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.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 07m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 3:30 PM.
On this day in 1918, Wisconsin troops depart for Europe: “the Wisconsin 127th and 128th Infantries departed for France from their training facility at Camp Arthur in Waco, Texas. Initially, these divisions were assigned to construct depots and facilities for troops that would follow. On May 18, they were assigned to the frontline at Belmont in the Alsace where they faced three German divisions. In the following months, 368 troops were killed, wounded or missing.”
President Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Wisconsin next month, countering a Democratic presidential debate set for the same night in Iowa.
Trump’s campaign says the rally will be Jan. 14 at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena. It’s the same night that CNN and The Des Moines Register are sponsoring the first Democratic debate of 2020 at Drake University in Des Moines.
The Milwaukee rally will also be Trump’s second in less than a week. The Republican president’s campaign has said he’ll hold his first 2020 rally in Toledo, Ohio, on Jan. 9.
Republicans are now officially the character doesn’t count party, the personal responsibility just proves you have failed to blame the other guy party, the deficit doesn’t matter party, the Russia is our ally party, and the I’m-right-and-you-are-human-scum party. Yes, it’s President Trump’s party now, but it stands only for what he has just tweeted.
A party without a governing theory, a higher purpose or a clear moral direction is nothing more than a cartel, a syndicate that exists only to advance itself. There is no organized, coherent purpose other than the acquisition and maintenance of power.
Trump didn’t hijack the GOP and bend it to his will. He did something far easier: He looked at the party, saw its fault lines and then offered himself as a pure distillation of accumulated white grievance and anger. He bet that Republican voters didn’t really care about free trade or mutual security, or about the environment or Europe, much less deficits. He rebranded kindness and compassion as “PC” and elevated division and bigotry as the admirable goals of just being politically incorrect. Trump didn’t make Americans more racist; he just normalized the resentments that were simmering in many households. In short, he let a lot of long-suppressed demons out of the box.
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Having ignored the warning signs for years myself, I know the seductive lure of believing what you prefer while ignoring the obvious truth.
Which is this: We are a long way — more than a half-century — from 1968, much less 1952. The United States is now a diverse, chaotic collection of 330 million people, a country of immigrants and multiculturalism that is growing less white every day. It is not some gauzy Shangri-La of suburban bliss that never existed.
Soledad O’Brien, responding to Michael Bloomberg’s hesitant, equivocating answer to a question about the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, explains why Bloomberg will never be president. She’s right that black voters will not accept him, but then no one of any race should support a man who does not – indeed, will not – recognize & condemn injustice.
I keep telling you all that answers like this will be utterly disqualifying for black voters. I’m surprised his team hasn’t come up with a strategy to answer these obvious questions. https://t.co/K5XtJsu1QO
