This Tuesday, May 14th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Mule @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
“The Mule” (Crime/Drama/Thriller)
Tuesday, May 14, 12:30 pm
Rated R (Language; violence) 1 hour, 56 minutes (2018).
Based on a true story: a 90-year-old retired horticulturist and Korean War veteran unknowingly becomes a drug runner for a Mexican cartel. Directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, and featuring Dianne Wiest, Laurence Fishburne, Bradley Cooper, and Andy Garcia.
One can find more information about The Mule at the Internet Movie Database.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 5:35 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 31m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 44.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
President Trump has effectively taken charge of the nation’s premier Fourth of July celebration in Washington, moving the gargantuan fireworks display from its usual spot on the Mall to be closer to the Potomac River and making tentative plans to address the nation from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, according to top administration officials.
The president’s starring role has the potential to turn what has long been a nonpartisan celebration of the nation’s founding into another version of a Trump campaign rally. Officials said it is unclear how much the changes may cost, but the plans have already raised alarms among city officials and some lawmakers about the potential impact of such major alterations to a time-honored and well-organized summer tradition.
Fireworks on the Mall, which the National Park Service has orchestrated for more than half a century, draw hundreds of thousands of Americans annually and mark one of the highlights of the city’s tourist season.
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[T]his past February, Trump announced on Twitter that Americans should “HOLD THE DATE!” on July 4 for a “Major fireworks display, entertainment and an address by your favorite President, me!”
[T]he notion that Democrats must have a white man to dislodge Trump is based on not much other than fear. Democrats need a competent candidate who can turn out the base, not scare off moderate independents and disenchanted Democrats, and stand up to Trump. Right now, voters are saying that person is former vice president Joe Biden, who both is extremely well-liked and fits the unproved-but-ingrained hunch that only a white man can beat the white incumbent president.
This week [on 5.1.19], Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) reminded voters that there is more than one way to slice and dice a dishonest, arrogant white Republican man. She filleted Attorney General William P. Barr, showing she can plan out and carry off a rhetorical knockout. Hey, maybe she can stand up to Trump on that debate stage. Maybe she is the one to rally the African American vote and keep those women who crossed over to vote Democratic in 2018 in the Democrats’ corner in 2020.
A trade deficit is not a loss of money. If you buy from a supermarket or go to a movie, you have a trade deficit, but you have not lost money; you get stuff (groceries, entertainment, etc.) in exchange for your dollars.
Trump’s understanding of trade is pre-modern, where modern as an era stretches back centuries. Since that time, others have misunderstood the basic truth Amash set out in his tweet, but those others who have misunderstood have been profoundly ignorant to the point of being crackpots.
In this regard, Trump’s like a flat-Earther: despite an empirically-established truth, he obstinately clings to a false notion.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 5:36 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 29m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis is captured: “The 1st Wisconsin Cavalry was one of the first units sent to search for Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, after the surrender of General Robert E. Lee. A Michigan unit, also sent to find Davis, accidentally attacked the cavalry before dawn. A few hours later, both units captured the Confederate president in Irwinville, Georgia.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Yascha Mounk writes How Authoritarians Manipulate Elections (“From Russia to Venezuela, the strongmen who have destroyed democratic institutions won high office at the ballot box”):
the new crop of authoritarian leaders is much more invested in retaining the appearance of a genuine democratic mandate. As a result, they have to engage in a more complicated political calculus: They have to give the opposition enough of a chance to compete in the elections to look credible to a significant segment of the population. But they must also capture political institutions such as electoral commissions to a sufficient extent to ensure that the people can’t actually boot them out of office.
As the recent developments in Turkey show, however, it may not be possible to sustain this equilibrium forever. Eventually, even governments that have effectively abolished the freedom of the press risk growing so unpopular that they have to resort to more blatant ways of rigging the vote.
But by the time he held his inspiring speech, Imamoglu knew all too well that, at least for the time being, Erdogan already had. After using his control over most of the country’s media to spread the insane conspiracy theory that a powerless opposition had somehow been able to falsify the outcome of the election, Erdogan went on to use his control over the country’s judiciary to cancel its result. Citing supposed irregularities, the electoral commission announced on Monday that Istanbul would hold new elections in June.
The announcement marks a fundamental turning point in Turkey’s political history: It is now impossible for any reasonable observer to keep denying reality. A country whose president has the power to annul elections when he doesn’t like their outcome has clearly become a dictatorship. From now on, anybody who still insists on calling Turkey a democracy, or treating its elections as a fair barometer of public opinion, is a liar or a fool.
President Trump has shown little interest in removing the steel and aluminum tariffs he imposed more than a year ago despite growing evidence Americans are paying a hefty price for these tariffs and increasing pressure from Republicans in Congress to remove them.
U.S. consumers and businesses are paying more than $900,000 a year for every job saved or created by Trump steel tariffs, according to calculations by experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The cost is more than 13 times the typical salary of a steelworker, according to Labor Department data, and it is similar to other economists’ estimates that Trump’s tariffs on washing machines are costing consumers $815,000 per job created.
“It’s very high. It’s arresting,” said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute who did the steel tariff cost calculation. “The reason it’s so high is that steel is a very capital-intensive industry. There are not many workers.”
Tariffs are simply taxes on imported goods, and Trump’s policy taxes consumers to support corporate producers.
More broadly, all sorts of government policies – federal, state, local – to subsidize one producer over another, or producers over consumers, often bring with them wasteful – absurd, truly – costs imposed on someone else.
A bureaucrat might say that his subsidies create, let’s say, ninety jobs, but neither genuine creation (rather than mere relocation) or the cost per job is properly assessed before committing to the spending plan.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 26m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
A roar rose from the crowd of thousands of Trump supporters in Panama City Beach on Wednesday night, as President Trump noted yet again that Border Patrol agents can’t use weapons to deter migrants. “How do you stop these people?” he asked.
“Shoot them!” someone yelled from the crowd, according to reporters on the scene and attendees.
The audience cheered. Supporters seated behind Trump and clad in white baseball caps bearing the letters “USA” laughed and applauded.
“That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement,” Trump replied, smiling and shaking his head. “Only in the Panhandle.”
Though Trump didn’t explicitly endorse the suggestion to shoot migrants, his joking response raised concerns that he was tacitly encouraging extrajudicial killings and brutality against asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants. The president has long been accused of endorsing acts of violence through his incendiary rhetoric and allusions to the potential for violence at his rallies, a charge that members of his administration deny.
Impeachment is Congress’s most famous, yet rarely exercised, power over wayward presidents and other federal officers. But as Trump-administration officials continue to defy House subpoenas related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, Democrats in control of the chamber could turn to an even blunter weapon in their arsenal: arrest.
Courts have recognized that the House and Senate each have the authority to enforce their orders by imprisoning those who violate them—literally. They can direct their respective sergeant at arms to arrest officials they’ve found to be in contempt and bring them to the Capitol for trial and, potentially, jail. Congress hasn’t invoked what’s known as the “power of inherent contempt” in nearly a century, but the escalating clash between two co-equal branches of government has Democrats talking about moves previously deemed unthinkable.
“Its day in the sun is coming,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me by phone on Tuesday. Raskin, a second-term Democrat and former constitutional-law professor, sits on the House Judiciary Committee, which on Wednesday approved, on a vote of 24–16, a resolution finding Attorney General William Barr in contempt for his refusal to give Congress the full, unredacted Mueller report.
So far, the conversation about the upcoming Boston Red Sox visit to Donald Trump’s White House has centered around the people of color who are skipping the event. The manager Alex Cora, a critic of the Trump administration’s inexcusable treatment of Puerto Rico amid the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017, cited his home island’s continuing troubles as his reason for opting out.
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Black and Hispanic players and coaches are expected to justify their reasons for not going to Trump’s White House. But the real question is: Why have so many of the white players on the Red Sox chosen not to support their black and brown teammates?
Hill’s covering sports, but her question applies beyond a single profession or activity: there is a wide gap in racial attitudes toward Trump. Yet even stating the matter so plainly omits the reason for that gap. Hill reminds what should be just as plain:
Context matters. And the truth is that Trump’s hateful rhetoric and policies aren’t so easily forgotten. Forcing people—including championship athletes—to disregard how hurtful his actions can be is disrespectful to those he has hurt.
Alex Cora can’t laugh and shake hands with the president knowing that 3,000 people in Puerto Rico—a U.S. territory—perished as a result of Hurricane Maria. And it’s not just that the government’s response to the devastation was inadequate. Trump also lied about the island’s death toll, and in a tweet the president called Puerto Rico’s leaders “grossly incompetent” and said they only want to “take from USA,” which implied that Puerto Rico wasn’t part of his country. In the same vein, a senior administration official told The Washington Post that Trump “doesn’t want another single dollar going to the island.” That’s not policy, that’s pettiness—and it shows contempt and condescension toward the people of Puerto Rico.
Trump frequently styles himself as though a white man’s president, and in so doing is unworthy of being anyone’s president.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 24m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission is scheduled to meet at 6:30 PM and the Birge Fountain Committee also at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1945, the Allies celebrate VE Day: “Victory in Europe Day, generally known as VE Day (Great Britain) or V-E Day (North America), is celebrated on Tuesday, 8 May 1945 to mark the formal acceptance by the Allies of World War II of Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender of its armed forces.”
By the time his master-of-the-universe memoir “Trump: The Art of the Deal” hit bookstores in 1987, Donald J. Trump was already in deep financial distress, losing tens of millions of dollars on troubled business deals, according to previously unrevealed figures from his federal income tax returns.
Mr. Trump was propelled to the presidency, in part, by a self-spun narrative of business success and of setbacks triumphantly overcome. He has attributed his first run of reversals and bankruptcies to the recession that took hold in 1990. But 10 years of tax information obtained by The New York Times paints a different, and far bleaker, picture of his deal-making abilities and financial condition.
The data — printouts from Mr. Trump’s official Internal Revenue Service tax transcripts, with the figures from his federal tax form, the 1040, for the years 1985 to 1994 — represents the fullest and most detailed look to date at the president’s taxes, information he has kept from public view. Though the information does not cover the tax years at the center of an escalating battle between the Trump administration and Congress, it traces the most tumultuous chapter in a long business career — an era of fevered acquisition and spectacular collapse.
The numbers show that in 1985, Mr. Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his core businesses — largely casinos, hotels and retail space in apartment buildings. They continued to lose money every year, totaling $1.17 billion in losses for the decade.
In fact, year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer, The Times found when it compared his results with detailed information the I.R.S. compiles on an annual sampling of high-income earners. His core business losses in 1990 and 1991 — more than $250 million each year — were more than double those of the nearest taxpayers in the I.R.S. information for those years.
The results of the 2018 election are well known, highlighted by the Democrats’ “blue wave” takeover of the House of Representatives and other state offices across the country. However, recently released data from the Census Bureau sheds new light on how this was done—with extraordinarily high levels of voter turnout among voting blocs that lean Democratic. These data, from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) voting supplement, provide information not available earlier—estimates of voter turnout for key demographic groups—both nationally and for states. They tell us which groups exceeded turnout expectations in 2018 and suggest that good things may be in store for Democrats in the 2020 presidential contest.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 22m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
Although the Wilderness is usually described as a draw, it could be called a tactical Confederate victory, but a strategic victory for the Union army. Lee inflicted heavy numerical casualties (see estimates below) on Grant, but as a percentage of Grant’s forces they were smaller than the percentage of casualties suffered by Lee’s smaller army. And, unlike Grant, Lee had very little opportunity to replenish his losses. Understanding this disparity, part of Grant’s strategy was to grind down the Confederate army by waging a war of attrition. The only way that Lee could escape from the trap that Grant had set was to destroy the Army of the Potomac while he still had sufficient force to do so, but Grant was too skilled to allow that to happen. Thus, the Overland Campaign, initiated by the crossing of the Rappahannock, and opening with this battle, set in motion the eventual destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia
So can he stop Mueller from testifying? “Of course there is no way Trump can stop Bob Mueller from testifying,” constitutional lawyer Laurence Tribe tells me. “There is no executive privilege between them, and obviously no attorney-client privilege, and Mueller doesn’t even work for Trump.” Tribe continues, “Until he leaves [the Justice Department], he works for Barr. And Barr has no conceivable basis to stop Mueller from testifying.” In any event, Tribe explains, “Mueller is free to leave [Justice] at any time and will then be simply a private citizen.”
He’ll be as unsuccessful in stopping private citizen Mueller from testifying as he has been in preventing former White House counsel Donald McGahn from telling his story. “Only a dictator can tell a private citizen not to testify in a duly constituted legislative or parliamentary inquiry into the head of state’s conduct,” Tribe concludes. “And though Trump might fancy himself a dictator, that’s not the reality. Not yet, anyway.”
Trump had no luck halting former acting attorney general Sally Yates from testifying, former Justice spokesman Matthew Miller says.
Trump must be frustrated. His spin works only when the facts are hidden or too complicated to unravel. Put the facts out in plain sight, have someone more credible than Trump (an open-ended category) explain what has happened and — poof! — Trump’s smokescreen, the nonsensical patter coming from Fox News hosts and the incoherent arguments from Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, will vanish.
Old Whitewater – a state of mind and not a person – loves little more than a one-size fits all boosterism plan. This kind of approach was tired even in print – it’s next to worthless in a diverse digital world.
And yet, and yet, along comes a public relations man and his assistant to peddle the Go Whitewater Now marketing page on Facebook page even when countless residents have better and more interesting Facebook pages for their local community organizations and projects.
Much of the sales pitch in the 4.25.19 presentation to the Whitewater Community Development Authority (embedded above) is littered with business jargon ill-suited to effective persuasion. It’s really quite something. Other communities are likely beset with this same affliction.
(Obvious point: FREE WHITEWATER isn’t on Facebook; here I’m referring to others’ Facebook efforts, each of them more genuine and compelling than a banal online travelogue.)
Search Facebook even briefly and you’ll find many more popular and engaging local efforts.
The city already pays an executive director of the Community Development Authority and a Public Relations and Communications Manager. That’s more than enough public money for marketing efforts.
Whitewater is a small town – there’s no one here publicly employed who doesn’t have the time (without additional charge) for a project even better than Go WW Now, if only he or she should have a bit of commitment and a bit of creativity.
In any event, any private party who truly cared about the city would not hold out his hand for public money for a job that others on Facebook do without charge, and do better, every day.
Monday in Whitewater will see occasional showers with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 20m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and the Downtown Whitewater Inc. Board at 5 PM.
On this day in 1915, actor and filmmaker Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.
Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual Silicon Valley confab to announce that “the future is private.”
In one of the most awkward moments I’ve ever seen captured on video, he smiled broadly as he tried to joke about the supposed change of direction.
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he said.
No, Zuck, you don’t. Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, Wired magazine has reported — “from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.”
Zuckerberg seemed to think his lame line would get some good-natured guffaws. The audience of technophiles, though, didn’t find it amusing. The reaction was pained silence with a few cringe-induced laughs.
The “pivot to privacy” simply isn’t believable.
“On privacy, I would suggest what Facebook is doing is more about public relations,” venture capitalist Roger McNamee told Hanna Kozlowska of Quartz. “[It has]tried to put a positive spin on something that they’re doing for business reasons, and would have done anyway.”
In their latest projections, [Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome] Powell and his colleagues said that they expect G.D.P. growth of 2.1 per cent in 2019 and 1.9 per cent in 2020, which is about in line with the maximum rate that they think the economy can sustain over the long term. The White House claims that its tax cuts and regulatory bonfire have transformed the economy’s productive potential by supercharging business investment, but this theory lacks empirical support. The relevant measure of investment “accelerated a bit in the first half of 2018, but has since slowed significantly,” the writer Mark Whitehouse, of Bloomberg, points out. “In the first three months of 2019, it was up an annualized 2.7 percent, well short of the 5.3 percent average for the current expansion.” About the only thing that has really shot up since the tax cut is the scale of corporate stock buybacks.
