I’m a libertarian, not a conservative, and yet one wishes the best for The Lincoln Project, a national conservative effort to defeat Donald Trump:
We do not undertake this task lightly nor from ideological preference. Our many policy differences with national Democrats remain. However, the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared fidelity to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat those candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Electing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.
These times require a grand coalition, and among its members will be – and must be – people of different partisan views united in a common constitutional defense.
It’s true that in many places, including Whitewater, a longstanding local boosterism – eroding as it did the standards of honesty and sound reasoning on which a well-ordered politics depends – made it easier for Trumpism to rise and spread. Some officials in this town from a decade ago, for example, who fancied themselves serious conservative or liberal men, were little more than third-tier circus barkers. (Perhaps they’re shocked – simply shocked! – by Trump now, but their own dodgy data and serial exaggerations paved the way for Trumpism.)
We who are libertarian – even those of us in small and faraway places – will happily join as we are able with serious and principled conservatives and liberals in the honorable work of defending the constitutional order.
No matter the motivations or the political outcome, testimony from the whistleblower would not change the underlying facts of what Trump said. The whistleblower’s account is verified by the same set of facts supplied by Vindman, Williams and Morrison, and others who were in the know.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 02m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 68.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Board meets at 6:10 PM, and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.
On the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s final major push in World War II, a U.S. Army unit shared a tribute to the “greatest battle in American history” — a detailed portrait of a worried military commander fretting over the plan that would ultimately secure an Allied victory over the Nazis.
“The fate of his beloved nation rested on his ability to lead his men,” the XVIII Airborne Corps wrote on a Monday Facebook post featuring the striking photo.
But the description wasn’t detailing the heroics of an American general poised to destroy fascist German forces. Instead, it seemingly celebrated the strategic mindset of Nazi war criminal Joachim Peiper, an infamous German commander who ordered the massacre of 84 U.S. prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge.
The Army unit posted a glamorous, colorized photo of Peiper alongside an intimate narrative depicting the Nazi writing in his diary. The photo was also shared on the Facebook pages for the Defense Department and the Army’s 10th Mountain Division.
The backlash was swift. Critics in the Facebook comments accused the post of “glorifying a Nazi war criminal,” called it a “’fanboy’ flavored piece,” and described the photo as “vile and disturbing.”
Shortly after a public affairs officer for the Army criticized the posts on Twitter, the photos disappeared. The Defense Department and 10th Mountain Division deleted their posts, and the XVIII Airborne Corps removed the photo of Peiper from its lengthy narrative.
Officials for the Army and Pentagon have yet to explain why the photo was chosen, or how it was vetted for publication. But the origins of the image raise more questions about the thinking behind the controversial Facebook post.
In the lower right-hand corner of the photo, a historic image rendered modern through digital editing, a watermark reads, “Colored by Tobias Kurtz.” The same watermark is visible on an identical image uploaded to the Deviant Art gallery of a user who goes by “kapo-neu” and identifies himself on his “about” page as Tobias Kurtz. The connection was noted by journalist Corey Pein, who tweeted a link to the image posted by Kurtz on Sept. 21, 2014. Kurtz did not immediately return a request for comment.
Kurtz’s Deviant Art and Flickr accounts say he is a Slovakia-based gamer who likes photography and graphic design. He has also shared an image of Hitler laughing as a group of German soldiers prepare to execute a kneeling man and ‘favorited’ an illustration Hitler punching an American soldier while Nazis cheer.
At the New Yorker, Masha Gessen translates A Powerful Statement of Resistance from a College Student on Trial in Moscow (‘Yegor Zhukov’s message about responsibility and love at his trial, for “extremism,” shows what political dissent can be and seems to describe American reality as accurately as the Russian one’).
(Zhukov was accused of “extremism” for posting YouTube videos about nonviolent protest and his campaign for a city council seat in Moscow. The prosecution asked for four years of incarceration; Zhukov received probation.)
A portion of Gessen’s translation of Yegor Zhukov’s remarks appears below (the full text is available at the New Yorker):
“This court hearing is concerned primarily with words and their meaning. We have discussed specific sentences, the subtleties of phrasing, different possible interpretations, and I hope that we have succeeded at showing to the honorable court that I am not an extremist, either from the point of view of linguistics or from the point of view of common sense. But now I would like to talk about a few things that are more basic than the meaning of words. I would like to talk about why I did the things I did, especially since the court expert offered his opinion on this. I would like to talk about my deep and true motives. The things that have motivated me to take up politics. The reasons why, among other things, I recorded videos for my blog.
“But first I want to say this. The Russian state claims to be the world’s last protector of traditional values. We are told that the state devotes a lot of resources to protecting the institution of the family, and to patriotism. We are also told that the most important traditional value is the Christian faith. Your Honor, I think this may actually be a good thing. The Christian ethic includes two values that I consider central for myself. First, responsibility. Christianity is based on the story of a person who dared to take up the burden of the world. It’s the story of a person who accepted responsibility in the greatest possible sense of that word. In essence, the central concept of the Christian religion is the concept of individual responsibility.
….
“Is this really what we are taught? Is this really the ethics that children absorb at school? Are these the kinds of heroes we honor? No. Our society, as currently constituted, suppresses any possibility of human development. [Fewer than] ten per cent of Russians possess ninety per cent of the country’s wealth. Some of these wealthy individuals are, of course, perfectly decent citizens, but most of this wealth is accumulated not through honest labor that benefits humanity but, plainly, through corruption.
….
“The only social policy the Russian state pursues consistently is the policy of atomization. The state dehumanizes us in one another’s eyes. In the state’s own eyes, we stopped being human a long time ago. Otherwise, why would it treat its citizens the way it does? Why does it punctuate its treatment of people through daily nightstick beatings, prison torture, inaction in the face of an H.I.V. epidemic, the closure of schools and hospitals, and so on?
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 02m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Fire Department meets at 6 PM, and Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session at 6 PM, with an open session scheduled to begin at 7 PM.
On this day in 1944, the Battle of the Bulge begins with a German counteroffensive on the western front.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Saturday that he’s made up his mind that President Trump should be acquitted, dismissed the notion that he has to be a “fair juror” and said he doesn’t see the need for a formal trial in the Senate.
He need not have worried. Amidst his boot-licking and willful ignorance of a “quid pro quo,” Graham left little doubt that he had the slightest intention of doing his job as a juror.
At the trial, Democrats should certainly appeal to the presiding judge, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., to disqualify Graham. After all, it is impossible that he could take an oath as required under the Constitution. “I solemnly swear (or affirm) that in all things appertaining to the trial of ____, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws, so help me God,” is the oath Graham and others must take. He has declared not only his partiality but his determination to ignore all evidence.
Wallace’s Sunday morning interview show is often riveting, creating newsworthy moments — whether he is grilling former FBI director James B. Comey as he did this week or holding White House adviser Stephen Miller’s feet to the fire as he did in late September.
“According to POTUS, Chris Wallace is a partisan hack. In reality, he’s consistently the gold standard for American political interviewers,” Jonathan Swan of Axios noted on Twitter shortly after the Comey interview aired.
Tough, well-prepared and knowledgeable, Wallace is willing to interrupt, ask follow-up questions and assert facts when his subjects are insistently spewing talking points. That President Trump bashes him as “nasty and obnoxious” or calls his interviews “dumb and unfair” doesn’t detract from that reality.
Earlier on Sunday, during the two-hour “Fox & Friends” show, this typical chyron led the cheers: “Trump’s Week of Winning Despite Impeachment.” And the hosts’ softer-than-Charmin interview with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) mocked Democrats for talking about “prayerfulness” as next week’s impeachment vote approaches.
….
Wallace is a straight-shooter and a pro.
We need lots more of what he offers.
But his contributions to truth-telling and holding public officials accountable — important as they are — don’t make up for what goes on at Fox News too much of the time.
(Wallace is a faint voice against Fox’s screaming opinion side.)
There’s a significant new development in the Foxconn project: the state has told the Taiwanese corporation it’s presently no longer eligible for tax credits. Over at The Verge, a national technology publication, there’s an excellent, detailed story about Foxconn’s serial excuses to receive the public money or credits it wants regardless of performance. In an exclusive, Josh Dzieza reports on the Showdown in Wisconn Valley:
Whatever Foxconn is building in Wisconsin, it’s not the $10 billion, 22 million-square-foot Generation 10.5 LCD factory that President Trump once promised would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” At various points over the last two years, the Taiwanese tech manufacturer has said it would build a smaller LCD factory; that it wouldn’t build a factory at all; that it would build an LCD factory; that the company could make any number of things, from screens for cars to server racks to robot coffee kiosks; and so on.
Throughout these changes, one question has loomed: given that Foxconn is building something completely different than that Gen 10.5 LCD facility specified in its original contract with Wisconsin, is it still going to get the record-breaking $4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies?
Documents obtained by The Verge show that Wisconsin officials have repeatedly — and with growing urgency — warned Foxconn that its current project has veered far from what was described in the original deal and that the contract must be amended if the company is to receive subsidies. Foxconn, however, has declined to amend the contract, and it indicated that it nevertheless intends to apply for tax credits.
Foxconn has “refused by inaction” to amend the deal, says Wisconsin Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan. “They were continuously encouraged. It’s a relatively recent development, where they have said, ‘No, we don’t want to do anything with the contract.’ Our expectation has been, and continues to be, that they should want to come back and have discussions about this.”
The documents show it was Foxconn that first proposed amending the contract in a meeting on March 11th, 2019. Over the following months, various officials from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) and Gov. Tony Evers’ administration urged Foxconn to formally apply to revise its contract to reflect whatever it is actually building, a process that would involve describing Foxconn’s current plans, its expected costs, employment, and other basic details.
Foxconn never did.
Instead, a Foxconn representative wrote a brief letter asking the then-CEO of WEDC to make the current factory eligible for subsidies under the original contract. The company later claimed it has a right to apply for subsidies no matter what it builds in Wisconsin. Negotiations appear to have completely broken down in late November, after Foxconn director of US strategic initiatives Alan Yeung accused the Evers administration of being unfriendly to business, and saying that “discussions regarding immaterial matters are a misappropriation of our collective time and energy.”
Foxconn’s Wisconsin venture is a loss to the state, and a national laughingstock.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-five. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 02m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 86.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Caycee Bean says two dozen women have come forward with stories about former UW-La Crosse art professor Joel Elgin sexually harassing, assaulting or preying on them during his two decades with the university.
Bean, the former student who publicly accused Elgin of sexual misconduct this fall, said she has been overwhelmed by the number of messages she has received from women who say they were also victimized by the once-popular professor.
While most of the stories were shared by students, Bean said, some were offered by faculty. One involves a woman who had been silent for 17 years.
“He’s been doing this for a very long time and has been getting away with it for a very long time,” Bean said at a press conference with her attorneys Thursday. “I’m here today to let victims know we no longer need to feel intimidated. I want them to know it’s OK to come forward. We’re here for you. The community is here for you.”
Bean also responded to a recent statement from Elgin’s attorney, Cheryl Gill, who called the other accusers Bean’s “minions” and said UW-La Crosse faculty should be “afraid, very afraid” of bogus misconduct claims from students.
….
“I laughed when I first read that — it’s so ridiculous,” Bean said of the “minion” comment. “These girls aren’t my minions. I do not know these women. These are complete strangers who heard … about this guy finally being caught and have a story to share.
“Joel and his attorney’s words were meant to hurt and intimidate me and many others who have come forward. This is a textbook case of why so many victims don’t come forward.”
By getting hospitals to reform their operations and stop turning away ambulances, Milwaukee County put itself at the forefront of a push to ensure patients get the best, fastest care.
But experts warn voluntary agreements like the one in Milwaukee and other cities can be fragile and easily discarded, in part because there is little regulatory oversight to ensure hospitals follow them.
The approach also leads to a peculiar patchwork, where hospitals in neighboring counties continue to turn away ambulances, even though other facilities within the same health care system have stopped doing so.
In fact, new figures show diversions by some hospitals in the Milwaukee area — particularly those belonging to Ascension Wisconsin — have crept up this year, despite the ban local hospitals agreed to three years ago.
At Christmas, three Devil’s Island escapees (Humphrey Bogart, Peter Ustinov, Aldo Ray) hide out in the home of a kindly, failing merchant and his family, and repay their kindness by helping them out of several crises. Also stars Joan Bennett, Basil Rathbone, and Leo G. Carroll.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1896, Frederick Jackson Turner delivers his “Significance of the Frontier in American History” address at the forty-first annual meeting of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.
At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.
The commission planned to remove the letter’s recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn’t heard from them. But Malloy’s decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.
Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn’t heard from them.
They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn’t be.
But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.
The Defense Department’s inspector general’s office will audit a $400 million border wall contract that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded to a North Dakota construction company run by a GOP donor whom President Trump repeatedly urged military officials to hire.
Glenn A. Fine, the top official at the Pentagon office, authorized a review of the contract in response to a Dec. 4 letter from Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, asking inspectors to take a closer look. Fine informed Thompson of the audit in a letter Thursday.
“You raised concerns about the possibility of inappropriate influence on USACE’s contracting decision, and questioned whether the bid submitted by Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. met solicitation standards,” Fine wrote in his letter to Thompson. “You also questioned whether USACE made the award in accordance with federal procurement law and regulations.
Video obtained by ProPublica shows the Border Patrol held a sick teen in a concrete cell without proper medical attention and did not discover his body until his cellmate alerted guards. The video doesn’t match the Border Patrol’s account of his death.
….
Carlos Gregorio Hernandez Vasquez, a 16-year-old Guatemalan migrant, was seriously ill when immigration agents put him in a small South Texas holding cell with another sick boy on the afternoon of May 19.
A few hours earlier, a nurse practitioner at the Border Patrol’s dangerously overcrowded processing center in McAllen had diagnosed him with the flu and measured his fever at 103 degrees. She said that he should be checked again in two hours and taken to the emergency room if his condition worsened.
None of that happened. Worried that Carlos might infect other migrants in the teeming McAllen facility, officials moved him to a cell for quarantine at a Border Patrol station in nearby Weslaco.
By the next morning, he was dead.
In a press release that day, Customs and Border Protection’s acting commissioner at the time, John Sanders, called Carlos’ death a “tragic loss.” The agency said that an agent had found Carlos “unresponsive” after checking in on him. Sanders said the Border Patrol was “committed to the health, safety and humane treatment of those in our custody.”
But the record shows that the Border Patrol fell far short of that standard with Carlos. ProPublica has obtained video that documents the 16-year-old’s last hours, and it shows that Border Patrol agents and health care workers at the Weslaco holding facility missed increasingly obvious signs that his condition was perilous.
In all these things, Adam Serwer is right that ‘cruelty is the point’ – a policy by which ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’
Smart line of questioning from @amyklobuchar, laying out how nothing in the IG report draws into question the key points of what we know about Russian interference or how the investigation into it was conducted pic.twitter.com/Rf81MVDaKW
It’s true that in many places, including Whitewater, a longstanding local boosterism – eroding as it did the standards of honesty and sound reasoning on which a well-ordered politics depends – made it easier for Trumpism to rise and spread. Some officials in this town from a decade ago, for example, who fancied themselves serious conservative or liberal men, were little more than third-tier circus barkers. (Perhaps they’re shocked – simply shocked! – by Trump now, but their own dodgy data and serial exaggerations paved the way for Trumpism.)