Debbie Ocean (Sandra Bullock) gathers an all-female crew to pull off an impossible heist at New York’s starstudded annual Met Gala. Including Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Mindy Kaling, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Dakota Fanning, and Marlo Thomas.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 85.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Library Board’s Personnel Committee meets at 5 PM today.
Wisconsin is on track to lose more dairy farms this year than in any year since at least 2003, according to state Agriculture Department figures for dairy producer licenses.
As of Nov. 1, the dairy state had lost 660 cow herds from a year earlier, and the number of herds was down nearly 49 percent from 15 years ago. The number of dairy cows in Wisconsin has remained steady even as the number of farms has fallen. That’s because the remaining dairy operations are, in many cases, much bigger. But even some of the bigger farms have not survived.
President Trump says he wants to get serious about tackling the deficit. But he also wants to spend big on infrastructure, slash taxes for the middle class and build a Mexican border wall. He won’t allow cuts to Social Security or Medicare. And he is demanding a mostly hands-off approach to military funding.
In other words, the president isn’t actually serious about tackling the deficit. Trump’s conflicting instincts on the matter are laid bare in a Sunday report from The Post’s Josh Dawsey and Damian Paletta. The takeaway: The red ink exploding on his watch has spooked the president — just not enough to force the sort of hard choices that will rein it in.
The Kremlin has for years bankrolled an array of pro-Russian breakaway states within the former Soviet republics of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. For Moscow, the goals could not be bigger — rebuilding Russia’s influence and countering the region’s drift toward the West.
The network of semi-states has become so important for Russia that an off-the-grid financial system now ties some of them together, bridging hundreds of miles and circumventing international sanctions.
An infestation of dots, thousands of them, represent oil wells in the Permian basin of West Texas and a slice of New Mexico. In less than a decade, U.S. companies have drilled 114,000. Many of them would turn a profit even with crude prices as low as $30 a barrel.
OPEC’s bad dream only deepens next year, when Permian producers expect to iron out distribution snags that will add three pipelines and as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-six, with snowfall in the afternoon and evening. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 24m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 92.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Fourteen Wisconsin units — seven Wisconsin Infantry regiments and seven Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries — participated in breaking the siege at Chattanooga.
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. — Two years ago, before Donald Trump was elected, Anna Rybicki would not have been seated at the dining room table at her home on Rust Street, devising a school reform strategy with five allies. She would not have attended a three-day community organizing workshop or made a pitch to the school board.
“It has changed my life, him getting elected,” said Rybicki, 39, a lawyer who has been a stay-at-home mother since 2011. “I never cried; I mobilized. That’s what felt good to me. I went to every meeting of everything.”
Since the eruption of nationwide anti-Trump protests in January 2017, a central question has been whether the energy would persist. The signs in Wisconsin so far have been positive for Democrats: They unexpectedly won a state Supreme Court race in April and flipped a reliably Republican state Senate seat in June. On Nov. 6, they defeated GOP Gov. Scott Walker for the first time in four tries. The statewide turnout percentage was among the highest in the country.
Since 2013, when the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) began to let some captive deer facilities with infected animals continue operating, additional cases of CWD have developed within those facilities, according to interviews and documents obtained under the state’s Open Records Law.
“After Korobov did not meet with Putin at the hundredth anniversary ceremony, I became curious what was going on with the head of GRU,” Kanev told The Daily Beast. The general must have been under a lot of pressure, since his agency was accused of “complete incompetence” and “boundless sloppiness,”
Mr. Trump’s use of tariffs as a cudgel to revitalize manufacturing in the United States is forcing changes across large multinational companies, though they may not always be the changes the president seeks. Harley-Davidson and Micron are moving production to factories in Europe or parts of Asia, while other companies have put off expansion plans amid trade uncertainty.
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 25m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
More than a third of top forecasters believe the U.S. economy will enter a recession in 2020; and a new Reuters poll of economists found they think the probability of a recession in the next two years is rising, to a median 35 percent. (The Fed projects GDP will slow to 2.5 percent next year, a 2 percent in 2020, before slipping to 1.8 percent in the longer run.)
For years, the state’s massive congressional delegation was highly competitive, but not anymore. Of 53 House seats, Democrats now hold at least 45.
….
The GOP’s retreat in California long predated Trump, but there’s no question he has intensified and accelerated it. In the past two years, California House Republicans, under pressure from then–Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, compounded their risk by voting with Trump more reliably than their Republican counterparts in other blue-leaning coastal states such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
“They bet on Trump and they bet wrong,” says John J. Pitney, a Claremont McKenna University political scientist and former aide at the Republican National Committee.
When a former Trump campaign adviser tried defending Hyde-Smith [a GOP candidate with a love for things Confederate] by claiming this was all part of “the outrage culture,” Carpenter countered, “It’s wrong when someone says something so provocative that you blame the people who are offended.” She bluntly declared, “If Republicans want to quit being accused of being racist, they have to stop saying racist things.”
A recent den study conducted by Panthera’s Teton Cougar Project analyzed the comings and goings of hard-working and affectionate mountain lion mothers using motion-triggered video cameras and collars that track the cats’ location using GPS. They learned new details about kittens’ lives inside the den and how intensely their mothers care for them.Scientists hope the insights—and awwww-inspiring video clips—might help protect vulnerable kittens from hunting.
Mountain lions are also called cougars, pumas, and catamounts — these all refer to the same cat species, Puma concolor. Based on the study’s observations, after giving birth, a typical mountain lion mother stays tucked into her den with her litter of up to five kittens for their first ten days. She purrs almost constantly to communicate with her babies, whose eyes open at about a week old. (See more video from inside a mountain lion family.)
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 27m 40s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1876, William M. “Boss” Tweed is returned to the United States after his escape to Spain from the Ludlow Street Jail, where he had been confined following his failure to make bail; Tweed died in prison after his return to New York. (The caption on the embedded cartoon: “As long as I count the Votes, what are you going to do about it?”)
As of noon on Wednesday, Democratic House candidates won 58,990,609 votes while their Republican counterparts pulled in 50,304,975. That means that, so far, Democrats won 53.1 percent of all votes counted while Republicans earned 45.2 percent.
Nearly 60 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling race relations, according to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll. The only group that gives him high marks are Republicans, with 76 percent. White men are the next highest, with half approving of Trump’s handling of race relations.
The lawyer-turned-Fox News host mounted an ill-fated run for the U.S. Senate in 2006, when she vied for the Republican nomination to challenge then-Sen. Hillary Clinton before dropping out after just four months. But in that brief period, Pirro’s campaign managed to rack up nearly $600,000 in debts to its campaign vendors.
Candidates can’t dissolve their campaign committees until all their debts are repaid, or a plan is put in place to do so. As a result, Pirro’s campaign remains active to this day. But the status of its huge campaign debts isn’t clear, because the committee stopped filing financial reports with the Federal Election Commission nearly seven years ago.
Through his foundations, Koch is bankrolling some very pro-Trump outlets. In 2017, the Charles Koch Foundation gave the Daily Caller News Foundation $960,000, while the Charles Koch Institute added $20,000. The previous year, the two nonprofits combined to give a slightly smaller amount, $958,000, but this total made up 83 percent of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s annual budget. The foundation, which produces much of the content for The Daily Caller website, has not yet released its 2017 tax form, so its revenues for last year are unknown.
Thanksgiving in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-six. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, for 9h 29m 28s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Incoming Democratic Gov. Tony Evers will need to find about $1.1 billion to give state agencies all they requested to pay for schools, prisons, Medicaid and other government operations over the next two years.
That’s according to a new report from Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s administration.
(Walker came into office complaining about a structural deficit, and eight years of redistribution in favor of his priorities and allies later, all those ‘bold reforms’ leave the state with a structural deficit.)
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
(Consider how dense Trump is: he accuses the judiciary of bias, and provokes the chief justice. If Trump should be right, and courts are biased, then by Trump’s own theory he’s provoked a man who now has an incentive to side against Trump’s administration. Trump would be better off if he should prove wrong about all this.)
In a bizarre, inaccurate and rambling statement — one offering a good reminder why Twitter has character limits — President Trump whitewashed the Saudi government’s brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In the process, the president maligned a good and innocent man, tarring Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” — a label the Saudis themselves have not used publicly — while proclaiming to the world that Trump’s relationship with Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old crown prince was too important to risk over the murder of a journalist. Whatever objections people may have to our turning a blind eye to Khashoggi’s assassination, the president argued, they do not outweigh the (grossly inflated) revenue we can expect from U.S.-Saudi arms deals.
Big Law — a nexus of power where partners are often plucked for top government posts — has emerged as a fierce, and perhaps unexpected, antagonist to President Trump’s immigration agenda. While pro bono work is nothing new, over the past two years, major law firms have become more vocal and visible in pushing back against the administration’s policies.
The Journal Sentinel has experienced astonishing declines in subscribers, truly large numbers that show serious trouble for the paper (and for smaller papers nearby).
Gannett, like a number of other newspaper companies, has more than a third of its print subscribers ages 70 or above in many markets. Most read in print; digital is a second and lesser option. (E-edition readers, who essentially get the print paper in digital form, will also be impacted by this decision.) Those subscribers, at Gannett and elsewhere, have seen their subscription rates hiked again and again, raised to the very limits of econometric modeling.
….
In Des Moines, the Register now sells 87,000 Sunday and 48,000 daily print copies. Two short years ago, those numbers stood at 122,000 and 66,000. That’s a drop of more than 27 percent in 24 months. Digital subscriptions have increased over that same period — but only from 4,100 to 6,000.
….
Or look at a smaller market: The Reno Gazette-Journal now sells 22,000 Sunday and 16,000 daily print copies. Two years ago, those numbers were 31,000 and 24,000. Those are declines of 24 percent and 33 percent. Digital subscriptions have climbed from 1,500 to 2,500 over the same period.
Public numbers. These are large print declines, but the only reason one can be sure of them is that Gannett has to report them in a financial filing; failure to do so would risk both government and shareholder actions.
Third-party information on circulation often lags years behind these up-to-date numbers. For example, Wikipedia still lists – as of this post – a daily circulation of 207,000 for the JS, and the Mondo Times lists a figure of 185,000. The accurate current number is under 100,000.
Small private companies. With small private-company newspapers, as in our area, only God and their publishers can be sure of their true circulation numbers.
It strains believability when a local, afternoon newspaper contends that its print numbers are up. (Afternoon editions are considered the weakest offering by time of day, and are defunct in most cities.)
Digital. Ken Doctor’s reporting on print versus digital numbers reveals how hard it is for old print publications to make the switch to digital: print numbers are declining steeply, but digital offerings from these print publications are mostly unwanted, with relatively few takers.
For a website like this one, unlike nearby newspapers in almost certain (but unacknowledged) decline and where those papers have dim prospects for digital, the best course is simply a daily commitment to first principles, diligently applied.
Before and after the recent election, solid assessments on Foxconn came to press, and they confirm how irrational and wasteful is that project. Earlier this year, the local business lobby (the Greater Whitewater Committee) invited the state capitalist stooge official overseeing the project to a dinner in Whitewater. I’ve no idea whether Matt Moroney will show up for a second dinner, but if they can’t book his return, there are sure to be infomercial salesmen, time-share brokers, or skid row bums who would be both available and seamless replacements.
The Tuesday after Election Day was when Amazon announced the grand prize winners of the largest economic development jackpot in American history: New York, Virginia and Tennessee would gain 55,000 high-paying Amazon jobs in exchange for more than $2.4 billion in state subsidies. It didn’t take long for Wisconsin taxpayers to realize exactly what Amazon’s announcement meant for them. They’d been taken to the cleaners by Walker, Donald Trump and Terry Gou, Foxconn’s billionaire chairman. Walker’s deal with Foxconn provides $4 billion in state and local taxpayer subsidies in exchange for an actual guarantee of only 3,000 jobs paying an average of $53,000 a year in a Mount Pleasant electronics plant.
Compare that to the enormous number of higher-paying jobs costing far less for the winners of the great Amazon lottery. Amazon split 50,000 headquarters jobs averaging $150,000 a year, with 25,000 going to New York (which bid $1.5 billion in direct state subsidies) and 25,000 to Virginia (bidding only $573 million in direct subsidies plus infrastructure, transportation and educational improvements). Nashville, Tenn., was a surprise last-minute addition, winning an Amazon operations center providing 5,000 new jobs in exchange for $102 million in state subsidies.
Dismal as that is, the estimate relies on the most optimistic suite of conditions, including the astonishingly hopeful assumption that all the 13,000 workers would reside in Wisconsin. They won’t; the state line with Illinois is less than 20 miles away, and local consulting firm Baker Tilly estimates that as many as half the original 3,000 workers will live in Illinois. The legislature’s study also conveniently failed to take into account the appropriate time value of money, which means they overestimated the future value of the investment.
Neither of these are casual errors. Adjust for more pessimistic assumptions, and the breakeven date for taxpayers on a $3 billion Foxconn deal moves out several hundred years. It is obviously even worse if the subsidy is $4.8 billion.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 6:55 AM and sunset 4:26 PM, for 9h 31m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to “play back” recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.[15] He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a ‘talking-machine’ can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878 as US Patent 200,521). “In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: “Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?” The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph…”[16]
The City of Whitewater’s Vimeo page now has a copy of the school board meeting of last night. (For more about the cable access programming that took the place of the live meeting Monday night, seeAfter the Referendum.) The meeting had a significant agenda, and the session is likely worth watching more than once.
In response to an email last night and two more today, here are some quick thoughts on the school district and Whitewater.
The gist of these messages is similar: was support for the referendum a good idea, in light of district report cards, and the airing of a Shirley Temple movie (The Little Princess, Twentieth Century Fox, 1939) instead of the school board meeting?
Support. Support for an operational referendum isn’t a gift to officials; it is a preventative against the disorder that would result from cuts to ordinary programming. Advocating for the referendum (as I did) wasn’t a bargain with this district administrator, this budget director, or this school board. I have nothing to offer government; they have nothing I want.
The most important referendum result is the avoidance of disorder, of the constant need for bailing buckets to keep the district afloat. Avoiding that prospect is gain for students more than anyone.
(A distant) second, however, is this: without a large project to draw attention, those considering district policies and direction now have a clear field for the next four years’ time. Politics is now behind us, with instead a vast expanse of policy discussion ahead.
Maneuver & Attrition. Over these years, this characteristic of officials in Whitewater stands out: they use mostly maneuver (moving this way or that at the moment) to accomplish their goals. A project, a program, a press release, a referendum – they are all maneuvers, movements at the moment. Sometimes big, sometimes small, but all are simply discrete acts.
Good policy and good principle, by contrast, work slowly, and are felt by power of attrition, by the gradual wearing away of lesser alternatives. Other than a reply to a specific act of misconduct, officials’ use of maneuver doesn’t require a quick response.
So, about the report cards and that movie… Those writing will excuse me if I do not feel deterred. First, one can consider the report cards deliberately, carefully, in context. The key measure will be which schools close gaps, and which do not. Especially in an economically challenged community, gap-closing is an individual and community good.
Second, it does matter whether this city and this school district will televise board meetings properly, but in response to emailers’ concerns, one can say that it doesn’t matter whether meetings are avoided out of indifference, any more than it matters whether showing an old film instead of a meeting is an intentional taunt. That’s seeing all this wrongly. Current practice is inadequate; what matters is a permanent solution that doesn’t allow for repeated gaps.
If Central Office, City Hall, or Hyer Hall could defeat open government so easily, and prevail so decisively, then we’d still have the officials we did a decade ago.
They can’t; we don’t.
Our school district has as its motto ‘every graduate an engaged lifelong learner.’ It would make a fine motto for any school. An engaged, lifelong learner should be able to consider an event with equanimity, learn from it, and responding effectively thereafter.
