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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.15.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 5:27 PM, for 10h 36m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 76.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1865, at the Battle of Congaree Creek, South Carolina, the 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in the Union victory over elements of the Confederacy’s Army of Tennessee.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

 Peter Schuck writes of The Real Problem With Trump’s National Emergency Plan:

President Trump is verging on a declaration of national emergency — purely in order to fund his wall. And if he does, the courts may — or may not — reject his gambit.

But the fact that he may actually possess the legal authority to require agencies to waste billions of dollars simply to fulfill a foolish campaign promise he thinks won him the election is itself scandalous. The theatrics surrounding his petulant threat to do so obscure a vital question for our democracy going far beyond this (non)crisis, a question to which Congress should immediately turn: Who decides what constitutes a national emergency?

In hundreds of laws, Congress has given the president the power to decide. (The Brennan Center for Justice has compiled an exhaustive list.) But by failing to define crucial terms, legal standards and accountability rules, Congress has handed presidents an all-too-handy tool of tyranny commonly used by autocrats to amass more power, crush dissent and eviscerate democratic institutions. In Mr. Trump’s case, it has handed an unguided missile to an ignorant, impetuous man-child.

Congress should have known better. After all, it enacted the National Emergencies Act of 1976, which purported to regulate such declarations, only two years after President Richard Nixon’s abuses of power forced his resignation. The act actually made matters worse in a key respect: It defined a national emergency as “a general declaration of emergency made by the president.” This circular definition, of course, is no constraint at all. Or as Humpty Dumpty says to Alice, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

 Robert Costa, Rachael Bade, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim report ‘Off the rails’: Inside Trump’s attempt to claim victory in his border wall defeat:

“We thought he was good to go all morning, and then suddenly it’s like everything is off the rails,” said one senior Republican aide.

By midafternoon, however, Trump was back on board — agreeing to sign the legislation with the caveat that he would also declare a national emergency in an attempt to use existing government funds to pay for wall construction. It was an option that Republican leaders had urged him to avoid but eventually accepted as necessary to escape the corner in which Trump — and his party — were trapped. McConnell promised Trump he would encourage others to support the emergency in a bid to get the president to sign, according to people familiar with the conversations.

  Why Valentine’s Day Isn’t 1-800-Flowers Busiest Day:

Culture, Freedom of Speech, Never Trump, Resistance

The Middle Lane is a Dirt Road to Decay

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Media critic Margaret Sullivan writes that The media feel safest in the middle lane. Just ask Jeff Flake, John Kasich and Howard Schultz:

One of the supposed golden rules of journalism goes like this: “If everybody’s mad at your coverage, you must be doing a good job.”

That’s ridiculous, of course, though it seems comforting. If everybody’s mad, it may just mean you’re getting everything wrong.

But it’s the kind of muddled thinking that feels right to media people who practice what I’ll call the middle-lane approach to journalism — the smarmy centrism that often benefits nobody, but promises that you won’t offend anyone.

Who is the media’s middle-lane approach actually good for?

Not the public, certainly, since readers and viewers would benefit from strong viewpoints across the full spectrum of political thought, not just minor variations of the same old stuff.

But it is great for politicians and pundits who bill themselves as centrists.

Yes, indeed.  The adult in the room, the triangulating schemer, the reptile whose body temperature requires a choice place in the sun: they all want to direct the debate positionally, situationally.

No, and no again: pick a few sound principles, and defend them against any and all.

City, Culture, Demographics, Ethnicity, Police

Accreditation in Context

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There is a liturgical tradition in which parishioners reflect on what they have done and what they have left undone.  A secular equivalent for Whitewater would ask a policymaker to consider not merely what has been done so many times before, but what might – and should have been – done, years ago and now.

So it is with police accreditation: that Whitewater sought this certification for many years is hardly to the city’s credit.  Indeed, one would expect that the city’s officials have the ability to manage these matters on their own with no announcements or awards for doing so.  See Accreditation: What Would Anyone Have Done Differently?

Following the preferences of Whitewater’s former chiefs isn’t a virtue – it’s closer to a resplendent error.  Longstanding practices of this kind will never substitute for genuine town-gown respect, or equality of treatment for all people within the city.

An out-of-town insurance agent‘s reassurances, specifically, amount to laughable hubris: an insurance company’s concerns about claims are neither a dispositive legal determination of liability nor a representation of residents’ experiences (as the insurance agent is not a resident).

Doubtless, there are some residents who will take comfort in accreditation.

And yet, and yet —  the indication of Whitewater’s better condition will not come when other cities look at her accreditation checklist – it will come when other cities look to her work in town-gown relations or relations among demographic groups.

What’s been done matters less than what’s been left undone.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.14.19

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Good morning.

Valentine’s Day in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-one.  Sunrise is 6:52 AM and sunset 5:25 PM, for 10h 33m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1819, an inventor is born:

On this date, the inventor of the modern typewriter, C. Latham Sholes, was born. Sholes moved to Wisconsin as a child and lived in Green Bay, Kenosha, and Milwaukee. In 1867, in Milwaukee, he presented his first model for the modern typewriter and patents for the device were taken out in 1868. Sholes took the advice of many mechanical experts, including Thomas Edison, and so claims that he was the sole inventor of the typewriter have often been disputed.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

 Dan Friedman reports Paul Manafort Lied to Robert Mueller About Russian Contacts, Judge Rules:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Paul Manafort lied to prosecutors about his contacts with a colleague who had suspected ties to Russian intelligence, activity that occurred while Manafort ran President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and continued into 2018.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson found that Manafort violated an agreement he reached in September with special counsel Robert Mueller’s office to cooperate fully with their inquiry into Trump campaign contacts with Russia. Jackson’s ruling, which came during a sealed hearing Wednesday, will likely bring Manafort a longer prison term when Jackson sentences him next month on charges including money laundering, obstruction of justice, and conspiracy, to which he pleaded guilty last year.

The ruling also underscores a key allegation from Mueller: Manafort lied to cover up contacts he had with a suspected proxy for the Russian government while serving as head of Trump’s campaign.

Jackson agreed that prosecutors had shown that Manafort misled prosecutors about his contacts with Konstantin Kilimnik—a longtime Manafort employee in Ukraine—who prosecutors have said retains active ties to Russian military intelligence, known as GRU. Federal prosecutors charged agents of the same agency with carrying out hacks of the Democratic National Committee and other Democrats as part of an effort to help Trump win the presidency.

See also Document: Judge Rules Manafort Lied While Under Cooperation Agreement:

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ABJ-Order-on-Manafort-Lies.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

 Shawn Johnson writes Report: Special Ed Funding Gap Grows To $1B:

A lack of new state funding for special education has forced school districts across Wisconsin to find that money elsewhere, according to a new report by a public policy think-tank.

That discrepancy between what schools need and what the state gives them has grown to more than $1 billion per year.

“The takeaway is it doesn’t only affect special education kids,” said Anne Chapman, a senior researcher at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which issued the report. “Because of the way Wisconsin chooses to fund both regular education and special education, this sort of what you might call underfunding of the costs of special ed cascades to affect all the school districts in the state.”

  3D printing with light: ‘The replicator’ is here:

Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Development, Economics, Economy, Government Spending, Local Government, Poverty, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, Transportation

Private Businesses Craving Public Money

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A private group may invite whom it wishes, but the guests invited tell much about the organization doing the inviting. Long years ago, straining even the finest recollection, private businesses relied on their own efforts for success (or so one has heard).  Look about now, even in small and struggling places, and one finds well-fed businessmen searching fervently for any public money they can get.  So, where once a business group’s guest of honor might have been an accomplished private person, now it’s a public official from whom the business lobby might wheedle some taxpayer money for its own ambitions.

In a small town like Whitewater, where a conservative landlord and a few others are organized as a business league (the Greater Whitewater Committee), their choice of guest speaker shows an attraction to public money.

Last year that group invited the operative overseeing the Foxconn project, a scheme dependent on billions in state and local money.  This year, they’ve invited the nominee to become Wisconsin’s secretary of transportation.  That’s fitting, as this special interest group would like state money for road expansion (in a state that has seen skyrocketing transportation projects and shrinking budgets).

Some of these business-league men have been – at the same time – public officials running Whitewater’s Community Development Authority.  Their work at the CDA has been a policy failure.  See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA and Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade.

Nationally and locally, big-government conservatives are economy-wreckers.

Still, one has tried to be helpful with guest speaker suggestions, differences notwithstanding:  suggesting former Gov. Walker offered someone knowledgeable about corporate welfare who also has time on his hands; suggesting Alfred E. Neuman matched the quality of the speaker with the policy outlook of the organization.

They’ve chosen more opportunistically, for another state bureaucrat.

Of this business league’s selection of a guest speaker, one sees a nearly mosquito-like attraction to a corpulent (and public) food supply.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.13.19

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-six.  Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 5:24 PM, for 10h 30m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 56% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1935, Wisconsin sets a floor on gasoline prices: “in an effort to stop gasoline price wars, the state of Wisconsin established a minimum price of 16 cents per gallon for gasoline.”

Recommended for reading in full:

 Bruce Murphy examines Walker and the Russian Connection:

Yesterday Urban Milwaukee published new data by Wisconsin Democracy Campaign (WDC) on the state’s top 20 individual donors and on the list was the Russia-connected business man, Leonard Blavatnik, of New York City, who gave $100,000 to the state Republican Party in August 2018, at a time when the party was controlled by Gov. Scott Walker.

Walker had earlier received $1.75 million for his run for president from Blavatnik’s company Access Industries.

Why the donations? That involves a murky mystery that might make a good John LeCarre novel. Blavatnik, you see, is a Soviet-born and Russian-raised American citizen who co-owns businesses in Russia with two oligarchs there, Oleg Deripaska and Viktor Vekselberg, who are close to Vladimir Putin, as the Dallas News has reported

….

Blavatnik gave a $250,000 donation to Walker’s Our American Revival fund (supporting his run for president) just days after Walker met with accused Russian spy Maria Butina, who has pleaded guilty to attempting to infiltrate Republican political circles and influence US relations with Russia before and after the 2016 presidential election. Butina had developed a friendship with officials with the National Rifle Association and used that connection to meet Republican candidates for the 2016 election. She met with officials in the campaign of Donald Trump and with Walker himself. 

 Molly Beck reports Scott Walker’s ‘Open for Business’ welcome signs will soon be detour markers:

Signs championed by former Gov. Scott Walker that welcomed visitors to Wisconsin as a state “Open for Business” are being turned into detour signs.

An official in Gov. Tony Evers’ administration said in a letter this month that the signs donning Walker’s economic development mantra will be turned into signs used for detours and directions in emergency situations.

“Therefore, the old signs will be cut in half with no material wasted,” said the Feb. 1 letter from Department of Administration enterprise operations administrator James Langdon to Republican Rep. John Macco of Ledgeview.

Amy Wang reports Top dog? It’s King, a wire fox terrier who won best in show at Westminster:

Breed after breed took turns in the spotlight, getting judged against their competitors. Over the course of two days, the field of about 2,800 dogs from 203 breeds was whittled to dozens, as one dog emerged from each breed contest victorious, to a mix of whoops, polite clapping and a few tears. By Tuesday night, only one dog remained: best in show.

King, a wire fox terrier, ultimately won the top award.

  Sites On Mars That Humans Should Visit:

City, Local Government, Open Government

The Disorder Nearby

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All the communities in our area are struggling economically, but yet Whitewater has fared better than neighboring places. The commitment of a community to transparency inoculates against an inferior, disordered politics of the sort one sees in the nearby cities of Jefferson and Milton.

Look at Jefferson (where city officials dissemble about relationships with fraudulent vendors) or the school district in Milton, Wisconsin (where the school board itself has fought against transparency, where a board member authorizes payments to officials without full board approval, and where twice now the community has thought so little of its school board and administrators that it has rejected their capital requests).  In both of those cities, the local newspapers (Daily Jefferson County Union and Milton Courier) have been ineffectual (or, worse, they’ve lied by commission or omission to hide mistakes and fraud).

Government’s commitment to openness is, in the broadest sense, an embrace of a competitive marketplace of ideas.  Fast and full information allows the discerning to make better decisions, and expands generally one’s capacity for discernment.  (One improves by practice.)

The best record is a recording. 

Fundamentally one is entitled to public information as a matter of right, but secondarily the spread of that information is a matter of prudence.

One wishes the best for all places, but Whitewater’s better record on governmental openness since 2010 has kept her from many of the problems that now bedevil Jefferson and Milton.

Update, Tuesday afternoon:

I’ve added replies from the city to an earlier post about our town’s cable access channel Channel 990.

Why a concern over this, why ask about it?  Here’s why: the best record is a recording.  If we were a different place – larger perhaps, or in a different era – this community might have credibly relied on local newspapers to keep it informed of politics and fiscal policy in the city, school district, and at the university.  We don’t have those sort of newspapers.  They’ve succumbed to pressures and made compromises that leave their accounts incomplete and unreliable.

Why worry about timing?  Because when a poorly written, poorly reported newspaper account gets a head start on a recording, the truth of the recording is left to chase the errors and mendacity of the newspaper account.

Where does one turn?  Prudently, one turns to a full and complete record.  Communities – like Milton and Jefferson – that rely on dying newspapers become dying towns.

We’ve done better in this regard, but sadly worse practices fester not far beyond our city limits.

City, Local Government, Open Government, Television

Whitewater’s Channel 990

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Update 1, Tuesday morning:

Channel 990 is televising properly again. Here’s my original email, and a reply from Whitewater’s city manager, Cameron Clapper.  (See also a message below from Kristin Mickelson, Whitewater’s PR & Communications Manager.)

Original email:

Good morning, City Manager Clapper.
I hope this note finds you well, and enjoying a snow day in Whitewater.
I’m writing about a notice on the City of Whitewater website that (1) mentions technical difficulties with the city’s cable access channel, and (2) makes a commitment to post online the videos of public meetings within forty-eight to seventy-two hours.
(A screenshot of the announcement is attached for your ready reference.)
The notice raises three simple questions:
1. Is Channel 990 still experiencing technical difficulties? (While there are programs running now on 990 – at the time of this writing – the notice about difficulties is still posted at the city website.)
2. Does the city have an estimated time of repair for Channel 990 (if still necessary)?
3. As the city ordinarily posts recordings of principal public meetings within about twenty-four hours, why is the promised posting schedule of recorded (but not broadcast) meetings now two or three times as long?
These questions address open government in Whitewater, and so are relevant to the municipality’s routine responsibilities.
Looking forward to your reply.
Cordially,
Adams

Reply from Cameron Clapper, Whitewater’s city manager:

Mr. Adams,

Thank you for the email.

I have asked our PR & Communications Manager, Kristin Mickelson, to follow-up with you regarding your questions below. As far as I am aware, the challenge with our broadcasting equipment has been resolved for now and the notice has been removed from the website.

Kristin will be able to supply you with further details.

Most Sincerely,

Cameron Clapper

Whitewater City Manager

Update 2, Tuesday morning:

Reply from Kristin Mickelson, Whitewater’s PR & Communications Manager:

Good morning Mr. Adams,

Thank you for reaching out to us with your questions about the television station. I am happy to answer your questions below.

  1. Channel 990 was briefly offline yesterday, February 11, 2019 with no explanation of why. Our IT staff and myself looked into the issue and was able to get regular programming back on but was unable to broadcast the Plan Commission live. For this purpose, a message was posted to the website informing viewers there was an issue. As the programming is continuing to work at this time, I did remove the message from the city website.
  2. Though IT staff and myself still have not discovered the reason for the station going off air yesterday, we are going to continue to look into the issue and troubleshoot as the equipment is getting older and has had some issues on and off during my time here. We are going to test out our live streaming and update programming in hopes that everything is back to normal. If not, we will than look into other options or upgrades as needed.
  3. As we always strive to post city meetings and any programs we film right away, we cannot promise a 24 hour turnaround time. There are many steps to filming a meeting and preparing it to post to our website and it may take 24-72 hours for my staff to have this completed based on their schedules and procedure alone. Although it is very rare to take longer than a day to post a meeting, it would not be fair to promise 24 hours to our community and not be able to fulfill this promise. In this particular situation, with the equipment having performance issues earlier in the day and with the incoming weather, I was taking precaution that we may not have the man power to complete the editing and posting process within a 24 hour time period. However, I have an amazing staff who worked later in the evening to complete the process so it could be posted right away.

I have very high standards for my department and the TV station is only one part of that. I have a great staff of students who truly cares about their work and have been doing a great job creating new public service announcements and ensuring we have 24 hours of programming on our station whether it be meetings, school concerts, parades, or events around Wisconsin. I am grateful you are a viewer of our station and get to enjoy all the hard work and dedication we put into it. Thank you for asking your questions!

Have a great and safe day.

Kristin Mickelson
PR & Communications Manager

 

There’s a notice on the City of Whitewater’s website about technical difficulties, and I’ve sent along an email to Whitewater’s city manager with a few simple questions that the notice raises. I’ll post my original email and a reply, if any, I receive.  (Simple questions: whether the channel is still malfunctioning, how long a repair might take, and why the window for the city to post meeting videos online is now longer than the ordinary posting period.)

I’m mentioning the email now because it’s better to be candid about one’s communications with the government (as against a few entitled residents in this city who think that this government is at their private disposal).

There’s a proper order for a blogger to approach government, in matters big or small, as a common person. See Steps for Blogging on a Policy or Proposal.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.12.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 6:54 AM and sunset 5:23 PM, for 10h 28m 09s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 45.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement and Cable TV Commission lists a 5:00 PM meeting. (Update: canceled due to weather.)

Abraham Lincoln is born on this day in 1809.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Eli Rosenberg reports ‘No crisis exists’: El Paso officials tell Trump to stop the falsehoods about their border city:

At a news conference Monday afternoon, Rep. Veronica Escobar (D), who represents the city in Congress, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego, District Attorney Jaime Esparza, and Commissioner Carlos Leon said Trump’s statements threatened to damage the town’s reputation.

“We’ve worked so hard to have the image of a solid community,” said Samaniego, who noted that his family emigrated to the country in 1911. “Every one of us is touched with the falsehoods that are taking place.”

Trump had made the city a centerpiece of his push for a border wall during the State of the Union address last week, saying that its fence, which was constructed between 2008 and 2010, had reduced violent crime and made El Paso one of the “safest cities in our country.” He repeated the claims during his campaign rally in the city on Monday night.

But Trump’s claims were false. The city’s violent crime peaked in 1993 before declining sharply throughout the 1990s, in line with national trends, and long before the city’s fence was approved by Congress in 2006.

….

“Donald Trump has continuously made inaccurate claims about the United States’ southern border, including El Paso,” the [municipal] resolution said, noting that data from Customs and Border Protection showed that “no crisis exists” on the border, despite Trump’s claims. “The County of El Paso is disillusioned by President Trump’s lies regarding the border and our community, and though it is difficult to welcome him to El Paso while he continues to proliferate such untruths, we do welcome him to meet with local officials to become properly informed about our great and safe region.”

Philip Bump writes Trump’s days of hard work generally begin at 11 a.m. — even in a busy week:

It’s hard to gauge how much work Trump does during his executive time, because it is unscheduled and mostly unrecorded, even within the broader White House.

….

All of this is by design, allowing Trump to make claims about how much he works by masking his leisure time under the rubric of “executive time.” We can’t say with certainty that Trump isn’t having important phone calls with foreign leaders for hours on end before heading down to the Oval Office each day, so we’re asked to assume that he is.

  Do Scientists Ever Name Creatures After People They Dislike?

Bad Ideas, Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Demographics, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Local Government, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC

Foxconn: When the Going Gets Tough…

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The national press has reported extensively, and critically, on the Foxconn project. National technology site The Verge (part of Vox Media) has also noticed how local officials who flacked this project day and night are now, well, quieter.

Nilay Patel writes Let’s all watch the Wisconsin local news desperately try to get answers about Foxconn:

No one knows what’s happening with Foxconn’s promised factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin (my hometown!) after conflicting reports surfaced last week that construction was on hold, then not on hold, on hold again, and then maybe back on track after Trump personally called Foxconn CEO Terry Gou. We’ve been tracking the story closely, Bloomberg Businessweek just ran a cover story about it, and there’s a great Reply All episode about it as well. It’s… well, it’s a mess.

But nothing quite captures the insanity like this tremendous report from Terry Sater at WISN 12 in Milwaukee. Here are some things it contains:

  • Absolutely no one from Mount Pleasant, Racine, or Foxconn going on the record.
  • Mount Pleasant Village President Dave DeGroot hiding behind his door to avoid answering questions about the broken deal.
  • Sater more or less vlogging from his car while driving around the Foxconn property as Foxconn security tails him.
  • Foxconn security pulling Sater over and kicking him off the property after they arrive at the main construction office.
  • Michael Bonn, the finance director for Mount Pleasant, telling Sater that he’s “trying to figure [it] out myself” because he hasn’t been to work in a day and a half.

When the going gets tough…the development gurus go mute.

Previously: 10 Key Articles About Foxconn, Foxconn as Alchemy: Magic Multipliers,  Foxconn Destroys Single-Family Homes, Foxconn Devours Tens of Millions from State’s Road Repair Budget, The Man Behind the Foxconn Project, A Sham News Story on Foxconn, Another Pig at the Trough, Even Foxconn’s Projections Show a Vulnerable (Replaceable) Workforce, Foxconn in Wisconsin: Not So High Tech After All, Foxconn’s Ambition is Automation, While Appeasing the Politically Ambitious, Foxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions, Foxconn’s Bait & Switch, Foxconn’s (Overwhelmingly) Low-Paying Jobs, The Next Guest Speaker, Trump, Ryan, and Walker Want to Seize Wisconsin Homes to Build Foxconn Plant, Foxconn Deal Melts Away, “Later This Year,” Foxconn’s Secret Deal with UW-Madison, Foxconn’s Predatory Reliance on Eminent Domain, Foxconn: Failure & Fraud, Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition,  Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere, Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land, Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal, Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans, WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid, Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy, Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy, Foxconn: The ‘State Visit Project,’ and ‘Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn.’

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.11.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 5:21 PM, for 10h 25m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 35.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Board meets at 6:00 PM.

This day in 1846 sees a shooting in the Territorial Legislature:

The legislature was debating the appointment of Enos S. Baker for sheriff of Grant County when Charles Arndt made a sarcastic remark about Baker’s colleague, James Vineyard. After an uproar, adjournment was declared and when Arndt approached Vineyard’s desk, a fight broke out during which Vineyard drew his revolver and shot Arndt.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Richard Parker explains Why the Wall Will Never Rise:

If President Donald Trump ever gets the funding for his long-promised wall, he will have to plot a course through Texas. But he will never make it all the way through here, the 800-mile stretch from Laredo to nearly El Paso. There will be no “concrete structure from sea to sea,” as the president once pledged. Taking this land would constitute an assault on private property and require a veritable army of lawyers, who, I can assure you, are no match for the state’s powerful border barons.

….

Although many big ranchers and landowners backed Trump, they are conservative in the most traditional senses. They actually believe in small government, free enterprise, free trade, and private property. And nobody puts a wall through their brush. These men and women are a pretty private bunch, too. You won’t find their names in the newspaper screaming bloody murder.

But they know how to make their presence felt. Last year, a couple of dozen border barons from the Laredo region summoned local politicians, cops, and representatives from the Customs and Border Patrol. It was a private, even secret event—no cameras, no press. According to Steve LaMantia, who led the group, the landowners delivered a warning to the feds not to build a wall through their land. To underscore their point, they held another meeting. And just in case it wasn’t crystal clear, they’re going to have another one.

“The general sentiment—to a person—is that everybody is in favor of additional border security,” said LaMantia. But seizing land through eminent domain? “That is diametrically opposed by everybody, from Zapata to Del Rio.”

….

If the border barons lose in court, that still won’t mean victory for Trump. They could simply chew up the wall by chewing up the clock on Trump’s time as president. They could demand an injunction blocking the government from taking the land before arriving at a settlement. And their lawyers could wrap the government up in years of haggling over dollars.

  One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Cyborg:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.10.19

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will bring snow with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 5:20 PM, for 10h 22m 50s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1763, the Treaty of Paris cedes formerly French-controlled land, including the Wisconsin region, to England.

Recommended for reading in full:

Joshua Partlow, Nick Miroff, and David A. Fahrenthold report ‘My whole town practically lived there’: From Costa Rica to New Jersey, a pipeline of illegal workers for Trump goes back years:

Angulo learned to drive backhoes and bulldozers, carving water hazards and tee boxes out of former horse pastures in Bedminster, N.J., where a famous New Yorker was building a world-class course. Angulo earned $8 an hour, a fraction of what a state-licensed heavy equipment operator would make, with no benefits or overtime pay. But he stayed seven years on the grounds crew, saving enough for a small piece of land and some cattle back home.

….

It’s a common story in this small town.

Other former employees of President Trump’s company live nearby: men who once raked the sand traps and pushed mowers through thick heat on Trump’s prized golf property — the “Summer White House,” as aides have called it — where his daughter Ivanka got married and where he wants to build a family cemetery.

“Many of us helped him get what he has today,” Angulo said. “This golf course was built by illegals.”

Soo Rin Kim, Katherine Faulders, and Matthew Mosk report Trump campaign paid legal fees to firm representing Jared Kushner:

President Donald Trump‘s campaign has spent nearly $100,000 of donor money to pay legal bills to the firm representing Jared Kushner, the latest campaign finance records show.

The president’s re-election campaign made two payments to the firm, Winston & Strawn LLP – $55,330 and $42,574. The expenditures were payments to Kushner’s attorney Abbe Lowell for Kushner’s legal fees, sources with knowledge of the payments told to ABC News. Lowell joined the firm in May 2018.

“Low dollar” contributions – $200 or less – made up 98.5 percent of the total funds raised by the Trump campaign in the last quarter of 2018, a consistent trend throughout the year, according to a press release by the campaign, along with the latest campaign finance filings.

 Patrick Marley reports Wisconsin GOP billing taxpayers almost twice as much as Democratic governor for lawyers in lame-duck lawsuits:

Republican lawmakers are charging taxpayers nearly twice as much an hour as Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in the legal fight over Wisconsin’s lame-duck laws.

Taxpayers will pay the lead attorney for lawmakers $500 an hour, according to contracts released Friday under the state’s open records law. The law firm Evers has hired is charging taxpayers $275 an hour.

The deals Evers cut are capped at $100,000, though that limit could be raised if the litigation is extensive. There are no caps on how much attorneys for the Republicans can charge.

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