This Tuesday, October 8th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Rocketman @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin Community Building:
Tuesday, October 8th, 12:30 PM
Biography/Drama/Musical
Rated R (Language, sexual content); 2 hours, 1 min (2019).
Step inside the story of Sir Elton John (Taron Egerton) and see his rise to the superstar showman he is today. This is a film that is more a musical than a biopic. It is rated R, but then Elton hasn’t lived a PG13 life. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1998. Elton John will be at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee on October 19 (his concert is sold out).
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 6:27 PM, for 11h 28m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1917, Sen. Robert La Follette supports free speech in wartime:
He responded to charges of treason with a three-hour defense of free speech in wartime. La Follette had voted against a declaration of war as well as several initiatives seen as essential to the war effort by those that supported U.S. involvement in the First World War. His resistance was met with a petition to the Committee on Privileges and Elections that called for La Follette’s expulsion from the Senate. The charges were investigated, but La Follette was cleared of any wrongdoing by the committee on January 16, 1919.
Since the revelation of an explosive whistleblower complaint that sparked an impeachment crisis for President Trump, he and his Republican allies have coalesced around a central defense: The document was based on secondhand information, mere hearsay riddled with inaccuracies.
But over the past two weeks, documents, firsthand witness accounts and even statements by Trump himself have emerged that bolster the facts outlined in the extraordinary abuse-of-
power complaint.
The descriptionof a July 25 phone call between Trump and the president of Ukraine, which formed the heart of the complaint and was still secret at the time the claim was filed in mid-August, matches a rough transcript of the call that the White House released a day before the complaint was made public.
The whistleblower’s assertion that records related to the phone call were transferred to a separate electronic system intended for highly classified material has since been confirmed by White House officials.
And the whistleblower’s narrative of theevents that led up to the call — including a shadow campaignundertaken by Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and the attempts of State Department officials to navigate his activities— have been largely confirmed by the text messages of three diplomats released Friday, as well as Giuliani himself in media interviews.
Independent evidence now supports the central elements laid out in the seven-page document. Even if they disregarded the complaint, legal experts said, lawmakers have obtained dramatic testimony and documents that provide ammunition for the whistleblower’s core assertion: that the president of the United States used “the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 6:28 PM, for 11h 31m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Trump administration has had a rough few weeks, but spare a thought for the president’s closest foreign allies. From Britain to Australia, Japan to Saudi Arabia, foreign leaders who decided to gamble on America’s unpredictable leader are probably wondering whether they made a losing bet.
In the United States, the ongoing scandal about President Trump’s July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sparked a swell of momentum for impeachment. Democrats argue that the phone call, in which Trump said Zelensky should open a criminal investigation against the son of one of his rivals, amounted to an abuse of office.
But there was more than one world leader on that phone call. Some critics in Ukraine have condemned Zelensky’s attempts to placate Trump during the conversation. “Now we’re a part of American elections, and I don’t like it,” Oleksiy Honcharenko, a member of former president Petro Poroshenko’s party, told The Washington Post. “Ukraine has problems enough without this.”
(Emphasis in original. Foreign leaders who gambled on Trump were never worthy allies of the United States. If they were worthy allies, then they would not have been so solicitous to a bigoted autocrat who was a threat to the liberal democratic order that defines the American republic. We can do better.)
Russia’s attempt to swing the 2016 U.S. election campaign for Donald Trump was just one of dozens of such operations Moscow has waged in the West in recent years. Assessing the specific impact of each act of political interference is exceedingly difficult. But analysts increasingly point to a general trend that serves Russia’s interest: The operations are eroding Western voters’ overall trust in democracy.
This week on And Now the Hard Part, we trace the roots of Moscow’s political interference and talk about how countries can fight back.
“You have to send the message to those that try to undermine our democracies that there will be consequences for their actions,” says Alina Polyakova, the director of the Global Project on Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution and our guest this week.
When [Miguel] Gomez moved to a small town outside Philadelphia, he lamented its lack of a video store. So he opened one himself. Roy Power’s short documentary Memory Video is a portrait of Gomez and his homespun operation—one of the last rental stores of its kind.
MIDDLETON – U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson said Thursday there’s nothing improper about President Donald Trump’s call on Chinese officials to investigate his top political rival in his 2020 re-election bid.
Trump extended the invitation Thursday to the foreign country as he faces impeachment over a similar request of the president of Ukraine and just months after Trump’s 2016 campaign was investigated over its ties to Russia officials.
The Whitewater Common Council met in regular session on Tuesday, October 1st.
One wonders: what does it profit a leader to speak another language if he’s ineffectual in the face of injuries to speakers of that language?
In the video above, one hears from Whitewater’s city government (beginning at 9:10 on the video):
A reminder to be proactive in your community and in your neighborhood. If you see something, give us a call. If someone looks suspicious, don’t think ah it’s just me, and justify the one hundred reasons you shouldn’t make the call. Make the call. Let us know so our police force can go out and do their job in protecting the community.
A reminder about this government reminder: far more than once, peaceful residents of this city have told this city leader that they and members of their community are repeatedly stopped and questioned over their immigration status, often through a flimsy pretext.
The practice continues. They’ve made the call, so to speak, but their concerns have been unaddressed.
They ironic temerity of these repeated stops: these are peaceful residents of this city, but many of those stopping them live neither in the city nor even in any of the counties in which this city is situated.
These stops aren’t ‘protecting’ Whitewater; they’re crude and disruptive nativism under the color of law.
A reminder about protection first requires an understanding of the very concept.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 6:30 PM, for 11h 34m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 37.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1957, the Soviets launch Sputnik 1 into orbit.
The change would boost costs for Wisconsin taxpayers by millions of dollars a year because the state would have to upgrade the computer systems that administer the FoodShare program, retrain workers and more thoroughly scrutinize the assets of people who apply for benefits.
The computer upgrade would cost $2.3 million, according to the state Department of Health Services. Operational costs would rise by $17.7 million a year. State and local taxpayers would have to pick up about half of both sets of costs, with the federal government paying for the rest.
“The bottom line is you’d have more cost on bureaucracy and administration and fewer benefits going to Wisconsinites,” Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul said.
Kaul and 23 other attorneys general sent a letter last week urging the U.S. Department of Agriculture not to implement the new rule for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, which is widely known as the food stamp program. In Wisconsin, it is called FoodShare.
(This federal mandate asks too much, and takes from those who have too little.)
An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president’s or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document.
Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on Capitol Hill, and flagged it in a federal court filing. They are also discussing whether to make it public.
The details of the IRS complaint follow news of a separate, explosive whistleblower complaint filed in August by a member of the intelligence community. That complaint revealed Trump’s request of Ukranian leaders to investigate former vice president Joe Biden, a political rival. It has spurred an impeachment probe on Capitol Hill.
Someone is, apparently, is placing parody ads for Rudolph Giuliani in the New York subway system:
A website linked to the parody, crazyrudylaw.com, offers Giuliani’s unscrupulous services in back channel deals and cable news appearances.
Better still, the firm offers to work for free:
In an effort to shield money from my wife during our divorce, I’m willing to work for FREE! I only ask that you pick up the bar tab at the end of our session.
President Trump said Wednesday that his controversial July call with his Ukrainian counterpart was transcribed “word-for-word, comma-for-comma,” an assertion that fueled growing questions about the nature and completeness of an official memorandum about the call released by the White House last week.
“This is an exact word-for-word transcript of the conversation, taken by very talented stenographers,” Trump said.
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Current and former U.S. officials studying the document pointed to several elements that, they say, indicate that the document may have been handled in an unusual way.
Those include the use of ellipses — punctuation indicating that information has been deleted for clarity or other reasons — that traditionally have not appeared in summaries of presidential calls with foreign leaders, according to the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the elaborate, non-public process.
….
The White House declined to comment Wednesday about the unusual markings or other apparent discrepancies. Shortly after the document’s release last week, a White House official had said that the ellipses did not indicate missing words but referred to “a trailing off of a voice or pause,” and called it standard practice for records of presidential phone calls.
Current and former officials said that would be slightly different from previous practice. They said when presidents simply trail off in a way that note-takers can’t hear, that point traditionally has been marked “[inaudible].” When fragments of sentences aren’t readily understood by note-takers, or when comments repeat a previous thought, they said, the transcripts had often been marked with dashes.
Trump, himself, claims there is a “word-for-word” transcript.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy & windy with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 6:32 PM, for 11h 37m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and the Fire Department board of directors meets at 6:30 PM.
A top GOP lawmaker is signaling he won’t help reimburse taxpayers for $200,000 in legal bills he and other Republicans racked up when a court found they had illegally blocked a liberal group on Twitter.
State officials in August agreed to pay for One Wisconsin Now’s legal bills after a federal judge determined Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Rep. John Nygren violated the group’s First Amendment rights by preventing it from accessing and responding to their Twitter posts.
Vos and Nygren didn’t respond to questions about the settlement at the time and Nygren on Wednesday gave no sign he planned to pay the settlement.
“I’m not even answering that,” he said when asked if he would pay some of the settlement.
Last year, then-Rep. Dale Kooyenga paid the state $30,000 to cover a settlement in a lawsuit brought after he took a protest sign from a public area of the Capitol. Kooyenga, a Republican from Brookfield, won a seat in the state Senate in November.
President Trump and Republicans are excitedly drawing attention to a breaking story in the New York Times that reports that the whistleblower gave advance notice to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) about the subject of his complaint, before filing it to the intelligence community’s inspector general.
….
But there’s nothing in the story that says anything about Schiff having any substantive input into the whistleblower’s complaint. It says Schiff’s aide reported to him some of what the whistleblower said, and that the aide told the whistleblower to get a lawyer and go to the inspector general.
In so doing, the aide advised the whistleblower on how to follow the law. That’s not “rigging” the process. It’s the opposite.
Indeed, the Times piece itself describes the significance of this news by claiming it shows “how determined” the whistleblower was to make his discovery known. This, by itself, does not raise doubts about his motives or truthfulness, or about the complaint itself, in any way. All it does is underscore how serious the whistleblower thought his discovery was, and how urgent he thought it was to get it to Congress.
John Trumbull’s founding-era painting, Declaration of Independence, is one of the most famous in America. Recently, Ancestry.com commissioned the recreation of Trumball’s scene in a photograph with the descendants of the Declaration’s signers. The recreation is truly hopeful:
Adam Serwer, writing on Twitter in response to a series of distortions from the conservative Federalist website, states plainly the truth of Trump-supporting lies:
There is no incentive to correct because the targeted audience will believe anything pro-Trump they are told, whereas acknowledging error would signal weakness and insufficient devotion to the Great Leader.
Yes, and yes again.
They want to hear what they want to hear, and there are always people who will satisfy those wants.
It’s also possible – and this is true at the local level with boosterism – that often pride keeps people from admitting that they’re wrong.
Two examples (of many) in Whitewater would be the commissioning of three studies before the local government at last conceded that a waste-hauling scheme into a digester was infeasible. A councilman (Binnie) pushed for that third taxpayer-funded study when by contrast any reasonable person earlier would have seen that the plan was both impractical and destructive. Here he futilely held on in the hope of a justification that was never going to come. Even at the end, Whitewater’s city manager (Clapper) insisted that in ten years or so he’d be proved right, and the wastewater superintendent (Reel) tried to keep talking about what a fine idea he was sure this was (until at last someone cut him off).
At UW-Whitewater, the school publicizes on its website a so-called crime safety study that’s so unsound no educated man or woman could give it credence. SeeThe Marketing of Misinformation: UW-Whitewater’s Use of a Counterfeit ‘Campus Safety’ Study, For UW-Whitewater’s Administration, Talking Points Won’t Be Enough, and Truth-Telling and Tale-Weaving. It doesn’t matter enough to the chancellor (Watson) and his public relations team (Kuhl, Angileri) that the study is embarrassingly deficient – it says what they want to hear, and what they want to prospective students to hear. Watson undertook advanced studies and defended a dissertation, but now he advances claims that are unworthy of legitimate academic work at any accredited institution. Watson, Kuhl, and Angileri say what they want in support of what they want.
Whitewater, Wisconsin, and America can and should do better.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of sixty-one. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 6:33 PM, for 11h 40m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1958, 4,000 members of United Auto Workers Locals at Janesville’s two GM plants walked off the job as part of a national strike
U.S. manufacturing fell deeper into a contraction last month, erasing hope of a quick turnaround for the industry and handing a blow to President Trump’s promises that he would revive blue-collar jobs and companies.
September marked the worst month for U.S. manufacturing in more than a decade — since June 2009 — according to the closely watched Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing index. Companies blamed Trump’s escalating trade war for many of their woes, putting pressure on the White House to show progress soon. Manufacturing remains a prominent industry in many swing states.
“Global trade remains the most significant issue, as demonstrated by the contraction in new export orders that began in July 2019. Overall, sentiment this month remains cautious regarding near-term growth,” said Timothy R. Fiore, chair of ISM.
….
Manufacturing fell into a technical recession in the first half of the year, and the latest ISM data indicates the situation appears to be getting worse.
Concerns are rising that the contraction in manufacturing could spill over into the rest of the U.S. economy. Stocks sold off quickly on the news that nearly every manufacturing sector reported trouble, with the Dow Jones industrial average ending the day with a 344-point loss.
“There is no end in sight to this slowdown, the recession risk is real,” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities, in an email to clients.
President Donald Trump’s agriculture secretary said Tuesday he believes dairy farms can stay in business, but they may have to get bigger to do so.
“I think the 2018 farm bill will stem the flow of that” loss of dairy farms in recent years, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue told reporters.
“Now what we see, obviously, is economies of scale having happened in America — big get bigger and small go out. … It’s very difficult on economies of scale with the capital needs and all the environmental regulations and everything else today to survive milking 40, 50, 60 or even 100 cows, and that’s what we’ve seen.”
Perdue made his comments after holding a town hall meeting with farmers and dairy industry officials at the kickoff of the annual World Dairy Expo at Madison’s Alliant Energy Center.
Grant County dairy farmer Jerry Volenec expressed frustration with Perdue’s comments.
“What I heard today from the secretary of agriculture was there’s no place for me,” said Volenec, who spoke at a news conference organized by the state Democratic Party.
Nearly 3,000 U.S. dairy farms folded in 2018, about a 6.5% decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures.
Wisconsin lost nearly 700 — almost two a day — as even dairy farmers used to enduring hard times called it quits in the fourth year of a downturn in milk prices.
Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63), the former chess champion and longtime human rights activist, recently described the role of propaganda in creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The thread from Twitter is below (linked here from the first tweet) in the thread:
As you watch Trump’s defenders lie, deflect, and distract today and in the coming weeks, remember that they don’t care about being caught in obvious lies. Calling bullshit still means you’re talking about the bullshit, not the facts.
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This is part of the “flood not dam” model. They want doubt. They can make up a dozen new lies and new distractions every day while there’s only one truth. Stop chasing them and keep repeating the facts.
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Many thought it strange when Putin’s propaganda released many different “refutations” after Russian forces shot down MH17, some even on the same day. But they want to distract, not refute. To make it seem like the truth isn’t knowable.
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They’ll attack the truth-tellers, accuse them of anything at all, because playing defense takes energy. They’ll use whataboutism to distract from their crimes. Keep following the money and repeating the truth.
