Scott Fitzgerald, a fixture of the Wisconsin state Senate for the last 25 years, announced Tuesday he would seek a higher office in the U.S. House of Representatives. Fitzgerald, 56, is the first Republican to enter the race to succeed retiring Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner and launches a bid to represent the deeply conservative district at a time when his ties to President Donald Trump may turn off some voters in the Milwaukee suburbs.
Whitewater is not a Milwaukee suburb – it’s a small and beautiful city far from most of this over-stretched district. Fitzgerald will never carry a majority of this city’s residents; his politics are, at bottom, a threat and affront to them.
It will be well worth covering every moment of his campaign.
Constitution Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 7:00 PM, for 12h 23m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 89.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 8:00 AM. Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6:15 PM, and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
First up, do early head-to-head polls like the ones Biden has cited tell us anything about how well a candidate will do in the primary? To test this idea, we collected polls conducted in the last half of the calendar year before the primary (July to December) and built two models to predict how each candidate would ultimately do in the nomination contest: One model used polls of the primary race and candidates’ name recognition, and the other model used those two factors plus incorporated how well the candidates did in head-to-head polls of the general election. We then compared the two models to see if adding in the general election polls improved our modeling. So, to spoil the ending a bit, do head-to-head polls help us predict who will win the nomination when we already know where candidates stand in the primary polls? The short answer is: No, they don’t seem to help much at all.
On Friday, civil rights groups filed the first lawsuit challenging the executive order, claiming it was “motivated by a racially discriminatory scheme to reduce Latino political representation and increase the overrepresentation of non-Latino Whites, thereby advantaging White voters at Latino voters’ expense.”
For decades, state legislative and Congressional districts have been drawn based on total population. If districts were instead based only on citizens or eligible voters, that could lead to a major shift in power from Democratic to Republican areas, as many Democrats represent areas with concentrations of non-citizens and non-voters, including children. If those people are not counted in legislative apportionment, that would benefit Republicans, who tend to represent whiter, more homogenous areas with fewer non-citizens and young people.
Over the past decade, Republicans have sought to make such a change. The late Republican gerrymandering expert Thomas Hofeller, who also led the behind-the-scenes efforts to add the citizenship question, wrote in a 2015 study that drawing districts based on eligible voters instead of the total population would “would clearly be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:02 PM, for 12:49:26 of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School District also meets at 6:30 PM.
Andrew Calderon reports Border Courts Swamped With New Asylum Cases (‘Thousands of cases have been filed since President Trump started forcing asylum seekers to wait in Mexico’):
Early this year, the Trump administration began forcing thousands of migrants seeking asylum to return to Mexico, to wait there for immigration court hearings that would decide whether they could settle in the United States. New government figures show the policy is rapidly flooding some courts assigned to handle the cases.
The numbers from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency within the Department of Justice that runs the immigration court system, show that so far this year, nearly 17,000 new asylum cases for migrants waiting in Mexico have been assigned to border courts through the end of August. And the numbers have been growing. More than 6,000 were filed in August alone.
These figures are likely an undercount of the number of people affected by the policy. According to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, 26,000 people had received notices to appear in these courts by the Department of Homeland Security through July.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un invited U.S. President Donald Trump to visit Pyongyang in a letter sent in August amid stalled denuclearisation talks, a South Korean newspaper reported on Monday, citing diplomatic sources.
Kim, in the letter sent in the third week of August, spoke of his “willingness” for a third summit and extended an invitation for Trump to visit the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, the Joongang Ilbo newspaper reported, citing an unidentified source.
Trump on Aug. 9 said he had received a “very beautiful letter” from Kim.
But U.S. officials have not said anything about a second letter in August.
Trump and Kim have met three times since June last year to discuss ways to resolve a crisis over North Korea’s missile and nuclear programmes, but substantive progress has been scant.
Ours is an era of conflicts of interest and self-dealing. Conflicts of interest sometimes begin with ignorance but they persist through arrogance. Simple principles of separation between roles that were once understood and respected (in the main) are now commonly rationalized away. If one bemoans degraded national ethics, one should be clear that local officials and private parties paved the way for ethical lapses through their own lesser standards.
And so, and so — a gallery of conflicts and ethical lapses, to be updated so often as necessary. One can – and should – match each lapse with a reply.
Latest Submission: School Board Member Reports for Local Newspaper on His Own District’s Meetings (online 9.6.19, in print 9.9.19).
Whitewater Unified School District board member Tom Ganser writes as a ‘correspondent’ for Daily Union editor Chris Spangler in a story entitled Whitewater School District Holds Annual Data Retreat. He is nowhere in the story identified as a school board member. That’s the editor’s lapse of journalistic standards. The board member has an official duty of oversight on a public body, but reports on those over whom he has oversight. That’s his lapse into a conflict of interest between roles as an impartial overseer and a mere press agent.
In fairness, this conflict-laden approach has beset Whitewater for years. A truly proper gallery of this sort would require an entire wing dedicated to the work of longtime Whitewater councilmember and current school board member Jim Stewart, who so often published accounts of the very meetings and government initiatives of which he was a part. I’ve a fair number of saved examples, but perhaps the current owners of Stewart’s archive will place the full oeuvre de l’artiste online.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:35 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 28m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1950, United Nations forces under the command of Gen. MacArthur land at Inchon, and within two weeks liberate Seoul from North Korean occupation.
In 2011, Sean Pugh was arrested for allegedly violating terms of his release from prison. A year and a half into his roughly two-year stay in the Brown County Jail, he realized he owed the county around $17,000 — the result of a $20 daily “pay-to-stay” fee plus fees from previous jail stints.
Brown County is one of at least 23 Wisconsin counties that assess “pay-to-stay” fees, which charge inmates for room and board for the time they are incarcerated, according to a Wisconsin Watch survey of county jails.
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Under Wisconsin law, pay-to-stay can apply to the entire period of time the person is in jail, including pretrial detention. It is then up to the counties whether they want to charge only sentenced inmates or also charge those who are not sentenced.
The jail systems in Wisconsin’s two largest counties — Dane and Milwaukee — do not levy pay-to-stay fees. But in other Wisconsin counties, jails are taking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the Wisconsin Watch survey found.
Such fees have escalated in recent decades. The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in a 9-0 decision that financial penalties levied by states may be so high as to violate the federal Eighth Amendment constitutional protection against excessive fines.
Noting that excessive fines for “vagrancy” were used after the Civil War to re-enslave freed men, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurrence: “The right against excessive fines traces its lineage back in English law nearly a millennium, and … has been consistently recognized as a core right worthy of constitutional protection.”
When it comes to ranking the presidents, there are only two contenders for the top spot: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. They had a few things in common: Both lost a parent as a child, both had a serious demeanor, and both dabbled with writing poetry.
But only one was any good at poetry. Listen to this story on “Retropod”:
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 7:06 PM, for 12h 31m 51s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
he was surprised to have received no delegation from the city. At the approach of a victorious general, the civil authorities customarily presented themselves at the gates of the city with the keys to the city in an attempt to safeguard the population and their property. As nobody received Napoleon he sent his aides into the city, seeking out officials with whom the arrangements for the occupation could be made. When none could be found, it became clear that the Russians had left the city unconditionally. In a normal surrender, the city officials would be forced to find billets and make arrangements for the feeding of the soldiers, but the situation caused a free-for-all in which every man was forced to find lodgings and sustenance for himself. Napoleon was secretly disappointed by the lack of custom as he felt it robbed him of a traditional victory over the Russians, especially in taking such a historically significant city. To make matters worse, Moscow had been stripped of all supplies by its governor, Feodor Rostopchin, who had also ordered the prisons to be opened.
Federal health data shows obesity rates went up in 33 states last year. Wisconsin remained stable with 32 percent of the state’s residents qualifying as obese — a number above the national average of nearly 31 percent.
“These latest data shout that our national obesity crisis is getting worse,” said John Auerbach, president and CEO of Trust for America’s Health which compiled a report using the federal statistics.
Nine states had obesity rates above 35 percent: Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota and West Virginia.
A number of health providers and advocacy groups in Wisconsin have put out recommendations to curb obesity which increases risk for Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and many types of cancers.
A 2015 study revealed that people today are 10 percent heavier than they were in the 1980s—even with the same diets and exercise regimens. A new episode of The Idea File investigates the plethora of complex factors that may be contributing to our increasing BMI, including a changing microbiome and toxic chemicals in the environment.
(The EU has banned certain chemicals that might lead to obesity, but people in a free society can and should manage their choices of cosmetics, for example, without government intervention.)
In December 2015, T. Christian Miller of ProPublica and Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project published An Unbelievable Story of Rape, about a woman (her middle name is Marie) who was raped, pressured to recant her account, and later found herself charged with a misdemeanor offense. In fact, she was raped, her attacker was later found to be a serial rapist, and her experience shows how indifferent – or hostile – the law can be to honest people simply trying to recount their injuries.
I read the story when it came out, and there is now a Netflix limited series, Unbelievable, that tells of Marie’s case.
The Netflix series comes recommended from those reviewers who have previewed it; I have yet to see it. The story, however, I would recommend now, with the reminder that well-written accounts of crimes – and of the indifference of others to those crimes – are painful to read. (One can say, that having re-read the story before the release of the series, the written account is as powerful as when one first read it years earlier.)
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 34m 44s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, Union soldiers discover Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191, detailing Confederate troop movements; the discovery gave Union generals valuable information they used to their advantage at the Battle of Antietam.
And Trump, who has never fully acknowledged Putin’s attack in 2016, recently noted that he would accept secret help, in the form of dirt on a political rival, from a foreign government for his reelection campaign. That remark, his call to allow Russia to reenter the G8, and his general Russia-didn’t-do-anything stance certainly send a signal to Putin: Feel free to do it again. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked votes on a variety of election security bills.
All of this is particularly maddening because there are steps the US government could take to prevent a repeat of 2016 or something worse. A new report released by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, chronicles what other Western governments have done to counter Moscow’s efforts and outlines steps that could be adopted in the United States to beat back an attack on the next election. (CAP was founded by John Podesta, who certainly cares a lot about Russian attacks: When he was chair of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, his emails were hacked by Russian operatives and leaked by WikiLeaks through the final four weeks of the 2016 campaign.)
The study, written by James Lamond and Talia Dessel, notes that “Russia is consistently shifting and updating its interference tactics, making it even harder to protect future elections,” and the paper examines several case studies of Russian intervention since the 2016 election. In 2017, Moscow sought to influence the French presidential election to boost the odds for Marine Le Pen, the National Front candidate running against Emmanuel Macron on an anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-NATO, and pro-Russia platform. During that race, Russia mounted a disinformation campaign using rumor and forged documents, cyberattacks on campaign officials, and a leak of stolen data. That same year, Russia-linked trolls and bots amplified the messages of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, in Germany during the federal election there. (The Kremlin also boosted the themes of the left-wing anti-fascists—a sign Moscow was aiming to sow overall political discord.) In 2018, Russian state propaganda outfits consistently smeared Sweden, while a populist, anti-immigrant party was vying for power in that country’s election. In 2019, Russia-linked operatives used disinformation efforts during elections for the European Parliament to suppress voter turnout.
These last years have been difficult, and one can reasonably expect worse from Trumpism before that ideology is consigned – as it will be – to the political outer darkness. A necessary condition for optimism is an understanding of the present from which one can build a better future. (Local boosterism and babbittry are failures because they’re built on exaggerations and lies that produce only more exaggerations and lies.) Even in the midst of these troubled times, one sees the outlines of a restored, reconstructed America. One can see these outlines from events at home and abroad.
There was a moment, at the height of the Greek debt crisis in July 2015, when many Athenians went to sleep expecting to wake up in a different country. One Greek academic told me he feared Greece would crash out of the euro currency overnight, that there would be no money in the banks in the morning, that there would be food shortages and then riots: “Greece is a middle-class country,” he told me. “I didn’t think we would be able to cope with the shock.” Several others told me that they had genuinely expected the arrival of a Venezuelan-style dictatorship, perhaps with tanks on the street.
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But the failure of Syriza [a populist party] has also triggered the opposite reaction [to apathy]: a small but growing attempt to revive economic liberalism, for the first time in recent memory, and to celebrate liberal democracy as well. A decade ago, fashionable intellectuals were all left-wing in Greece, and most books on politics and economics were written by Marxists. Now, it’s possible to sit down in a cafe with young people who describe themselves not only as “economic liberals” but also as “neoliberals,” adopting a phrase that was used as a harsh insult only a few years ago.
The arc of American history reveals an unmistakable pattern. Whenever privilege and power conspire to pull us backward, we eventually rally and move forward.
Sometimes it takes an economic shock like the bursting of a giant speculative bubble. Sometimes we just reach a tipping point where the frustrations of average Americans turn into action.
Now, come forward in time with me. Look at the startling diversity of younger Americans. Most Americans now under 18 years old are ethnically Hispanic, Asian or Pacific Islander, African-American, or of more than one race. In ten years, it’s projected that most Americans under 30 will be.
Three decades from now, most of America will people of color or of more than one race. That diversity will be a huge strength. Hopefully, it will mean more tolerance, less racism, less xenophobia.
Young people are determined to make America better. I’ve been teaching for almost 40 years, and I’ve never taught a generation of students as committed to improving the nation and the world as is the generation I’m now teaching. A record percentage of them voted in the 2018 midterm elections. Another sign of our future strength.
BREAKING: The U.S. budget deficit surpassed $1 trillion in the first 11 months of the fiscal year through August, according to data from the Treasury Department https://t.co/cVndXhFyxh
Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered thundershowers with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 37m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1940, Marcel Ravidat discovers the entrance to Lascaux Cave, a cave complex with over 600 drawings from the Upper Paleolithic era. The next day, “he returned to the scene with three friends….The teenagers discovered that the cave walls were covered with depictions of animals.”
President Trump says he is “winning big time, against China.” But his trade war is causing measurable damage to the U.S. economy, with the pain likely to worsen.
Forecasting firm Moody’s Analytics estimates that Trump’s trade war with China has already reduced U.S. employment by 300,000 jobs, compared with likely employment levels absent the trade war. That’s a combination of jobs eliminated by firms struggling with tariffs and other elements of the trade war, and jobs that would have been created but haven’t because of reduced economic activity.
The firm’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Yahoo Finance that the job toll from the trade war will hit about 450,000 by the end of the year, if there’s no change in policy. By the end of 2020, the trade war will have killed 900,000 jobs, on its current course. The hardest-hit sectors are manufacturing, warehousing, distribution and retail.
Other data back up the Moody’s Analytics numbers. Employers have created 1.3 million jobs so far this year, down from 1.9 million during the same period in 2018. The manufacturing sector has actually contracted, with many producers struggling with higher prices caused by Trump’s tariffs. Business investment is growing by the smallest amount since late 2016.
With John Bolton out as national security adviser, the defense industry is poised to receive even more representation in the highest levels of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy team. Bolton deputy Charlie Kupperman—a former executive at Boeing and Lockheed Martin—was tapped to fill the job in an acting capacity, giving industry veterans another prominent perch in the administration. Ex-Raytheon lobbyist Mark Esper already serves as Secretary of Defense.
While in office, Trump has become a major booster for American defense contractors. He’s urged Vietnamese leaders to buy “the best military equipment in the world by far” from American firms and has even promoted specific companies, such as Lockheed Martin, from the White House’s official Twitter feed. When Saudi Arabia, a longtime US ally, drew international condemnation for its role in ordering the death of a Washington Post journalist, Trump appeared to excuse the kingdom’s behavior due, in part, to the “record amount of money” it had spent on “military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great US defense contractors.”
If a group invited a guest speaker who said the world was flat, then that group would be rightly discarded as a credible policy advocate. In Whitewater and other towns, crony-capitalist groups of different sizes proudly declared the Foxconn project a boon for Wisconsin. (Trump, himself, declared it a boon for the whole planet: “the eighth wonder of the world.”)
Roughly a year since Foxconn Technology Group pledged $100 million to help fund a new UW-Madison engineering building and company-related research, the university said it has received $700,000, less than 1% of the original commitment.
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Foxconn’s master agreement with UW-Madison does not say how much it plans to provide the university or when, although the agreement is for five years. In fact, the 12-page document does not even mention a dollar figure and instead notes the company “intends to make a substantial investment in research and other activities” with UW-Madison, despite public statements in August 2018 referencing $100 million.
(Emphasis added.)
Be patient, Badgers – you’ve only $99,300,000.00 to go. Hey, Greater Whitewater Committee and Whitewater Community Development Authority – how about a bake sale to speed this process along?
