Harvey Weinstein is responsible – directly and personally – for his actions. Others, however, assisted him in concealing his violent coercion. Astonishingly, as the New York Times reports, some of those who aided Weinstein were – of all people – attorneys who made public careers as victims’ rights advocates. The two podcasts embedded below detail their audacity. A corrupt influence corrodes in places and ways that are almost unimaginable.
Last week, our colleagues Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published a book documenting their investigation of Harvey Weinstein. In writing it, they discovered information about two feminist icons — Gloria Allred and her daughter, Lisa Bloom — that raises questions about their legacies and the legal system in which they’ve worked. Today, we look at the role of Ms. Bloom, a lawyer who represented Mr. Weinstein.
Thursday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 6:39 AM and sunset 6:57 PM, for 12h 17m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 75.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. Some sources place the date as September 21.
The whistleblower complaint that has triggered a tense showdown between the U.S. intelligence community and Congress involves President Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, according to two former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
Trump’s interaction with the foreign leader included a “promise” that was regarded as so troubling that it prompted an official in the U.S. intelligence community to file a formal whistleblower complaint with the inspector general for the intelligence community, said the former officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
It was not immediately clear which foreign leader Trump was speaking with or what he pledged to deliver, but his direct involvement in the matter has not been previously disclosed. It raises new questions about the president’s handling of sensitive information and may further strain his relationship with U.S. spy agencies. One former official said the communication was a phone call.
On this day in history, 170 years ago today, Harriet Tubman escaped slavery. Not content with merely liberating herself, Tubman is reported to have gone back to the Confederacy 19 times, risking capture as she “conducted” some 300 slaves to freedom. https://t.co/j26r8qsbtXpic.twitter.com/Ow3isXxhRF— Cato Institute (@CatoInstitute) September 18, 2019
On Monday night, the Whitewater Unified School District’s board met to interview four applicants for a vacancy on the board (following the resignation of board member Jean Linos). The agenda for the meeting, although posted online, listed none of the applicants: not by total number, let alone by name or with their accompanying letters of interest.
Board members must have seen the agenda beforehand; they should have known that it was a paltry one.
Yesterday, I submitted a public records request under Wisconsin law to the district for a video recording, information on the vote tally for the applicants, and the letters of interest the applicants submitted. The video is now online (see above); the district has replied that responses to the two other items in the request are pending.
These applicants – Andrew Crone, Maryann Zimmerman, Miguel Aranda, and Nick Baldwin – presented well, and one wishes successful applicant Miguel Aranda the best during his term on the board (a term running to April 2020). (In the final round between applicants, the board selected between Aranda and Zimmerman, on a 5-1 vote for Aranda.)
There were two questions for each applicant:
Tell about yourself and why you are interested in serving the students, families, and staff of the Whitewater School District.
Please share what skills, characteristics, and experience that would enhance your service on the school board.
Anyone watching the video will see that this was a strong group of applicants. Whitewater should know their names, see their letters of interest, and know how current board members voted for the applicants. There’s so much talk about celebrating successes, and yet a genuine success – having a good group of applicants – was not, so to speak, celebrated enough (with good information).
After this meeting, a reporter (Beleckis, Jonah) for the Janesville Gazette wrote a brief and low-information story about the meeting. SeeWhitewater School Board’s newest member says he can be a liaison for Latino community. His newspaper uses the motto ‘Local Matters,’ but Whitewater’s local didn’t matter much to the reporter: he didn’t take the time to list all the applicants’ names, the questions they answered, or even tell which two applicants made it to the final round.
For this reporter and the paper’s editor (Schwartz, Sid) this was a shallow and forgettable effort. A single theme worked into a headline, but less information than one would expect from a high-school newspaper. This looks like the work of those who do not respect their readers: men who doubt the ability of readers to follow facts about Whitewater and instead think that the title is all that matters to a story. Readers in Whitewater – and everywhere else – are sharper than that, and deserve more than that. (What would be worse: if the Gazette’s editor doesn’t read what goes in his own paper, or if he does and still approves?)
It’s admirable for a board member to want to be a liaison to a community; a proper newspaper story would be able to convey that message while still stating key facts about an interview.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 6:58 PM, for 12h 20m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 83.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission meets at 5 PM.
The Trump administration has proposed a plan to slash food benefits for many Americans who now get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits. An estimated 18 percent of recipients or 3.6 million people could lose the food assistance, including as many as 63,000 in Wisconsin.
The Trump administration says this will close a “loophole” that allows too many people to get the aid. “But proponents of the current system say it helps low-income families who work but have huge child care, housing and other expenses that leave them with insufficient money to buy food,” as NPR has reported.
Where did the idea for this change come from? A bland sounding group called the Foundation for Government Accountability has been instrumental in pushing the idea.
….
“In December, the Foundation for Government Accountability hosted public officials from across the country in Orlando. The scene: Walt Disney World’s Swan and Dolphin Resort, an ocean-themed oasis with palatial fountains next to a lake lined with palm trees.
President Trump on Tuesday warned the Chinese not to wait until after the 2020 election to strike a trade deal. But the two sides remain far apart on key issues, and the possibility of a breakthrough this year remains remote.
That’s the candid assessment of three people close to the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide me their unvarnished views of the state of play between the world’s two largest economies. In short, these people agreed, the two sides still have miles to go to resolve U.S. demands for major, structural change in how the Chinese government manages its economy.
And for the time being, with the Chinese economy showing signs of stress, Trump appears to feel no urgency to forge anything the administration would tout as a comprehensive agreement.
“I think there’ll be a deal maybe soon, maybe before the election, or one day after the election,” Trump said yesterday. “And if it’s after the election, it’ll be a deal like you’ve never seen, it’ll be the greatest deal ever and China knows that.” Trump said he told Chinese leaders: “If it’s after the election, it’s going to be far worse than what it is right now.”
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.
….
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.
