Through groundbreaking computer restoration technology, Director Peter Jackson creates a moving realistic depiction of World War 1, as never before seen, in restored, vivid colorization and retiming of film frames. Shown in honor of Veterans Day.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 4:37 PM, for 9h 57m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
But many took Mr. Schabowski by his word. After West Germany’s main evening news, popular with East Germans who had long stopped trusting their own state-controlled media, effectively declared the wall open, crowds started heading for checkpoints at the Berlin Wall, demanding to cross.
At one of those checkpoints, a Stasi officer who had always been loyal to the regime, was working the night shift. His name was Lt. Col. Harald Jäger. And his order was to turn people away.
As the crowd grew, the colonel repeatedly called his superiors with updates. But no new orders were forthcoming. At some point he listened in to a call with the ministry, where he overheard one senior official questioning his judgment.
“Someone in the ministry asked whether Comrade Jäger was in a position to assess the situation properly or whether he was acting out of fear,” Mr. Jäger recalled years later in an interview with Der Spiegel. “When I heard that, I’d had enough.”
Shortly after, Mr. Jäger defied his superiors and opened the crossing, starting a domino effect that eventually hit all checkpoints in Berlin. By midnight, triumphant easterners had climbed on top of the wall in the heart of the city, popping champagne corks and setting off fireworks in celebration.
Not a single shot was fired. And no Soviet tanks appeared.
That, said Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, was perhaps the greatest miracle of that night. “It was a peaceful revolution, the first of its kind,” he said. “They were prepared for everything, except candles and prayers.”
Wisconsin is a small state, yet an important one – in these recent years she has played a significant role in the political life of the country. As one would not wish to live other than in Whitewater, so one could not wish for more valuable ground on which to fight the political conflict of our era than in Wisconsin.
This is the political conflict of our time: whether Trumpism will establish a herrenvolk on this continent, stretching from one ocean to another, under a bigoted autocracy that takes for itself while heeding only foreign dictators at the expense of our own people.
Three years ago, this deplorable movement approached power through an electoral college majority despite a three-million vote popular loss. This faction, since assuming power, has inflicted countless injuries, abuses, and lies on the people of a virtuous republic that they are manifestly unworthy to lead.
(This band did not, surely, come to power without years of the slow erosion of basic standards and rights. It’s now obvious that across America boosters who peddled false descriptions & junk solutions during the economic hardship of the Great Recession contributed, knowingly or unknowingly, to the erosion of reason and honesty. They were at first forgettable for their absurdities, later annoying for them, and how having contributed to our present degradation they are politically unforgivable. That’s why, for some who have wondered, a boosterism in Whitewater and elsewhere that once merely irritated must now be confronted relentlessly.)
There are, undoubtedly, losses yet ahead before this conflict is won. There are, undoubtedly, parts of America where victories will come more easily. For it all, there is no better place to be than Whitewater, Wisconsin. Love alone would hold one here; principle alone requires that one contend and fight here.
How fortunate, truly, that these different sentiments support the same effort.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 4:38 PM, for 9h 59m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Republicans are road-testing yet another deeply absurd defense of President Trump: They are conceding that, yes, there may have been a quid pro quo, but there’s no proof Trump himself was behind it.
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Trump himself suspended the military aid.
Trump personally ordered acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to inform budget officials that the aid that had already been appropriated by Congress was being frozen, officials told The Post.
Trump did this one week before his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump demanded the investigations he wanted, explicitly mentioning Biden and the conspiracy theorythat Ukraine, not Russia, hacked the Democratic emails to set up Russia and Trump.
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Giuliani publicly confirmed the whole plot, and that he was acting at Trump’s direction.
Trump froze the aid to Ukraine at a time when Trump lawyer Rudolph Giuliani had already said publicly for months that he was pressuring Ukraine to carry out these investigations. As far back as early May, Giuliani explicitly said he wanted those investigations to target both the conspiracy theory and Biden specifically.
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Those texts demonstrate the meaning of [Ambassador to the E.U] Sondland’s confession.
Pence directly delivered the message about suspended aid to Ukraine.
On Sept. 1, the same day Sondland informed a top Zelensky aide that the military aid was conditional, Vice President Pence met with Zelensky.
Zelensky raised the withheld aid with Pence. And as The Post reports, Pence informed Zelensky that the administration was “still looking at” the aid, i.e., it was on hold. Pence also told Zelensky he needed to do more to fight “corruption.”
Foxconn Technology Group wants permission to omit sprinkler protection in part of its factory — the second fire-related code variance the company has sought.
A consultant’s report, prepared for Foxconn’s construction management team and included in a group of planning documents released last week by a state agency, says sprinklers can safely be omitted in the factory’s “stocker” areas if certain recommendations are followed.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:39 PM, for 10h 02m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 77.33% of its visible disk illuminated.
Voters in three states chose candidates and policies that could result in expanded access to the ballot, an undoing of Republican gerrymandering efforts, and a fairer voting system.
Democrat Andy Beshear, who was elected governor of Kentucky,pledged during the campaign to issue an executive order restoring voting rights to 140,000 people convicted of nonviolent felonies in the state. Kentucky is one of only three states where people with past felony convictions cannot vote unless the governor restores their rights. As a result, 300,000 Kentucky residents—nine percent of the electorate—have been disenfranchised, including more than one in four African-Americans, the highest black felon disenfranchisement rate in the country.
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In Virginia, Democrats won the state legislature, giving them one-party control of the state for the first time in a quarter of a century. Democrats could now pass major voting reforms like early voting, automatic and Election Day registration, and the automatic restoration of voting rights for ex-offenders, along with repealing the state’s restrictive voter ID law. All of these bills have already been introduced by Democrats in the legislature but blocked by Republicans.
Virginia Democrats will also control the drawing of the state’s redistricting mapsin 2021. It remains to be seen whether they will support efforts to create a bipartisan redistricting commission to redraw legislative and US House maps, which passed the legislature this year but must be approved by the legislature again in 2020 and then by the voters in a ballot referendum.
In September, an obscure Twitter account promoting a fringe belief about an anti-Trump cabal within the government tweeted out a hashtag: #FakeWhistleblower.
It was typical for the anonymous account, which traffics in far-right content and a conspiracy theory known as QAnon, some of whose adherents think that satanic pedophiles control the “deep state.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently labeled QAnon a potential domestic terror threat.
Still, that did not stop others, including a Republican congressional candidate, from quickly picking up the hashtag and tweeting it. Within a week, hundreds of QAnon believers and “MAGA” activists had joined in, posting memes and bogus reports to undermine the complaint by a government whistle-blower that President Trump had pressed Ukraine’s leader for dirt on former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son.
Of the 2,298 votes cast in the Nov. 5 advisory referendum, 1,218 (53%) voted in favor of dissolution; 1,080 voted against it, according to unofficial results released Tuesday night by the school district.
These residents had a right to have their opinion heard on the issue explicitly (and not implicitly through a failed spending referendum). For it all, they’ve decided poorly: unable to control spending on their local district, they’ve decided they should have no local district at all. They’ll now find their children traveling farther, certainly for high school, to districts that absorb the territory that was once the Palmyra-Eagle School District’s.
These residents should have been able to manage their own public education system without ending local control entirely. They’ve almost certainly made their communities less attractive to homebuyers with children who will shun a community where their children won’t have a locally-controlled school.
Whitewater’s school board recently voted to petition the Wisconsin legislature to allow a three-way consolidation whereby the Whitewater and Mukwonago School Districts would absorb the Palmyra-Eagle School District without the need for a state advisory board to carve the dissolving district up.
That petition was presumptuous – we’ve not had in Whitewater a community discussion about what splitting Palmyra-Eagle with another district will mean. Like all libertarians, I strongly support people moving or going where’d they’d like to go, so if Palmyra-Eagle’s parents want to send their children to Whitewater, we should welcome them (as I surely will). SeeSchool Board, 10.28.19: 3 Points.
It was not, however, our school district’s proper place to petition the legislature for a deal with another district to carve Palmyra-Eagle as they saw fit without significant community consultation in all affected areas. Nothing like that community consultation has happened. We don’t know with confidence what Palmyra-Eagle’s parents want for their children – where they want to go matters as much as what we want.
Palmyra-Eagle’s students won’t feel welcome here if they’re treated as reallocated headcount, for goodness’ sake. In these months ahead, our school board owes our community – and Palmyra-Eagle’s, too – much more than a petition: circumstances call for outreach to residents and parents in both communities. This is as true whether one gains students under consolidation or by assignment under a state advisory board.
One truly hopes that many of the parents in the Palmyra-Eagle School District choose, happily and even excitedly, Whitewater and the Whippet Way. There is no other community in all the world in which I’d rather be; those genuine feelings come from free choice, not compulsion.
Honest persuasion and respectful outreach matter most.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 4:40 PM, for 10h 04m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 70.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board’s personnel committee meets in closed session at 5:45 PM.
On this day in 1947, Meet the Press first premieres as a television program.
Democrats had a good night Tuesday in the off-year elections, picking up both chambers of the Virginia state legislature and apparently the governor seat in Kentucky, although Republican Governor Matt Bevin hasn’t yet conceded. In Mississippi, Republicans held on in the gubernatorial race, but by a relatively slim margin.
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Oh yes, the suburbs. Bevin was hurt in suburban Cincinnati (although see a dissenting thread). Democrats also picked up a state legislative seat in suburban St. Louis; won their first three city council seats in Carmel, an Indianapolis suburb; and did better than usual in some Memphis suburbs. That continues a trend from 2018 that should scare Republicans. That said, it’s impossible to know if it will continue or if it’s a Trump-era reaction that will dissipate or reverse once he’s gone.
National effects? The Washington Post’s Robert Costa reports that Senate Republicans were watching Kentucky closely: “not just watching the returns, but President Trump’s political capital as they make decisions about how to handle impeachment and their own future.” How politicians interpret elections is only sometimes scientific, but it always matters, often far more than the objective facts about those elections. Whether they think Trump is an electoral asset or poison at the ballot box will be at least as important to the outcome of impeachment and a Senate trial as actual evidence of malfeasance. I can say one thing: These political professionals are unlikely to be convinced by Trump’s habitual false claims that his intervention in a race moved the polls by massive amounts.
It’s worth noting here one possible reason for that difference. Fox News is the most trusted network among Republicans, according to Suffolk University polling — and Fox News has also been much less likely to cover key witnesses in the impeachment inquiry.
Republicans’ lack of familiarity with the core issues — or professed lack of familiarity — is a theme in Monmouth’s poll.
Most Republicans — a group that, again, opposes the impeachment inquiry — think that what’s been revealed so far shows that Trump either did nothing wrong or did nothing that rises to the level of impeachment.
There’s sound reason to doubt that the New Dealers’ economic solutions to the Great Depression were effective, but there’s no doubt that Roosevelt’s Brain Trust was hard-working, smart, and candid in its description of America’s economic problems. For a critical assessment of the New Deal, written accessibly, seeThe Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.
It’s nearly impossible to overstate how admirable one finds the vigor and commitment of those advising Roosevelt, however much one doubts the effectiveness of their solutions. (Not all New Deal legislation came at the same time – there were proposals now broadly lumped together as New Deal legislation that came at different times, with varying objectives.)
What’s most commendable about that group is that they did not deny America’s problems, try to wish them away, or to simply accentuate the positive in the face of economic hardship. That is, they did not resort to boosterism and babbittry in the face of others’ suffering.
They were candid, knowing that candor is the foundation of worthy remedial efforts.
When one reads something like the Janesville Gazette’s Rock County economic indicators point positive (Gavan, reporter; Schwartz, editor), one reads another story in a long line of local, Panglossian tales.
The reporter relies on cherry-picked data to say that unemployment in Rock County is low, but neglects to report that unemployment in all 72 Wisconsin counties has been rising year over year:
In more than 1,000 counties, or about one in three, the unemployment rate is higher than it was a year ago. That includes all 72 counties in Wisconsin and all 10 in New Hampshire, as well as most in Michigan, Minnesota and North Carolina. The numbers can be volatile from month to month, but this trend remains even if you look at entire quarters or years.
Note well: In Whitewater, when the Great Recession began, and long afterward during our present stagnation, a whole class of local officials and hangers-on stuck with accentuating the positive and pretending all was well.
In 1922, when conditions were good, Sinclair Lewis satirized this outlook in Babbitt; he likely could not have imagined that someone would adopt that sugary outlook even when seeing undeniable, widespread economic hardship in every direction. And yet, and yet — that was the official outlook in Whitewater during the Great Recession and beyond. The men of that time – the city manager, the website publisher and councilman, the chancellor, the landlords and their public-relations man, among others – all talked this way. Free market, progressive, traditional conservative, etc. – almost anything would have been better than their babbittry, small-town state-capitalism, and insiders’ myopia.
Admittedly, neither they (nor I) were personally disadvantaged. That should not have mattered – boosterism and babbittry should have been anathema to them as it was – and always will be – to any sensible person.
The Gazette has a right to push a dishonest outlook; they cannot expect to do so without reply.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 6:34 AM and sunset 4:41 PM, for 10h 07m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 60.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Republicans have complained for weeks about the secret House impeachment inquiry, accusing Democrats of rigging the process and interviewing witnesses behind closed doors — at one point storming the hearing room and chanting, “Let us in!”
But inside the secure room in the Capitol basement where the proceedings are taking place, Republicans have used their time to complain that testimony has become public, going after their colleagues who were quoted in media reports commenting on witness appearances, and quizzing witnesses themselves on how their statements had been released.
The efforts by GOP lawmakers to shape the Democrats’ inquiry emerged in full view for the first time Monday with the release of hundreds of pages of transcripts from two early witnesses: Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, and Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
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Meadows was among the most assertive Republican inquisitors, the transcripts show. He stuck largely to questioning the legitimacy of the process and trying to ferret out whether [former Ambassador Marie] Yovanovitch or her sources harbored anti-Trump bias. He asked about the origins of her nickname “Masha,” querying, “Where did you get that name from?”
“Well, despite my posting to Ukraine, I’m actually half Russian, and it’s a Russian nickname,” said Yovanovitch.
Meadows then abruptly completed his round of questioning. “I yield back,” he said.
(In all of this, he’s asking her about her nickname? There are middle schoolers who’d ask more material and relevant questions than that one. Honest to goodness.)
While former Vice President Joe Biden now leads Trump by 17 percentage points, other Democratic contenders show the most improvement: Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ advantage vs. Trump has gone from a non-significant 6 points in July to 12 in September to 17 now. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s has gone from 7 to 11 to 15 points.
Impeachment is not the only factor, since the trend dates to early September. Among Trump’s broader challenges, six in 10 Americans or more say he’s not honest and trustworthy, lacks the kind of personality and temperament it takes to serve effectively and doesn’t understand their problems. Slightly smaller majorities doubt his deal-making, delivery of “needed change” to Washington and leadership generally.
Further, as reported last week, half support Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, 54% say his policies have made the United States less respected globally, 58% disapprove of his overall job performance and 66% say he’s acted unpresidentially since taking office.
Of all the thousands of lies that Trump has told since becoming president, perhaps the most fundamental lie is his insistence that he somehow represents a majority of his fellow citizens.
In the survey, 49% back Trump’s impeachment and removal while 46% oppose it. In the NBC/WSJ poll a month ago, a 49% plurality opposed impeachment and removal while 43% favored it.
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In addition, Trump faces entrenched opposition significantly larger than his hard-core base. A 46% plurality of Americans said they were almost certain to vote against the president next November, compared to 34% almost certain to vote for him.
The sheltered, insulated, cosseted, and cocooned viewers of Fox News are led astray when they hear that Trump is wildly popular. In fact, only about a third of Americans say that they’re sure to vote for him. The number adamantly opposed to Trump is far larger.
One has often heard the expression that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he does not exist; the greatest trick Trump ever pulled was convincing a fanatical minority that he speaks for an American majority.
Monday in Whitewater will see showers yielding to partly sunny skies with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:33 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 10h 09m 29s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1956, Soviet troops intervene to suppress the Hungarian popular revolution against communist rule.
Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky died in Cambridge, England, on Sunday night. He was 76, an age far greater than he expected to reach back when he was in and out of Soviet prisons and going on the hunger strikes that made him a potent symbol of resistance to Communist oppression.
For so many of us in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Bukovsky’s name had the air of a legend, since he had been forcibly ejected from the Soviet Union in 1976. Soviet authorities had grown afraid of his ability to organize the prisoners wherever he was jailed, but turning him into a martyr was also unattractive. Remember that this was the 1970s, when there were still strong voices in Europe and on both sides of the U.S. political aisle in support of holding the Soviets accountable for their treatment of dissidents such as Bukovsky, Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In his writings and public statements, Bukovsky remained steadfastly in favor of direct opposition to the Soviet Union, condemning for collaboration and collusion those such as Henry Kissinger who favored amoral realpolitik. Bukovsky saw clearly that the “peaceful coexistence” touted by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev and his successors was a sham. No nation capable of imprisoning and torturing its citizens the way the Soviet Union did, Bukovsky said, could ever be a part of a civilized world of human rights and individual liberty.
Clashes are erupting between local and federal officials over the hundreds of joint task forces that operate around the country, specializing in missions such as finding fugitives, fighting drug dealers or tracking potential terrorists.
Washington provides money, expertise and weaponry. Local law enforcement agencies provide much of the manpower. Their officers are deputized as federal agents, which among other things means that the Justice Department can shield them from litigation and local oversight.
At least five cities, including Atlanta, have pulled out of task forces since 2017, and Houston, the nation’s fourth largest, has threatened to follow.
The problem, police officials say, is that local cops assigned to joint task forces are not bound by department rules, such as wearing body cameras, which the feds have prohibited. The FBI and U.S. Marshals allow the use of deadly force if a person poses an “imminent danger,” using a definition that is less strict than many police departments’. California recently adopted a law stating that deadly force may be used only when “necessary.” Task-force members are also immune to civilian lawsuits in a way that regular officers are not.
First, the resolution directs all six committees instructed by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to participate in the inquiry—Intelligence, Financial Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, Oversight and Reform, and Ways and Means—to “continue their ongoing investigations as part of the existing House of Representatives inquiry.” This posture—directing a continuation of work rather than authorizing the inquiry—reflects House Democrats’ long-standing assertion that the impeachment inquiry need not be specifically authorized by the full House to be valid. In addition, it would seem the scope of the inquiry, at least for now, is not strictly limited to issues related to President Trump’s conduct with respect to Ukraine. It is hard to say whether issues being investigated in other committees will eventually find their way into articles of impeachment, but this resolution certainly leaves that possibility open.
(Reynolds and Taylor continue with a thorough description.)
Embedded below, the resolution and a fact sheet from the House Committee on Rules:
