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.
….
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.
In late April, I wrote about The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future (advertising’s not enough to sustain publications, subscriptions will prove necessary for most publications, and “[t]he key lesson for publishers is to offer sharp (and sometimes sharp-tongued) writing, to see that content is king”). (A word about FREE WHITEWATER. This website accepts no advertising, requires no subscription, and never will. For-profit publications with employees don’t have that luxury.)
Most newspapers aren’t owned by a trust that mandates they promote“liberal journalism both in Britain and elsewhere.”
And most newspapers don’t lose money year after year after year. Sure, some papers that are run by rich men more interested in influence than profit, and some families have chosen to rank civic duty above the bottom line. But in the main, when revenues decline at a newspaper, costs get cut — cut to the point that whatever profit level the owner seeks gets met. Most newspapers that consistently lose money die.
And yet The Guardian is, here again, an especially noteworthy exception.
Benton also lists a few keys to success (for any for-profit digital publication):
We’ve been writing here for a long time about the difficult transition newspapers are making (or not making) to digital. If you had to define a few key financial landmarks papers need to hit along the way, you might pick these three taken from Ken Doctor pieces early this decade:
Cinco de Mayo in Whitewater will see occasional afternoon thundershowers with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 38s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the Mexican Army defeats French occupying forces at the Battle of Puebla.
Plans to build the first privately-run immigration detention center in Wisconsin are off the table — at least for now — part of larger trend in which companies that build them are being encouraged by federal officials but resisted at the state and local level.
For at least a year, Virginia-based Immigration Centers of America wanted to build a 500-bed detention center in St. Croix County. The company said it would generate more than 200 full-time jobs and millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue.
However, earlier this month it withdrew its proposal to build in New Richmond. The city’s staff had issued a report recommending officials reject the application for rezoning and related ordinance changes, saying the project didn’t fit in the city’s development plan. In addition, public outcry over the plan was fierce, with residents opposing the detention of immigrants, and expressing concerns about property values and use of tax dollars.
President Donald Trump despises “fake news.” The Washington Post, The New York Times—these are “enemies of the people.” He has urged the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission to force Saturday Night Live off the air to punish the comedy show for making jokes about him.
What he likes are independent and honest voices who say things such as: Vaccines cause autism. President Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a “carefully crafted fake.” Democratic Party insiders organized the murder of a staffer to cover up their nefarious plan to blame Russia for the hack of their emails. Sharia police are enforcing sharia law in Minneapolis. The Sandy Hook massacre never happened; the dead children were paid actors. (These are all false claims.)
One thing at least will follow from the president’s Twitter campaign: It will become even more difficult than before for the shamefaced remains of what used to be mainstream conservatism to separate themselves from these grifters, racists, and liars. According to the president, they are now martyrs, saying things that deserve to be heard. There have been times in the past few years—especially during the hoax to shift blame from the Russians for hacking the Democratic National Committee—that Fox News and Infowars blurred into each other. Those days will now return.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
a series of battles fought in Virginia during May and June 1864, in the American Civil War. Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all Union armies, directed the actions of the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Maj. Gen. George G. Meade, and other forces against Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Although Grant suffered severe losses during the campaign, it was a strategic Union victory. It inflicted proportionately higher losses on Lee’s army and maneuvered it into a siege at Richmond and Petersburg, Virginia, in just over eight weeks.
Although Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is over, and although President Trump on Friday again described the probe as a “Witch Hunt,” the FBI is almost certain to continue its counterintelligence investigation into Russian espionage efforts related to the 2016 election. More important, they will continue to search for Americans working on behalf of the Kremlin.
The inability to establish that the Trump campaign conspired in a “tacit or express” agreement with the Russian government is not surprising. Most espionage investigations come up empty unless and until they get a lucky break. That does not mean there was no espionage activity in relation to the 2016 election. Every previous Russian political-warfare campaign was built on human spies. Russian “active measures”—propaganda, information warfare, cyberattacks, disinformation, use of forgeries, spreading conspiracies and rumors, funding extremist groups and deception operations—rely on human actors to support and inform their success. Counterintelligence professionals must doubt that Russia could have pulled off its election-interference effort without the support of spies burrowed into U.S. society or institutions.
Indeed, troubling patterns, unanswered questions, and tantalizing leads suggest that Russia relied on human sources to interfere in the 2016 election. Both the Mueller report and Intelligence Community assessments have identified a variety of Russian actors involved in the attack. They uncovered the activities of the Russian GRU, cyberhackers, and the Russian troll factory. However, one key player is missing: Russia’s premier espionage service, the SVR. Is it possible that the Russian espionage service played no role in Russia’s operation, and had no spies helping support what the Mueller report characterized as a “sweeping and systematic” attack of American institutions? The FBI would be professionally negligent if it assumed so.
The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 12m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The core of the problem is not that Barr moved, as many people worried he would, to suppress the report; it is what he has said about it. I have spent a great deal of time with the Mueller report, about which Barr’s public statements are simply indefensible. The mischaracterizations began in his first letter. They got worse during his press conference the morning he released the document. And they grew worse still yesterday in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
….
The dishonesty only begins with the laughably selective quotation of Mueller’s report in Barr’s original letter, the scope of which Charlie Savage laid out in a remarkable New York Times article shortly after the full report was released. I urge people to look at Savage’s side-by-side quotations. The distortion of Mueller’s meaning across a range of areas is not subtle, and it’s not hard to understand why Mueller himself wrote to Barr saying that the attorney general’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and conclusions.”
Barr, before the Senate yesterday, described the letter as “snitty.” Actually, it was generous. As Paul Rosenzweig summarized the situation on Lawfare, “the excerpts of the report contained in Barr’s original summary letter are at best a favorable spin on the report and at worst a rather transparent effort to mislead the public in advance of the report’s release.”
(Wittes, like many of us, at first gave Barr the benefit of the doubt, despite our opposition to Trump. We were too generous.)
Barr is no flunky. He is a hardened ideologue who believes that the president he serves is largely above the law. Barr seems genuinely committed to defending the imperial prerogatives of the office against shortsighted liberals who would weaken the presidency in a delusional quest to remove a Republican from office. As he put it in his 2017 memo attacking the special counsel’s investigation, “crediting” the belief that the president could have committed obstruction by his official acts “would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the Presidency.”
Barr is not protecting Trump because he thinks Trump is the most accomplished president in modern history, because he fears Trump, because the real-estate mogul has some psychological hold on him, or because he has been corrupted. Barr is defending Trump because Barr is a zealot.
