The action was part of a prayer vigil for migrant children and their families during the ELCA Churchwide Assembly this week at Milwaukee’s Wisconsin Center.
It took place on the same day the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declared itself a “sanctuary church body,” signaling its support for immigrants.
Both came in response to President Trump’s policies at the U.S. border with Mexico and his pledge to deport millions.
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More than 570 voting members of the churchwide assembly signed up to participate in the prayer vigil at the ICE building. They were joined by staff from the ELCA and its AMMPARO (Accompanying Migrant Minors with Protection, Advocacy, Representation and Opportunities) ministry, as well as members of the Greater Milwaukee Synod, the New Sanctuary Movement and Voces de la Frontera, a local grass-roots organization.
The group marched nearly a mile from the Wisconsin Center to the ICE building, carrying signs with messages like “We put the protest back in Protestant” and chanting “This is what the love of God looks like.”
Astoria, New York (CNN) — Paul Santell spends at least 30 hours each week feeding and trapping stray cats throughout New York City’s boroughs.
It’s a mission that sort of fell in his lap five years ago but has now earned him the moniker “Paul the Cat Guy.”
“When I moved to Queens, I didn’t realize there were so many cats,” Santell said. “I knew nothing about animal rescue.”
In the United States, there are 30 to 40 million stray or feral cats roaming outside and only about 2% of them have been spayed or neutered. These community cats produce around 80% of the kittens born in the US each year, adding to the overpopulation concern.
On his way home each night, Santell began noticing strays living in poor conditions. He started to feed one of them. That quickly became two cats, then three. Before he knew it, he was feeding a whole colony.
“After about two months of feeding them, I said, ‘You know what? I want to do more to help them.'”
Santell attended an ASPCA class, where he learned about Trap-Neuter-Return, or TNR—defined as the humane and effective approach for managing community cats. Cats are trapped and taken to a veterinarian to be spayed or neutered and vaccinated. After recovery, the cats are released back where they were found or, if they’re friendly, adopted.
“You learn how to use a trap. You understand what colony cats are. And once you get certified, you’re able to use the free spay-neuter service at the ASPCA,” Santell said.
Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:55 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 09m 35s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 68.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments fight at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia.
The latest, most egregious example involves the Economic Research Service, an independent statistical agency at the Agriculture Department.
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The small-but-mighty ERS is arguably the world’s premier agricultural economics agency. It produces critical numbers that farmers rely on when deciding what to plant and how much, how to price, how to manage risk; and that other stakeholders and public officials use to evaluate agricultural policy.
The administration’s solution to these inconveniences? Blowing up the agency altogether.
In June, the Agriculture Department informed employees at the ERS and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which manages $1.7 billion in scientific funding, that they were moving to “the Kansas City Region,” precise location TBD. Employees had 30 days to decide whether to uproot their families or lose their jobs.
As of July 26, only 116 employees agreed to relocate, according to a USDA spokesperson. That’s about 20 percent of those initially asked. Representatives from the employees’ union, the American Federation of Government Employees, told me they expect even fewer to ultimately move, since some employees who said they’d relocate are searching for other opportunities.
Those are among the words President Donald Trump repeatedly uses while discussing illegal immigration during his campaign rallies, according to a USA TODAY analysis of the transcripts from more than five dozen of those events.
Trump, who traveled Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, to meet with victims and family members reeling from mass shootings, is facing pressure from critics who say his language has fed a climate of anger toward immigrants, raising the risk of violence. A manifesto authorities believe was written by the El Paso gunman before his attack decries “the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
But “invasion” is just one of several incendiary terms Trump regularly embraces.
A USA TODAY analysis of the 64 rallies Trump has held since 2017 found that, when discussing immigration, the president has said “invasion” at least 19 times. He has used the word “animal” 34 times and the word “killer” nearly three dozen times.
Whitewater’s common council met in regular session on Tuesday, 8.6.19, and at that meeting the council selected an applicant to fill a vacant council seat. See Common Council, 8.6.19: The Context of an Appointment.
Today, a few other points to consider:
1. Government is not the community; it’s a slice only. While it’s practical to watch government closely (and it’s a libertarian disposition to do so), the vibrant life of a community is found in free exchange and associations among residents, not in the machinations of elected or appointed officials.
2. In a rural community beset with economic stagnation, where government has been ineffectual or destructive to sound policy (Whitewater’s Community Development Authority comes to mind), the best options are private ones (especially private charitable ones). SeeAn Oasis Strategy.
3. It’s good to expect preparedness, but council members who are older (and likely retired) only condescend when they ask young applicants (who are an absolute majority of the city’s population) “can we count on you spending that amount of time [1-2 hours] to be prepared for the meeting?” (video @ 6:20).
Perhaps the better question for those older residents now in office: if you’ve spent 1-2 hours in reading, what does the average resident have to show for it?
Just as likely, it’s long-time incumbents who need to read more, and read with greater discernment.
4. It’s true (video @ 40:45) that listing service clubs on the city’s website would be useful to newcomers. It’s also practical to solicit feedback about the city’s website (video @ 41:20).
And look, and look – messaging from local government isn’t most often ineffective because it’s poorly formatted – it’s ineffective when the underlying claims are absurd.
Notices about community events or groups aren’t an occasion where politics fails – grandiose claims about political accomplishments are a notable occasion where politics fails.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 5:54 AM and sunset 8:06 PM, for 14h 12m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The vast majority of people in Wisconsin agree on making that policy change, according to 2018 polling by Marquette University Law School. Nationally, 96% of Democrats, 84% of Republicans and 89% of Independents support the measure, according to a recent Marist poll.
Despite overwhelming support, the move likely won’t be made here anytime soon.
“For any Republican to say ‘I support universal background checks’ would be career suicide,” Clemson University political scientist Steven Miller said.
The National Rifle Association’s political arm likely would help elect a primary opponent of any Republican candidate who seeks or supports such restrictions, Miller said, and support for the added safeguard, while wide, isn’t that intense.
“Most people think that’s a good idea, but most people don’t care too much and the people who oppose that are really serious about that,” he said. “Because the minority is much more mobilized, they are more likely to get what they want.”
There were four overlapping themes apparent that dominated the alt-right network in this study:
Support for US President Donald Trump, support for white nationalism, opposition to immigration (often framed in anti-Muslim terms), and accounts primarily devoted to transgressive trolling and harassment.
@realdonaldtrump was the most influential Twitter account among all users analysed in this study; @richardbspencer was the most influential account within the specific network of users who followed accounts that contained the phrase ‘alt-right’ in their Twitter profiles.
Support for Trump outstripped all other themes by a wide margin, including references to his name and various campaign slogans in hashtags and user self-descriptions. The most common word in user profiles was ‘MAGA’ (short for Make America Great Again, Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan), and the most common word pair in user profiles was ‘Trump supporter’.
The alt-right network was most consistently ‘for’ Trump, but users frequently defined themselves by what they were ‘against’. Top word pairs in user self-descriptions included ‘anti-EU’, ‘anti-Islam’, ‘anti-globalist’, ‘anti-feminist’ and ‘anti-Zionist’.
While the alt-right’s presence on Twitter was substantial, probably encompassing more than 100,000 users as a conservative estimate, the sample analysed here showed extensive evidence of manipulation, including manipulated follower counts, follower tracking, and automated tweeting. Neither the source nor the exact scope of these efforts could be conclusively determined.
The Whitewater Common Council met in regular session on Tuesday night. A portion of that meeting (video, 2:35-16:58) involved the appointment of a council member to a vacant seat through April 2020. Two students from UW-Whitewater, Zachary Klotz and Matthew Schulgit, applied to fill that vacancy.
After remarks from each applicant, and a few questions from incumbent council members, the council voted unanimously to select Matthew Schulgit.
(Over the years, some befuddled officials have contended that the town has too many rental units and too few single-family homes. No and no again: the town apart from the college is small, and a small town will have a limited number of single-family homes. Wanting to boost single-family homes to keep up with a large number of campus rentals is like thinking a chihuahua has to over-eat to make itself big like a nearby Great Dane.)
Although Whitewater has a campus in the middle of town, and one that’s large relative to the rest of the town, she has not seen the kind of uplift from a campus that serious observers typically expect.
James Fallows, for example, observes that being near a university – or a community college – helps a city succeed. See James Fallows on ‘Eleven Signs a City Will Succeed’ (Part 1) and (Part 2).
Fallows most certainly does not define community success to include those stark economic circumstances. (There are no serious observers of progress who think community success requires no more than the self-promotion of a right-wing landlord or boosters and their small clique of dogsbodies.)
Whitewater’s selection of a student masks her inability – effectively – to make the most of being a college town. It’s good to have student representation (and good that the representative is talented); it’s better to have genuine integration between the town & campus.
That’s Whitewater’s context of selecting one council member who’s a student; anything else is oddly out-of-context.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with evening thunderstorms, and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 8:07 PM, for 14h 14m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1782, Gen. Washington creates the order of the Purple Heart.
President Trump’s re-election campaign has harnessed Facebook advertising to push the idea of an “invasion” at the southern border, amplifying the fear-inducing language about immigrants that he has also voiced at campaign rallies and on Twitter.
Since January, Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign has posted more than 2,000 ads on Facebook that include the word “invasion” — part of a barrage of advertising focused on immigration, a dominant theme of his re-election messaging. A review of Mr. Trump’s tweets also found repeated references to an “invasion,” while his 2016 campaign advertising heavily featured dark warnings about immigrants breaching America’s borders.
Orange County, long a Republican stronghold, has officially turned blue.
The county that nurtured Ronald Reagan’s conservatism and is the resting place of Richard Nixon is now home to 547,458 registered Democrats, compared with 547,369 Republicans, according to statistics released early Wednesday morning by the county Registrar of Voters. And the number of voters not aligned with a political party has surged in recent years, and now tops 440,770, or 27.4% of the county’s voters.
Democratic leaders attributed the shift to changing demographics, aggressive recruitment efforts and President Trump.
“Trump’s toxic rhetoric and exclusionary policies alienate women, millennials, suburban voters, immigrants and people of color — critical components of the electorate in Orange County,” said Katerina Ioannides, chairwoman of the Orange County Young Democrats, which conducted voter registration drives aimed at young voters, one of several groups that worked to increase party registration. “The Republican Party’s platform no longer resonates in a rapidly diversifying, increasingly college-educated Orange County.
Even if we get a Democratic president Americans don’t like all that much, or whose limitations are obvious, we’ll be in a better spot than we would be with President Trump. That’s an unsurprising assumption by Democrats. But, increasingly, independents and disaffected Republicans — as seen from their praise of former president Barack Obama’s remarks on the mass murders in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio — know this to be true. “Anyone but Trump” should be the goal for all Americans, even Republicans.
One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.
“You get the sense that things have changed, that this is not a place for you to be exploring things that don’t agree with someone’s political views,” Ziska said in a wide-ranging interview. “That’s so sad. I can’t even begin to tell you how sad that is.”
One should be sympathetic to Ziska – he believes in serious research, and finds now that biased and ignorant men impede his work. Ziska and all America deserve better.
And yet, and yet — Ziska’s circumstances may have changed, but cities and towns have seen junk studies, policies, and the sunny lies of boosterism for many years. Trump is unfit, and Trumpism is mendaciously malevolent, but there has been much junk science and policy that gently paved the way to utter mediocrity, from this small city and doubtless others (e.g., 1, 2,3, 4, 5, 6, and 7).
Smaller maladies in a part of the body sometimes weaken a patient, and make her vulnerable to catastrophic illnesses.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 16m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 36.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
“We are sickened by this monstrous evil,” said the president on Monday. We need, he said, to “find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion and love.”
Nice sentiments. Too bad Trump said them in a flat voice, like he was recording a hostage video. And then, on the final reference, he referred to the city where the second shooting occurred as Toledo. Nothing shows how much you care more than misstating the name of the city where nine people died in a mass shooting, especially after you read it right from the teleprompter only minutes earlier.
Trump is literally the last person who can bring comfort to the grieving, never mind solve the problem of gun violence in the United States. Our president is a failure as both a human being and a leader. We’ve seen it demonstrated time and time again.
Trump has spent the better part of a decade inciting anger and hate. He’s our bully in chief. He went from pushing racist birther theories about President Barack Obama to calling Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants “rapists” and “animals” and “thugs.” He referred to migration to the United States as an “infestation” and “invasion.”
At a rally in the Florida Panhandle in May, Trump asked the crowd, “How do you stop these people?” A man in the crowd answered, “Shoot them.” Trump didn’t miss a beat. “Only in the Panhandle can you get away with that statement.” The crowd cheered widely.
In El Paso this weekend and across the globe this year, white supremacists have left manifestos referencing a racist conspiracy theory to justify slaughtering religious and ethnic minorities.
Alleged killers in Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and El Paso, Texas believed a theory that claims white people are being “replaced” by people of color through mass immigration. Conspiracy theorists often falsely claim this is a deliberate effort by any number of groups demonized on the far right: liberals, Democrats, Jews, Muslims. It’s the theory peddled by white-supremacist groups seeking recruits and the torch-bearing marchers in Charlottesville two years ago.
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In name alone, the conspiracy theory began in 2011, with the book The Great Replacement by French author Renaud Camus. The anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant text likened the growth of non-white populations to the genocide of white people in European countries. This supposed genocide is nonexistent.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 19m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whigs’ support for the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act precipitated their near-electoral destruction in the first half of that decade. The party’s leaders, split between North and South, publicly projected an ambivalence about the future of slavery in the United States. While slavery served as the lever around which the Whigs would spin into oblivion, it was their moral failure regarding so odious an institution to so many Americans that ultimately killed them off.
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Like the Whigs of old, Donald Trump’s GOP is staring at a similar fate should it continue on this path. Many evangelical Christians, seeing themselves as arbiters of moral righteousness, tout the president as the tonic to so many of the country’s problems. The reality is, however, that the party’s outward failures are distinctly grounded in a lack of moral compass, ugly politics and nonexistent policy; for which the electoral consequences have only just begun.
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Regarding how they see the world, their personal priorities, what they believe to be the most pressing issues facing the country, the GOP is out of step with a large and growing cohort. On the other hand, the older voters that Republicans have long relied on — white, more conservative, more working class — will represent a plurality of registered voters and their impact will drop accordingly.
Not coincidentally, Republicans in the Trump era are losing House seats (more than 40 in 2018), governorships (down a net 6 in 2018) and state legislatures. (“Six chambers changed partisan control in the 2018 elections. Democrats captured the Colorado State Senate, Maine State Senate, Minnesota House of Representatives, New Hampshire House of Representatives, New Hampshire State Senate, and New York State Senate. . . . In 2018, 322 incumbents, including 49 Democrats and 253 Republicans, were defeated in the general elections.”)
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Shouting into the wind brings us no closer to a Trump-free GOP or a Trump-free White House. The only plausible path at this point is to crush the Republican Party so resoundingly at every level that it is forced to abandon Trumpism, recruit an entirely different generation of leadership and devise an agenda that is not based on right-wing nationalism. Helping Democrats achieve that end should be the goal of all decent Americans — including Republicans who want one day to be able to vote in good faith for a Republican Party true to the tradition of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a shower or thunderstorm in spots late this afternoon, and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 21m 30s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the 8th Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in reconnaissance of Bay Springs, Mississippi.
But to many strategists on both sides, the clearest path to victory for Democrats against Trump is to take back Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, since they have a history of voting Democratic and were decided so narrowly in 2016. That logic puts these three at the very epicenter of the 2020 election.
In a nail-biter, any one of them could turn out to be the difference-maker. But there is a sizeable school of thought that views Wisconsin as the most pivotal.
Why?
Because it’s seen by many analysts as a little harder for Democrats to win back than Michigan and Pennsylvania, a perception based on the voting history of these states and their demographic makeup.
Wisconsin was not only the “tipping point” state in 2016, it was nearly captured by the GOP in 2000 and 2004 and has produced a lot of Republican victories at the state level over the past decade.
Wisconsin also has a higher share of blue-collar white voters than either Michigan or Pennsylvania, and that group is the president’s demographic base.
None of this guarantees that Wisconsin will “decide” the next presidential election. If the election isn’t close, no single state will be decisive. If it is close, there are a handful of other states that could be difference-makers.
But what it does guarantee is that both sides will have to campaign as if their fates depend on Wisconsin (and a few other places).
They will treat the election as if every vote matters in the handful of states that matter.
(No better place to be than here – a decisive place at a decisive time.)
Less than a year after JSW Steel (USA) Inc. lauded U.S. metal tariffs for aiding the steel industry, the company is suing because it’s not exempted from the levies.
The producer says the Commerce Department wrongfully denied waivers for steel-slab raw materials, forcing the steelmaker to pay tens of millions of dollars in tariffs. It relies on imports of these materials from India and Mexico because the U.S. doesn’t produce steel slab of sufficient quality or quantity, JSW said in its complaint.
(Live by Trump’s tariffs, perish by Trump’s tariffs.)
The undisputed godfather of the lowrider bicycle. Bike Batman, a real-life superhero who recovers stolen bikes and returns them to their rightful owners. A 15-year-old cyclist who refuses to let a serious health issue get in the way of her dream to compete in the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a thunderstorm in one or two spots this afternoon, and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 23m 48s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 8.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1958, the USS Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, becomes the first watercraft to travel beneath the ice cap reach the geographic North Pole.
THERE IS a lot Congress could do to better protect U.S. elections, and a lot Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has not allowed lawmakers to achieve. Now, two senators are offering one more opportunity.
Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) are urging colleagues negotiating this year’s defense spending bill to include an amendment in that legislation that they believe would make Russia less likely to repeat its 2016 interference. The provision would mirror parts of the duo’s stand-alone Deter Act, and it also would build on a proposal tacked on to a version of the reauthorization act the House passed last month.
The senators’ Deter Act idea differs from its House counterpart in a few ways, the most important of which is that it is more carefully targeted actually to deter. The House bill would impose additional sanctions on Russia’s sovereign debt immediately and make them difficult to remove. Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Rubio instead suggest readying sanctions that would take effect in the event of future interference. It’s a smart strategy.
Any state that considers taking aggressive action against another weighs the potential costs against the gains. The U.S. response to Russian malfeasance has not been consistent or credible enough to change Vladimir Putin’s calculus. President Trump’s sternest reprimand to the Kremlin leader has been a smirking “Don’t meddle,” so altering the equation is up to Congress. The House bill would make Russia suffer now, no matter whether it decides to attack again, and the bar for removing sanctions is so high that the country has no guarantee of relief even if it does not. Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Rubio, on the other hand, would give Russia a clear reason to refrain.
The senators’ suggestion has another advantage: Because there is a small stock of sovereign debt available, they would include a panoply of other punishments, including blocking transactions with Russia’s energy, banking and defense sectors, as well as sanctioning oligarchs and other figures participating in any interference efforts.
