So while videos of cats on YouTube are not a new concept, cooking with them might be. Popular YouTube channel JunsKitchen stars three house cats — Kohaku, Poki and Nagi — who watch as their owner Jun Yoshizuki prepares classic Japanese staples such as omurice, ramen and tofu.
JunsKitchen is one of four YouTube channels run by Yoshizuki, 29, and his wife, Rachel, 30. While most of their channels focus on their life and travels in Japan, JunsKitchen features basic cooking tutorials. But what makes these special, and popular with fans, is the soothing atmosphere Jun creates with meticulously edited videos. He posted just seven videos to the channel last year.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 16m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1765, Britain passes the Stamp Act with an effective date of November 1, 1765:
an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain that imposed a direct tax on the British colonies and plantations in America and required that many printed materials in the colonies be produced on stamped paper produced in London, carrying an embossed revenue stamp.[1][2] Printed materials included legal documents, magazines, playing cards, newspapers, and many other types of paper used throughout the colonies. Like previous taxes, the stamp tax had to be paid in valid British currency, not in colonial paper money.[3]
Recommended for reading in full:
In a comment last night, Joe highlights the big developments on Thursday in Wisconsin politics (and law, truly). The first of those was developments was an injunction against legislation from last year’s lame-duck session. A story and the decision and order in that case (one of four challenging the lame-duck session) appear below.
In a rebuke to Republican legislators, a Dane County judge on Thursday blocked enforcement of laws enacted in December that curtailed the powers of the incoming Democratic governor and attorney general.
Immediately after the ruling, Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul sought to do at least one thing the laws had barred: withdrawing Wisconsin from multi-state legal challenges to the federal health care law known as Obamacare.
Republican legislative leaders promised to swiftly appeal the ruling, issued Thursday morning by Dane County Circuit Judge Richard Niess. They contend it throws state government into chaos by raising questions about the validity of laws passed in prior extraordinary sessions.
….
But such sessions are not authorized by the state Constitution or state law, Niess wrote in his ruling. The Legislature adopted a joint rule permitting them in the 1977 session, according to the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau.
“There can be no justification for enforcement of the unconstitutional legislative actions emanating from the December 2018 ‘extraordinary session’ that is consistent with the rule of law,” Niess wrote.
In addition to the lame-duck laws, Niess’ ruling also vacates, during the session, 82 nominees and appointees to state boards and councils made by former Gov. Scott Walker.
Hours after the ruling on Thursday afternoon, Kaul asked federal judges to dismiss Wisconsin from two anti-Obamacare lawsuits the state backed under former GOP Attorney General Brad Schimel. It remained unclear late Thursday when federal courts might grant Kaul’s requests.
The journalist and 33-year-old mother of two, [Lyudmila] Savchuk started noticing websites and social media accounts attacking local opposition activists in her hometown of Saint Petersburg with a frequency she hadn’t seen before.
“I wanted to get in there to see how it works, of course,” says Savchuk. “But the most important thing was to see if there was some way to stop it.”
Related: In Russia, a ‘ghost empire’ rises
She was hired as a blogger and told to report to Savushkina 55, a nondescript four-story office building on the outskirts of town.
Once on the inside, Savchuk was stunned to see hundreds of mostly younger Russians working as paid trolls in rotating shifts.
….
In total, Savchuk spent just two and a half months at the IRA before she went public about the troll factory in a local newspaper.
Her conclusion: The troll farm was a Kremlin project, run by a shadowy local restaurateur named Evgeny Prigozhin.
While Prigozhin has denied those charges, his name may sound familiar to American audiences. Often called “Putin’s Chef” for his close ties to the Russian President, Prigozhin was placed under US sanctions in 2018 for what American officials say was a coordinated attempt to interfere with the US elections.
Thursday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 7:08 PM, for 12h 13m 48s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On Sunday, March 21, close to 8,000 people assembled at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church to commence the trek to Montgomery.[90] Most of the participants were black, but some were white and some were Asian and Latino. Spiritual leaders of multiple races, religions, and creeds marched abreast with Dr. King, including Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Greek Orthodox Archbishop Iakovos, Rabbis Abraham Joshua Heschel and Maurice Davis, and at least one nun, all of whom were depicted in a photo that has become famous.[68]
MADISON – Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is refusing to testify in Wisconsin’s gerrymandering case, opening a new front in a long-running legal battle over how election maps are drawn.
The Rochester Republican and his attorneys refused to accept a subpoena, turn over documents and agree to have him sit for a deposition because they maintain he is immune from civil legal actions. Democrats suing over the maps filed court documents late Tuesday asking a panel of federal judges to force Vos to testify.
“Assembly members, including Speaker Vos, have waived any claim to legislative immunity in this case by intervening as a defendant and actively participating in the litigation, including filing motions and discovery requests,” attorney Ruth Greenwood wrote in her filing.
An attorney for Vos rejected that argument.
“Subpoenaing Speaker Vos diverts time, energy, and attention away from legislative tasks and disrupts the important work of the Wisconsin Legislature,” attorney Kevin St. John wrote in a letter to Greenwood last month.
(Vos is too busy to discuss the gerrymandering that sustains his political power.)
Russia will stop publishing monthly data that’s shown a slump in disposable incomes for five straight years after the indicator was criticized for using methodology that’s decades out of date.
The Federal Statistics Service will start releasing quarterly income data starting next month and historical numbers will be recalculated going back to 2013, head Pavel Malkov said at a briefing with journalists in Moscow. The new methodology will include data on online sales and sales from smaller retailers among other things, he added.
The statistics service, known as Rosstat, comes under regular fire for the quality of its data, especially after growth numbers for 2018 released last month massively outstripped economist estimates. The Economy Ministry took control nearly two years ago and Malkov, a former economy ministry official, was appointed head late last year to address issues including the collection of primary data.
When UW-Whitewater’s enrollment was expanding, and so student housing was in demand, some residents opposed to more rental properties rushed to local government in a futile effort to hold back the student tide, through zoning or code enforcement.
Now that there’s a worry that student enrollment is declining, and rental properties are less in demand, some residents are rushing to local government to do something – anything, anything at all – to reconvert former rental properties back single-family homes.
Honest to goodness, expecting local government to direct effectively the housing trends of the area is like rushing to a kitchen junk drawer for the tools to dig a ditch or build a tower.
Indeed, to repeat a point made here before: “Imagine what it would take to produce even a 50-50 distribution of owner-occupied homes in Whitewater: to equal the number of rental units Whitewater has now, she would have to add 1,758 owner-occupied units – more than the entire stock of existing owner-occupied units.” (Emphasis in original.)
Spring begins in Whitewater with mostly cloudy skies, an occasional shower, and a high of fifty. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 10m 53s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
The meeting’s organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name “Republican” which had been suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. You can see eyewitness accounts of the meeting, early Republican campaign documents, and other original sources on our page devoted to Wisconsin and the Republican Party. Though other places have claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican.
Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview that offers a real alternative to liberalism. Communism was an ideology — and some thought fascism was, as well — that offered a comprehensive understanding of human nature, politics, economics and governance to shape the behavior and thought of all members of a society in every aspect of their lives.
We believed that “traditional” autocratic governments were devoid of grand theories about society and, for the most part, left their people alone. Unlike communist governments, they had no universalist pretensions, no anti-liberal “ideology” to export. Though hostile to democracy at home, they did not care what happened beyond their borders. They might even evolve into democracies themselves, unlike the “totalitarian” communist states. We even got used to regarding them as “friends,” as strategic allies against the great radical challenges of the day: communism during the Cold War, Islamist extremism today.
Like so many of the theories that became conventional wisdom during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, this one was mistaken. Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. Or, more accurately, it has reemerged, for authoritarianism has always posed the most potent and enduring challenge to liberalism, since the birth of the liberal idea itself. Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. It has returned as an ideological force, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and just at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.
Writing yesterday at the New York Times, liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman addressed economic challenges of rural communities in Getting Real About Rural America. It is a blog post about which reasonable observers of any ideology – left, center, right, or libertarian – could agree. Krugman writes
There’s nothing wrong with discussing these issues. Rural lives matter — we’re all Americans, and deserve to share in the nation’s wealth. Rural votes matter even more; like it or not, our political system gives hugely disproportionate weight to less populous states, which are also generally states with relatively rural populations.
But it’s also important to get real. There are powerful forces behind the relative and in some cases absolute economic decline of rural America — and the truth is that nobody knows how to reverse those forces.
….
So what can be done to help rural America? We can and should make sure that all Americans have good health care, access to good education, and so on wherever they live. We can try to promote economic development in lagging regions with public investment, employment subsidies and, possibly, job guarantees.
But as I said, experience abroad isn’t encouraging. West Germany invested $1.7 trillion in an attempt to revive the former East Germany — more than $100,000 per capita — yet the region is still lagging, with many young people leaving.
It says all one could say about the conditions of rural economies that a gifted economist on the left sees the limitations of a strategy of “public investment, employment subsidies and, possibly, job guarantees.”
Bluntly stated: if Krugman lacks a public-spending solution for rural areas, there’s not the slightest chance that (far) lesser thinkers at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation or tiny local versions of the WEDC in towns across Wisconsin will be able to craft an effective solution. At the WEDC and local level, the discussion isn’t even economics as a social science – it’s political sorcery and rhetorical alchemy.
There’s no claim here that Krugman is an unbridled free-market man – it’s merely that he’s practical about state-sponsored solutions.
Krugman’s willingness to speak plainly to his fellow Democrats (“As you read this, Democratic presidential hopefuls are crisscrossing Iowa, trying to assure farmers that they share their concerns”) is admirable. (His criticism of Modern Monetary Theory – that theory being a fad of the far left – is compelling.)
Strangest of all, in Wisconsin: the strongest advocates of those rural solutions Krugman doubts aren’t Democrats, but WEDC Republicans.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 7:06 PM, for 12h 07m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
It doesn’t take a person with an advanced degree in psychology to see Trump’s narcissism and lack of empathy, his vindictiveness and pathological lying, his impulsivity and callousness, his inability to be guided by norms, or his shamelessness and dehumanization of those who do not abide his wishes. His condition is getting worse, not better—and there are now fewer people in the administration able to contain the president and act as a check on his worst impulses.
This constellation of characteristics would be worrisome in a banker or a high-school teacher, in an aircraft machinist or a warehouse manager, in a gas-station attendant or a truck driver. To have them define the personality of an American president is downright alarming.
Whether the worst scenarios come to pass or not is right now unknowable. But what we do know is that the president is a person who seems to draw energy and purpose from maliciousness and transgressive acts, from creating enmity among people of different races, religions, and backgrounds, and from attacking the weak, the honorable, and even the dead.
Donald Trump is not well, and as long as he is president, our nation is not safe.
Unfortunately, most Republicans are fine with Trump, or say they are. They have tax cuts and some judges, so what do they care if the presidency is sullied, racial anger builds, the United States’ reputation in the world is damaged, decency and objective truth are obliterated, and none of our real challenges (e.g. income inequality, climate change) are addressed? Republicans will still tell you that they are victims of liberal elites. In their minds, Trump is just evening the score on their behalf.
There is no moral or intellectual reason that will persuade them. There is no respectful conversation to be had with people who argue in bad faith. The only solution is to defeat Trump and his party so thoroughly that Trumpism is permanently discredited.
If there’s one thing that’s difficult during the NCAA Tournament, it’s figuring out where to focus your attention on Thursday and Friday, when as many as four games are going on at the same time. If your allegiance is simply the state of Wisconsin, here’s what to watch for [scheduling and other information folows].
(The whole tournament is worth watching as much as one can, but this is a good Wisconsin-only guide.)
One reads that today Foxconn is promising a less advanced facility in Wisconsin by 2020, and today’s promise has captured a few headlines.
The truth – even if Foxconn follows through on this latest promise – is an embarrassing retreat, as Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan observes:
Sounds like it’s more than a year late, and well below scale. Foxconn taking THREE years to create 1,500 jobs is a glacial pace for them. Long term target was 13,000, with ~2,000 by end 2019.
But more than six months later, it’s hard to tell what kind of progress has been made on the deal.
Foxconn representatives did not answer a list of questions related to their partnership with Wisconsin’s flagship university, instead providing a statement that said the Taiwanese electronics maker is proud of its partnership with UW-Madison.
In the late 1960s, almost all prime-working-age men, typically defined as 25 to 54, worked—nearly 95 percent. That figure had dipped to 85 percent by 2015—a decline most acutely felt among men without college degrees. The trend of men dropping out of the labor force, particularly non-college-educated men, has been building for more than six decades. It has been a slow withdrawal, but a steady one—a flow that began with a sharp decline in opportunities for men who dropped out of high school, and grew to include those who earned a diploma but not a degree.
Economists have been working to understand the roots of the decline, and have come up with a cadre of theories: Perhaps it’s a case of insufficient wages for jobs that don’t require a degree; or maybe rising incarceration rates are the real culprit (people with criminal records have a harder time getting jobs); or it could be that more jobs that did not require a degree in the past do now.
A recent working paperfrom the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that maybe it’s all of the above and then some—a complex combination of low wages for non-college-degreed jobs; incarceration rates, which are higher among men without degrees; and a sharp decline in marriage rates among less educated men, which may remove an economic incentive to work—all wrapped up into a slowly rolling ball that’s knocking more and more men out of the workforce. Sure, these issues are affecting college-educated men as well, but each of them is felt more acutely by those without degrees.
Whatever the cause, it is reasonable to conclude that a government policy that provides publicly-funded relocation incentives (money, land, etc.) for businesses using a non-college labor force is economically suspect.
A plan like that is simply doubling one’s efforts on a part of the economy from which employers are walking away (perhaps in favor of automation), and for which there are fewer good-paying opportunities and long-term prospects.
The price of enticing workers to stay in publicly-subsidized industries (often so that development gurus can claim another supposed short-term success) is a long-term dead-end for workers. A memorandum of understanding to subsidize a business like that would memorialize nothing so much as a lack of understanding.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 05m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board’s open session tonight begins at 7 PM.
On this day in 1953, Braves Move to Milwaukee: “the Braves baseball team announced that they were moving from Boston to Milwaukee.”
He has talked about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges. He’s encouraged police officers to bang suspects’ heads against car roofs. He has suggested his supporters “knock the hell” out of hecklers. At a rally shortly before 2018 Election Day, he went on a similar riff about Bikers for Trump and the military.
I’m well aware of the various see-no-evil attempts to excuse this behavior: That’s just how he talks. Don’t take him literally. Other Republicans are keeping him in check. His speeches and tweets don’t really matter.
But they do matter. The president’s continued encouragement of violence — and of white nationalism — is part of the reason that white-nationalist violence is increasing. Funny how that works.
Twenty-five years ago, Democrats and Republicans felt the same way about immigrants: The Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of both parties agreed they were a burden. Immigration critics were confident that those numbers would increase as a backlash to rising immigration took hold among native-born Americans. Instead, the opposite happened. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, the share of Democrats and independents who said immigrants strengthen America had nearly doubled, while Republican opinion on the question had barely budged.
And under Trump, anti-immigrant sentiment has fallen even further as the president’s rhetoric about immigrants alienates large swaths of the public. According to a Pew poll from January, 55 percent of Republicans—8 percent fewer than in May 2015—and a record-low 13 percent of Democrats believe that immigrants burden the United States by taking jobs, housing, and health care from native-born Americans. And according to Gallup surveys, 67 percent of Americans now say immigration should be increased or kept at its present level, the highest number since Gallup began asking the question in 1965.
The United States is in the midst of a two-decade-long shift in favor of immigration, and it is only accelerating under Trump. For all the nativist movement’s efforts over the decades to rein in immigration, the chances of preserving a white majority are effectively gone.
St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 02m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Lost in the ongoing debate over whether Wisconsin should expand eligibility for Medicaid — and accept roughly $184.9 million a year in federal dollars for doing so — is one small detail:
Former Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature already expanded the Medicaid program.
They just didn’t take the federal money available to states to offset much of the cost.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country that expanded eligibility for its Medicaid program — the change made in 2014 covered 147,000 adults without dependent children as of January — while not accepting the federal money available to states through the Affordable Care Act.
….
Republicans in the Legislature — whose votes Evers would need — have largely stood firm in their opposition. And now legislators are citing a study that contends expanding the program would shift $1.1 billion in costs to private health plans.
The study — released last month by Republican lawmakers at a news conference at the state Capitol — was by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and the Center for Research On the Wisconsin Economy, or CROWE, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Economists and policy analysts quickly criticized the study for what they contend is a lengthy list of flaws, with one describing it as “baloney.”
“My real concern is they are trying to affect policy with such garbage work,” said Tim Classen, a professor of economics at Loyola University in Chicago.
The authors of the study — Will Flanders at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Noah Williams, an economics professor at UW-Madison — stand by the study and its conclusions.
….
Critics of the study done by Flanders and Williams also contend that it did not account for the fact that Wisconsin already partially expanded Medicaid.
“The issue that really is not addressed for me is Wisconsin’s expansion has sort of already happened,” said Laura Dague, an economist and associate professor of health policy at Texas A&M University. “The application of these numbers to the Wisconsin context is pretty questionable.”
Basically, the study comes up with a national average of the purported cost shift to private health plans from a broad group — adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty threshold. It then applies that average to a subset of that group — those with incomes between 100 percent and 138 percent of the threshold.
The study’s critics contend that isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.
(The WISGOP, especially, has found researchers – like Williams who know better – willing to do low-quality work on its behalf.)
