisions to purchase cage-free eggs when they go to the grocery store.”
Schneider said smaller farms like his will need to find new ways to differentiate their products, like using free-range production or transitioning to organic.
Shortly after the news broke that a US airstrike in Baghdad ordered by President Donald Trump had killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force, Ari Fleischer went on Fox News and proclaimed, “I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani.”
Here we go again.
Fleischer was press secretary for President George W. Bush when the Bush-Cheney administration deployed a long stretch of false statements and lies—Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al Qaeda! Saddam had WMDs! Saddam intended to use WMDs against the United States! Saddam’s defeat would lead to peace and democracy in Iraq and throughout the region!—to grease the way to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. In that position, Fleischer was a key spokesperson for the war. Prior to the invasion, he promised the war would lead to a bright future: “Once the Iraqi people see that Saddam and those around him will be removed from power, they’ll welcome freedom, they’ll be a liberated people.” Instead, Iraq and the region were wracked with destabilization and death that continues to this day. About 200,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in the chaos and violence the Bush-Cheney invasion unleashed, and 4,500 US soldiers were killed in their war.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:34 PM, for 9h 09m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63% of its visible disk illuminated.
Manufacturing activity in the U.S. contracted to its lowest level in more than a decade last month even as China and the U.S. showed progress on the trade front.
The Institute for Supply Management said Friday that its manufacturing index fell in December to 47.2. That’s its lowest level since June 2009, when it hit 46.3. Economists polled by Reuters expected a reading of 49 for December. Anything below 50 represents sector contraction.
December also marked the fifth straight month of contraction for the U.S. manufacturing sector.
The U.S. drone strike in Iraq against the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, raises once again the question of legal constraints—under domestic and international law—on the president’s power to use force unilaterally. I have written a legal opinion in government and many, many pieces out of government on this issue, and over the years I have grown very cynical about the supposed legal constraints on those war powers. The general thoughts that follow, which build a bit on this Twitter thread, are born of that cynicism.
First, with the exception of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which has always been a very weak constraint, practically all of the law in this area has been developed by executive branch lawyers justifying unilateral presidential uses of force. Unsurprisingly, executive branch lawyers view unilateral presidential power very broadly. The three most recent published opinions concern Libya (2011), Iraq (2014) and Syria (2018).
Second, Congress has done practically nothing since the War Powers Resolution to push back on these ever-broader constructions of executive power. Indeed, it has gone along with these constructions through appropriating for an ever-bigger and more powerful military. It has consistently and specifically appropriated money in support of the military operations under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) with the full knowledge that the executive branch (starting under President George W. Bush and continuing under President Obama) was using the AUMF as a justification for uses of force in multiple countries—and the knowledge that Obama interpreted the AUMF to apply to the Islamic State. Congress has continued to appropriate in support of U.S. military operations in several Middle Eastern countries even as those operations increasingly bumped up against Iranian proxies.
Third, the domestic-law basis for the killing of Soleimani is maddeningly complex, factually and legally. The law governing U.S. military operations throughout the Middle East rests on a combination of the 2001 AUMF; the 2002 AUMF, which authorizes force to address “the continuing threat posed by Iraq”; various appropriations; and Article II. And once we are there, Article II provides the president with very broad self-defense powers.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:33 PM, for 9h 08m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
This is what Michael Duffey, associate director of national security programs at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), told Elaine McCusker, the acting Pentagon comptroller, in an Aug. 30 email, which has only been made available in redacted form until now. It is one of many documents the Trump administration is trying to keep from the public, despite congressional oversight efforts and court orders in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation.
Earlier in the day on Aug. 30, President Donald Trump met with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss the president’s hold on $391 million in military assistance for Ukraine. Inside the Trump administration, panic was reaching fever pitch about the president’s funding hold, which had stretched on for two months. Days earlier, POLITICO had broken the story and questions were starting to pile up. U.S. defense contractors were worried about delayed contracts and officials in Kyiv and lawmakers on Capitol Hill wanted to know what on earth was going on. While Trump’s national security team thought withholding the money went against U.S. national security interests, Trump still wouldn’t budge.
Thanks to the testimony of several Trump administration officials, we now know what Trump was waiting on: a commitment from Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.
But getting at that truth hasn’t been easy and the Trump administration continues to try to obscure it. It is blocking key officials from testifying and is keeping documentary evidence from lawmakers investigating the Ukraine story. For example, this note from Duffey to McCusker was never turned over to House investigators and the Trump administration is continuing to try to keep it secret.
Last month, a court ordered the government to release almost 300 pages of emails to the Center for Public Integrity in response to a FOIA lawsuit. It released a first batch on Dec. 12, and then a second installment on Dec. 20, including Duffey’s email, but that document, along with several others, were partially or completely blacked out.
Since then, Just Security has viewed unredacted copies of these emails, which begin in June and end in early October. Together, they tell the behind-the-scenes story of the defense and budget officials who had to carry out the president’s unexplained hold on military aid to Ukraine.
(Michael Duffey is the former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party.)
Paul Manafort said he used Fox News host Sean Hannity to receive backchannel messages from President Donald Trump while prosecutors investigated him for financial crimes, according to newly released memos from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Among the several hundred pages of memos published by BuzzFeed News on Thursday, which contain summaries of FBI interviews with key Trump administration and campaign officials, the Fox News anchor’s alleged role as an unofficial messenger between the president and his former campaign chairman comes into sharp focus.
For all the discussion of politics over these last three years, America now comes to a critical year ahead. In these next twelve months, we’ll see primaries, conventions, a general election, and thereafter possible challenges to, and necessary defenses of, the constitutional order.