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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Government Spending, Hunger, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Planning, Poverty, State Capitalism, That Which Paved the Way, Trump, WEDC, Wisconsin

The Fight Against Gravity

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The Trump Administration wants to bolster industries that are market failures, with coal as an example.  Catherine Rampell writes of that effort in The Trump administration learns that fighting gravity is hard:

The Trump administration is learning that, as new data show that the industries it has worked hardest to prop up — through bailouts, tariffs and other favors — continue their descent.

….

Trump (incorrectly) blamed the industry’s problems on overregulation, including by the Obama administration. So the president is scrapping the Clean Power Plan, which was intended to reduce carbon emissions at coal-burning plants. His administration has also been rolling back other regulations, including one regarding the disposal of coal ash  and another concerning mercury emissions.

Then there were the many direct and indirect coal subsidies, including proposals to invoke national security so the administration could require power plants to keep financially non-viable plants running. Just last week, the Energy Department announced $38 million in new federal funding for research into how to keep old coal plants online.

….

U.S. coal consumption in 2018 was at its lowest level in 39 years, according to another recent EIA report. More coal-fired plants closed in Trump’s first two years in office than in the entirety of Obama’s first term.

To be clear, that’s not because of anything Trump has done. It’s because of what he can’t  do.

Despite Trump’s claims, the main challenge for coal is not regulation. It’s technology. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in particular, has made natural gas a much cheaper alternative. Productivity gains have also been rapid, faster than many analysts expected, making natural gas even more competitive.

The local version of this approach is a decades-long effort to manipulate Whitewater’s economy through subsidies for favored businesses and regulations against disfavored ones.  For it all, Whitewater has performed worse since the Great Recession, and is a low-wage economy.  See Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade and A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.

Rampell’s right: defying gravity is hard (and much too hard for the national and local manipulators).  Government should abandon business manipulation (however crafted) and devote its efforts to assistance to needy individuals and households.

Cats, Weather

Friday Catblogging: Cats and Cold

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Without doubt, the most important actions to take during a cold spell are ones that protect vulnerable people.  Still, different groups might focus on different needs, and of feral cats, CBS Chicago writes ‘It Takes Just Five Minutes To Save A Cat’s Life’: How To Protect Feral Cats During The Dangerous Cold Spell:

-Leave out dry food. Wet food freezes. 

-Bring the cat into a warm room in your home, like a bathroom or the basement. You can release it on Friday when the weather warms up.

-Make a well-insulated, waterproof shelter with minimal air space to maximize warmth. A do-it-yourself shelter can be made with a plastic bin or a box. If you’re using a cardboard box, cut a 5-6 inch wide hole in the box to create an entrance and line the bottom with materials like styrofoam, garbage bags, or plentiful amounts of straw. You can also buy microwaveable surfaces for pets called Snuggle Safe Discs at PetSmart. Cover the exterior of the box with plastic garbage bags to protect it from the elements. Don’t use blankets or sheets because they retain moisture and freeze in the cold. “Cats don’t need a lot of space,” [Erica] Roewade [a colony caretaker who runs the feral cat rescue network group ‘Chicago Community Cats.’]

said. “They just need to squeeze their little body in there.” 

-Buy a pre-fabricated insulated shelter from Tree House, a cat rescue in Chicago. Shelters are priced between $25 and $35 and proceeds support homeless cats. 

-Bring the cat to a shelter, but only if it’s a stray, Roewade says. You can tell the difference because strays will usually rub against humans and display friendly behavior. 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.1.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighteen.  Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 5:08 PM, for 10h 00m 05s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 10% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1950, Curly Lambeau resigns as head coach of the Packers.

Recommended for reading in full:

Jackson Diehl writes Bernie Sanders is dead wrong about what’s happening in Venezuela:

Poorly informed leftists are peddling the notion that the political crisis in Venezuela is the product of yet another heavy-handed U.S.?“intervention” in Latin America. Sen.?Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) compares it to the U.S. support for coups in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

For the record, those regime changes happened in 1973, 1954, 1964 and 1965 — and what’s happening in Venezuela half a century later bears no resemblance to them. On the contrary, the movement to oust the disastrous populist regime founded by Hugo Chávez is being driven by Venezuela’s own neighbors, who until very recently had more help from Ottawa than from Washington. What we’re seeing, in an era of U.S. retreat and dysfunction, is a 21st-century model for diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere.

….

Then came a humanitarian catastrophe without precedent in the region’s modern history: shortages of food, medicine, power and even water that have driven 10?percent of Venezuelans — more than 3 million?people— to flee the country. Suddenly, chavismo did not look so benign in Bogota and Brasilia. Swamped by refugees, Colombia and Brazil, along with Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Panama, concluded that something had to be done to stem the implosion.

Fortunately, they had a vehicle. In August 2017, 11 Latin American nations and Canada formed the Lima Group to press for the return of democracy in Venezuela. Reflecting the long-standing U.S. approach, the Trump administration encouraged the alliance but did not join it. After Maduro staged a blatantly fraudulent election last May, the group met at the United Nations last September to consider its options. Panama, backed by Canada, pushed the idea that Maduro’s scheduled inauguration to a new term on Jan. 10 should become a rallying point.

  David Brooks writes Kamala Harris, Call-Out Star (“The toughest progressive we’ve seen in a long time”):

The more you learn about Kamala Harris, the more formidable she appears. She is an amazing amalgam of different elements — highly educated elite meritocrat, Oakland street fighter, crusading, rough-elbow prosecutor, canny machine pol and telegenic rhetorical brawler.

She is also probably the toughest and most hard-nosed progressive on the scene right now.

….

To beat Trump, I suspect Democrats will want unity. They won’t want somebody who essentially runs against the Democratic establishment (Bernie Sanders); they’ll want somebody who embodies it (Harris). They’ll want somebody who seems able to pulverize Trump in a debate (Harris).

….

But the larger issue may be temperament and toughness. Harris’s fearless, cut-the-crap rhetorical style will probably serve her well in this pugilistic political moment.

  The Ridiculous Way British Sailors Were Ordered to Stop German U-boats During WWI:

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Employment, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC, Wisconsin

Lost Homes and Land, All Over a Foxconn Fantasy

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Wisconsin State Senator Jon Erpenbach reminds that people lost homes and land over the Foxconn proposal, and communities spent far over one-hundred millions on an idea that was – to any reasonable, discerning person – doomed to fail. Doomed to fail: dozens of analyses and warnings from across America, of which merely one is Tim Culpan’s Wisconsin Is Finally Facing the Reality of Foxconn’s Plans (“The economics of building display panels in the state would never work. Any agreement was mostly a political exercise”).

Each and every person – including Whitewater’s public officials, business lobbyists, and local reporters – who kept pushing Foxconn is either disqualifyingly ignorant or disconcertingly mendacious. 

Now in Whitewater, the local private business lobby (the Greater Whitewater Committee) is enmeshed with the public Whitewater Community Development Authority (almost as though the public body were a private landlord’s plaything), and both have flacked Foxconn.

The public CDA and the private Greater Whitewater Committee (however conflicted in the way one imagines organizations in a small, one-mule southern town to be) have both pushed a ‘neighborhood preservation effort’ that seeks to preserve local single-family homes. Pushing single-family housing by stifling opportunities for new rental properties would seem to benefit the incumbent landlord who has a leading role in the Greater Whitewater Committee and the CDA, but it’s unlikely that residents in Whitewater are unfamiliar, generally, with others’ seeming motivations from self-interest and entitlement.

For all that concern about single-family homes in Whitewater, know this: these advocates of corporate welfare lifted not a finger, nor shed a single tear, for dozens of homeowners near the Foxconn site whose homes meant something to them.

There is no greatness, and never will be, for Whitewater or any city, in fantastic schemes of cronyism and corporate welfare like Foxconn.

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, and WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid.

Immigration, Trump

Does Trump Think Sicario: Day of the Soldado is a Documentary?

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Mary Papenfuss reports Rachel Maddow: Trump May Have Cooked Up ‘Taped Women’ From ‘Sicario’:

President Donald Trump has been obsessively repeating a horror tale of trafficked women in cars at the southern border, their mouths taped shut, so they “can’t even breathe.” The problem is that trafficked women and border officials apparently have no idea what he’s talking about. Now Rachel Maddow, along with some media outlets, believe it could be possible that Trump witnessed it with his very own eyes — on the violent movie “Sicario: Day of the Soldado.”

The film shows such a scene at the Mexican border, eerily similar to what Trump has described. There is also a scene of Muslim prayer rugs in the southern desert, which has also popped up in a Trump tweet. He has talked about the smugglers’ amazing cars, just like in the movie.

All are “plot points in the same movie — which is fiction,” Maddow emphasized Monday.

“Now in any normal  administration it would be insane to suggest … even joke about the president of the United States seeing stuff in a movie … and maybe thinking it was real — or at least real enough to justify an actual military deployment of thousands of active duty U.S. troops to the border,” she said.

Update: Quinn Owen and Matt Gutman report Fact Check: No evidence for Trump’s tales of duct-taped women, prayer rugs at border (“An internal administration inquiry turned up no evidence of Trump’s claim.”).

Trump’s own administration can’t find evidence of his claims; the theory that Trump’s lurid tales come from a movie is looking more likely by the minute.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.31.19

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of four below.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 5:07 PM, for 9h 57m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 16.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1950, Pres. Truman announces plans to develop a hydrogen bomb.  (Scientists successfully detonated an h-bomb two and a half years later.)

Recommended for reading in full:

 Tom Winter reports Mueller says Russians are using his discovery materials in disinformation effort:

Russians are using materials obtained from special counsel Robert Mueller’s office in a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the investigation into Moscow’s election interference, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

One or more people associated with the special counsel’s case against Russian hackers made statements last October claiming to have stolen discovery materials that were originally provided by Mueller to Concord Management, Mueller’s team said in court documents filed on Wednesday in the Russian troll farm case.

That discovery — evidence and documents traded between both sides of a lawsuit — appears to have been altered and disseminated as part of a disinformation campaign apparently aimed at discrediting the ongoing investigations in Russian interference in the U.S. political system, according to the documents.

Concord Management, a company owned by a Russian oligarch known as President Vladimir Putin’s “chef,” is one of three Russian entities that were accused by the special counsel last February of helping to mastermind the social media meddling into the 2016 election. Thirteen Russian citizens were also indicted and accused of taking part in the widespread effort.

According to the documents filed Wednesday, a Twitter account called @HackingRedstone tweeted: “We’ve got access to the Special Counsel Mueller’s probe database as we hacked Russian server with info from the Russian troll case Concord LLC v. Mueller. You can view all the files Mueller had about the IRA and Russian collusion. Enjoy the reading!”

The account has since been suspended.

  Pete Madden and Matthew Mosk report NRA says 2015 Moscow trip wasn’t ‘official.’ Emails, photos reveal gun group’s role:

The National Rifle Association made its first public attempt this week to distance itself from any formal involvement in a now infamous trip to Moscow undertaken by a group of its high-ranking members, but internal NRA emails and photos posted on social media reviewed by ABC News appear to show the organization was significantly involved in planning it.

Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has launched an investigation of the NRA and written a series of letters seeking “information and documentation” about the trip, disputed the NRA’s public attempt to distance itself from the trip.

….

Emails sent by NRA officials before the trip, as well as photos taken during the visit, offer greater detail about the organization’s role in arranging the excursion.

….

Other emails suggest that the NRA would pay for travel expenses for two delegation members and provide formal NRA “gifts” for the delegation to present to their Russian hosts.

  How Balloons Pop:

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Employment, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, Tony Evers, WEDC, Wisconsin

WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos Hopes You’re Stupid

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With the news that Foxconn plans to drop manufacturing at a plant that was supposed to hire thousands of workers, for which people lost their homes, and that was the centerpiece of Scott Walker’s corporate welfare and crony capitalism, Speaker Robin Vos blames…newly-elected Gov. Tony Evers.

Oh, brother: Vos must hope that Wisconsinites are stupid enough to believe that after a year of national economists’ criticism of the project as unworkable from the start (linking to one example of many), the failure of the effort rests on what happened at the ballot box since November.

No, and no again: economists of the left, center, and right all warned this was a bad deal, and doomed to fail.

Vos relies futilely on the prospect that Wisconsinites are too stupid or too ignorant to read serious publications outside the WISGOP media bubble. They aren’t like that; they’re knowledgeable.  (Actually, Evers never opposed the program, and did not seek to end it, or even the WEDC: “But Evers did not pledge to stop the company’s plans and has since backed off his plan to eliminate the jobs agency [WEDC] after Republican lawmakers passed new laws curbing his authority over the agency.”)

Update, 1.31.19: In less than 24 hours, WISGOP Speaker Vos is completely refuted in his attempt to blame Foxconn debacle on Gov. Evers:

Mark Hogan, CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., said Evers never sought to re-negotiate any element of the Foxconn project.

“I have been involved with the Foxconn project from day one and there never have been any side deals and the contract stands on its own,” Hogan said Thursday. “In addition, there have been no attempts by either the company or the Evers’ or Walker administrations to renegotiate WEDC’s contract.”

He said Evers and his administration “have done a very good job of reaching out to company officials and developing a relationship that will protect our taxpayers’ interests and at the same time, give Foxconn the ability to  be successful in Wisconsin.”

….

“All interactions to date with Governor Evers and his team have been constructive and we look forward to further discussions as we continue to invest in American talent and broaden the base of our investment within the State of Wisconsin,” the company [Foxconn] said.

By the way, look how weak Vos’s argument is:  under his reasoning, Foxconn was never a sure thing, but in fact a politically-inspired and sustained program that could disappear after an election.  Vos’s attack begs the conclusion that the whole program was politically contingent.  He’s inviting a dispositive reply, but either is too slow to see that he is, or hopes others are too slow to make a reasonable riposte.  Vos may be lacking, but most people are sharp and will see the weakness in his claim.

WISGOP Assembly Speaker Vos hopes that Wisconsinites are stupid, yet his dark hope is in vain.  He presents a laughably weak argument, but national economists long ago saw through this project, Wisconsinites saw through its key backer in November, and both will be remembered only with deserved derision.

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, and Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans.

 

 

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Employment, Foxconn, Government Spending, Local Government, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC

Foxconn Talks of Folding Wisconsin Manufacturing Plans

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No one who thought about Foxconn seriously would be surprised to read from a Reuters exclusive that Foxconn [is] reconsidering plans to make LCD panels at Wisconsin plant. The Taiwanese manufacturer has already broken its promises on the kind of panels it would build at the plant, and failed to meet even its low, first-year hiring goals.  Jess Macy Yu and Karl Plume now report that

Foxconn Technology Group is reconsidering plans to make advanced liquid crystal display panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin campus, and said it intends to hire mostly engineers and researchers rather than the manufacturing workforce the project originally promised.

….

Foxconn, which received controversial state and local incentives for the project, initially planned to manufacture advanced large screen displays for TVs and other consumer and professional products at the facility, which is under construction. It later said it would build smaller LCD screens instead.

Now, those plans may be scaled back or even shelved, Louis Woo, special assistant to Foxconn Chief Executive Terry Gou, told Reuters. He said the company was still evaluating options for Wisconsin, but cited the steep cost of making advanced TV screens in the United States, where labor expenses are comparatively high.

“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.,” he said in an interview. “We can’t compete.”

….

“In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment,” Woo said.

Earlier this month, Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple Inc., reiterated its intention to create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, but said it had slowed its pace of hiring. The company initially said it expected to employ about 5,200 people by the end of 2020; a company source said that figure now looks likely to be closer to 1,000 workers.

….

Rather than manufacturing LCD panels in the United States, Woo said it would be more profitable to make them in greater China and Japan, ship them to Mexico for final assembly, and import the finished product to the United States.

….

Currently, to qualify for the tax credits Foxconn must meet certain hiring and capital investment goals. It fell short of the employment goal in 2018 – hiring 178 full-time jobs rather than the 260 targeted – failing to earn a tax credit of up to $9.5 million.

The company may be prepared to walk away from future incentives if it is unable to meet Wisconsin’s job creation and capital investment requirements, according to the source familiar with the matter.

Each and every person – including Whitewater’s public officials, business lobbyists, and local reporters – who kept pushing Foxconn is either disqualifyingly ignorant or disconcertingly mendacious. 

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, and Foxconn Couldn’t Even Meet Its Low First-Year Goal.

 

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.30.19

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twelve below, and much colder wind chill temperatures.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 5:05 PM, for 9h 55m 20s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 24.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1948, an assassin kills Gandhi.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Conservative Michael Gerson writes Trump is a fraud:

His reputation as a self-made billionaire lies in ruins. An extensive New York Times article on Trump’s wealth found a bassinet millionaire, consistently bailed out of bad bets, who dodged gift taxes, milked his empire for cash and cultivated a deceptive image of business brilliance. And special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation may reveal serious corruption and perjury in cataloguing Trump’s 30-year panting desire to sell his brand in Russia.

And who can take Trump seriously as a manager? He has a talent for weeding out the talented and responsible. He is a world-class nepotist. He is incapable of delegation or of taking conflicting advice. He is unreliable in dealing with his allies. He is capable of taking several conflicting policy views on the same topic — be it health care, or the “dreamers,” or gun control — in a matter of days or hours. He often has no clear goals. He has no attention span and is consistently ignorant of details. He is prone to vicious and public abuse of rivals and of employees. Try to put that profile up on LinkedIn.

Those 37 percent who approve of Trump’s performance may point to the state of the economy or the composition of the Supreme Court. They may be impressed by his destruction of norms or enthused by his promotion of exclusion. They may want a president who speaks his mind, even when it is hateful gibberish. They may want a president who is an institutional arsonist, even if the result is mere destruction.

….

We have plumbed the shallows of his boasts. They are refuted lies. And whatever else the president may be, he is a fraud.

  Chuck Rosenberg writes Roger Stone’s Arrest Was Appropriate, Not Heavy-Handed:

Read, for instance, page 20 of the indictment, where prosecutors note that Stone emailed one witness and called him a “rat” and a “stoolie” and threatened to take that witness’s dog away from him. In another email that same day to that same witness, according to the indictment, Stone wrote “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die [expletive].”

Law enforcement simply does not hand a summons to someone who threatens to kill a witness and trust that person to act responsibly with it.  No conscientious prosecutor would think a summons appropriate there, or think that a threat to kill a witness is simply what targets of grand jury investigations routinely do.

The witness tampering alleged here is more than just someone asking another, “pretty please,” to lie.  Rather, it includes a death threat against a witness:  “Prepare to die [expletive].”

  Bringing a fossil to life by reverse-engineering locomotion:

Authoritarianism, Federal Government, Law, Race, Trump

Undermining His Own Case for a National Emergency

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Elizabeth Goitein observes Trump Is Destroying His Own Case for a National Emergency (“By waiting for Congress to act, the president is undermining the legal basis for any declaration”):

Here’s how the legal process for emergency powers works: Under the National Emergencies Act, passed by Congress in 1976, the president has broad discretion to declare a national emergency. Upon issuing the declaration, he gains access to special authorities provided in 123 provisions of law that have been enacted over many decades. These laws authorize presidential action across all areas of government, from military deployment to agricultural exports to energy production. Like an advance medical directive, in which a patient specifies actions a doctor may take in a range of extreme situations when the patient cannot make her wishes known, they represent Congress’s best guess as to what powers a president might need in a crisis that is unfolding too quickly for Congress to respond.

As this legal framework makes clear, emergency powers are not a license for the president to sidestep Congress. To the contrary: The only powers the president can access during a national emergency are those Congress has granted. However potent some of these powers might be, the source of the president’s authority in all cases remains a legislative delegation—one that is granted in advance because true emergencies require immediate action. A president using emergency powers to thwart Congress’s will, in a situation where Congress has had ample time to express it, is like a doctor relying on an advance directive to deny life-saving treatment to a patient who is conscious and clearly asking to be saved.

Of course, Trump’s hesitation also belies his claim that there is an emergency at the border. Presidents don’t dawdle in the face of real emergencies. President George W. Bush did not spend weeks scratching his head about whether to issue an emergency declaration after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. But even if a real crisis existed, emergency powers are designed for situations in which Congress has no time to act. If Congress does have time, then there is no justification for bypassing the ordinary legislative process.

Goitein’s right, if one looks at this – as one should – as a legal matter (as no one is above the law).  Trump, however, doesn’t respect the law.  It seems more likely that Trump’s wants a herrenvolk government for America, and that his desires rest on a blood and soil policy.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.29.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of two.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 5:04 PM, for 9h 53m 00s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 33.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1865, the 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery fights a skirmish at the Combahee River on the coast of South Carolina, and the 3rd Wisconsin Infantry fights another one 50 miles west at Robertsville, South Carolina.

Recommended for reading in full:

Yian Mui reports The government shutdown cost the economy $11 billion, including a permanent $3 billion loss, Congressional Budget Office says:

“Among those who experienced the largest and most direct negative effects are federal workers who faced delayed compensation and private-sector entities that lost business,” the report said. “Some of those private-sector entities will never recoup that lost income.”

  Michael Scherer and Scott Clement report Democrats’ 2020 presidential contest is wide open as danger mounts for Trump, new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows:

A 56 percent majority of all Americans say they would “definitely not vote for him” should Trump become the Republican nominee, while 14 percent say they would consider voting for him and 28 percent would definitely vote for him. Majorities of independents (59 percent), women (64 percent) and suburbanites (56 percent) rule out supporting Trump for a second term.

….

While 75 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents approve of Trump’s performance in office when asked separately, nearly 1 in 3 say they would like to nominate someone other than Trump to be the party’s candidate for president.

 Patrick Marley reports Gov. Tony Evers to use private attorneys after AG declines to defend lame-duck laws:

Attorney General Josh Kaul has declined to represent Gov. Tony Evers in a suit over lame-duck laws limiting their powers, prompting Evers to spend up to $50,000 of taxpayer money on private attorneys.

The move comes soon after Republican lawmakers approved billing taxpayers for their own private attorneys in the legal fight. They have not said what firm they plan to use.

The Democratic governor selected the Madison firm Pines Bach to represent him last week after Kaul told Evers he couldn’t represent him because of a conflict of interest.

….

Kaul sent Evers a letter Jan. 18 telling him he would not represent him because one of the lame-duck laws in question curbed the power of Kaul’s Department of Justice.

“DOJ has a direct and substantial interest in this case that is in conflict with the defense of this case,” the Democratic attorney general wrote.

….

GOP lawmakers recently agreed to pay the Chicago firm Bartlit Beck up to $840,000 to represent them in a lawsuit over legislative maps they drew in 2011. Including previous expenses, those maps and the lawsuits they spawned are on track to cost taxpayers $3.5 million.

(The contrast between the WISGOP-controlled Assembly’s use of public money and Evers’s use of private money is stark.)

  LG’s New TV Rolls Itself Up When You’re Not Watching:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.28.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see snow in the morning and a high of twenty-five.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 5:03 PM, for 9h 50m 43s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 43.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart shortly after liftoff, killing all seven members of the crew.

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Colten Bartholomew of the Lacrosse Tribune reports Tribune investigation: UW-Whitewater defensive schemes sent to UW-La Crosse football:

An email containing eight PowerPoint presentations that detail the Warhawks’ defensive principles, coverage rules and alignments against a number of opponents’ formations was sent to UW-L coach Mike Schmidt on Aug. 22 and sent from Schmidt to UW-L offensive coaches on Sept. 17.

The email containing these PowerPoint files was sent to the Tribune as part of an open records request into the reassignment and eventual resignation of former La Crosse offensive coordinator Luke Bengtson.

The five-times-forwarded email chain started with craigsmith0306@gmail.com — Craig Smith was the former offensive coordinator at UW-Whitewater, whose contract wasn’t renewed after the 2017 season. The Tribune confirmed it was the account of that Craig Smith via email.

The account emailed the PowerPoint documents to edmondsnelson@gmail.com, which forwarded it to NEdmonds@dbq.edu, the University of Dubuque account of Nelson Edmonds, the dean of student engagement and services and a former assistant coach at Whitewater. Edmonds forwarded it to the university email of Stan Zweifel, the Spartans football coach, who then forwarded it to Schmidt.

The Tribune confirmed that the PowerPoint documents were accurate and featured code words that pertained to Whitewater schemes this season.

Dubuque lost to Whitewater 38-6 in the season opener, and La Crosse fell 30-7 in the first WIAC game of the season.

 Craig Gilbert writes Latest polling data point to major re-election challenges for Trump in Wisconsin:

In 10 Marquette polls since Trump took office, his approval rating has never topped 47 percent. The share of voters who disapprove of him has equaled or exceeded 50 percent in the past nine polls dating back to June 2017.

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Among Republicans, 58 percent said they would definitely vote for Trump, 22 percent said they would probably vote for Trump, 6 percent said they would probably vote for someone else and 10 percent said they would definitely vote for someone else. That is a party with a few cracks in it. Fewer than six in 10 GOP voters say they are certain they would support the Trump in the next election.

Among Democrats, there isn’t much doubt: None said they would definitely vote for Trump, 1 percent said they would probably vote for Trump, 4 percent said they would probably vote for someone else and 95 percent said they would definitely vote for someone else.

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The intensity of public opinion matters a lot in politics and it is not on Trump’s side: 30 percent of Wisconsin voters “strongly” approve of him and 46 percent “strongly” disapprove.

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