This Wednesday, December 19th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Left Hand of God @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
The Left Hand of God (Drama/Inspirational)
Wednesday, December 19, 12:30 pm
Rated PG. 1 hour, 27 min. (1955)
In 1947, at a remote Catholic mission in China, arrives a man in priestly robes: the long-awaited “Father O’Shea” (Humphrey Bogart). Though seemingly uncomfortable with his priestly duties, Father O’Shea’s tough tactics prove very successful in the Seven Villages, as around them post-World War 2 China disintegrates into civil war and revolution. But Father O’Shea has a personal secret, and his friendship with the mission nurse (Gene Tierney) also seems to be taking on an unpriestly tone. Also stars Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, and Agnes Moorehead. This beautiful, under-spoken film is rarely seen on TV.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:22 PM, for 9h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 60.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1733, the Sons of Liberty in Boston protest through a Boston Tea Party:
While Samuel Adams tried to reassert control of the meeting, people poured out of the Old South Meeting House to prepare to take action. In some cases, this involved donning what may have been elaborately prepared Mohawk costumes.[65] While disguising their individual faces was imperative, because of the illegality of their protest, dressing as Mohawk warriors was a specific and symbolic choice. It showed that the Sons of Liberty identified with America, over their official status as subjects of Great Britain.[66]
That evening, a group of 30 to 130 men, some dressed in the Mohawk warrior disguises, boarded the three vessels and, over the course of three hours, dumped all 342 chests of tea into the water.[67] The precise location of the Griffin’s Wharf site of the Tea Party has been subject to prolonged uncertainty; a comprehensive study[68] places it near the foot of Hutchinson Street (today’s Pearl Street).
They were collateral damage as Donald J. Trump and his siblings dodged inheritance taxes and gained control of their father’s fortune: thousands of renters in an empire of unassuming red-brick buildings scattered across Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Those buildings have been home to generations of strivers, municipal workers and newly arrived immigrants. When their regulated rents started rising more quickly in the 1990s, many tenants had no idea why. Some heard that the Trump family had spent millions on building improvements, but they remained suspicious.
“I’ve always thought there was something strange going on,” said Jack Leitner, who has lived in the Beach Haven Apartments in Coney Island, Brooklyn, for more than two decades. “But you have to have proof, and it’s an uphill battle.”
As it turned out, a hidden scam lurked behind the mysterious increases. In October, a New York Times investigation into the origins of Mr. Trump’s wealth revealed, among its findings, that the future president and his siblings set up a phony business to pad the cost of nearly everything their father, the legendary builder Fred C. Trump, purchased for his buildings. The Trump children split that extra money.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 02m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1791, the Bill of Rights is ratified, with proposed articles of amendment Three through Twelve becoming Amendments One through Ten of the Constitution.
Recommended for reading in full:
Libby Nelson writes of Gov. Walker’s approval in full of lame-duck legislation, describing it as Scott Walker’s revenge:
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed bills on Friday that take power away from Wisconsin’s new governor, a Democrat, and give it to Republican lawmakers in the statehouse. Vox / Tara Golshan
The bills cut down on early voting hours and will make it harder for Gov.-elect Tony Evers to keep some of his campaign promises — including withdrawing Wisconsin from an Affordable Care Act lawsuit and eliminating work requirements for Medicaid. NBC / Dartunorro Clark
The state legislature, controlled by Republicans, passed the bills in a special lame-duck session to get the legislation through before Evers takes office in January. NYT / Mitch Smith and Monica Davey
But the bills were months in the making, plotted out so that Republicans could shore up their policy changes even if Democrats won in November. NYT / Mitch Smith, John Eligon, and Monica Davey
Progressive groups are already planning to file a lawsuit against the bills. AP
In Michigan, Republicans are trying to follow in Wisconsin’s path — but it’s not clear if Gov. Rick Snyder will go along. Detroit News / Jonathan Oosting
For scholars of democracy, these are scary developments. Democracy relies on the peaceful transition of power and elected officials’ willingness to accept the legitimacy of elections. Lame-duck power grabs challenge both. Vox / Zack Beauchamp
In July 2008, Donald Trump undertook one of his most infamous transactions. He sold a mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev,Russian oligarch and billionaire. Trump had purchased it four years earlier for $41.35 million. The sale price was nearly $54 million more than Trump had paid for the property, even though he had made only modest improvements in it.
….
Five years after the sale, when the economy had made a significant recovery, Palm Beach County appraised the house for just $59.8 million. In other words, despite an actual recorded sale of $95 million and despite the economic recovery, the county determined that it was worth $35 million less than what Rybolovlev had paid five years earlier.
….
There must have been another reason — a reason to give Trump tens of millions of dollars with no expectation of a financial return. One possibility is that Russian leader Vladimir Putin saw an opportunity to exploit Trump’s financial problems to obtain his loyalty and indebtedness.
If you can remember back to Kelly’s appointment, six thousand years ago in 2017, the event was met with hopefulness bordering on fan fiction. “The kind of discipline he’s going to bring is important,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) told CNN. “He will bring some plain-spoken discipline,” The Washington Post offered. It quoted an anonymous friend of Kelly’s who heralded the appointment as “the end of the chaos.” He would be — as Washington’s most favored way of describing non-Trumpish White House employees would have it — the adult in the room.
….
Amid tumult and partisanship, Kelly was appointed, and here was an upstanding father-figure for us all, ready to take on rancor, sloppiness and general ineptitude. He could fix things. He had epaulets.
As his tenure progressed, of course, he couldn’t bring discipline. Nobody could. There’s simply no way to enforce structure on a commander in chief who apparently abhors it.
And as Kelly’s tenure progressed, it also became clear that he couldn’t bring an end to rancor and controversy either. Because, it turns out, he brought controversy with him.
Yes: supposed maturity means nothing without principle, and principle requires reading, observation, and reasoning that mere age does not assure.
Years are only meaningful for policymakers if they produce and then sustain sound judgment.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 41.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Here’s the flaw in Trump’s reasoning. If you know something is illegal and then you do it thru a lawyer, that doesn’t excuse you. Otherwise every mobster would do what Trump did here.
@realDonald Trump: I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called “advice of counsel,” and a lawyer has great liability if a mistake is made. That is why they get paid. Despite that many campaign finance lawyers have strongly……
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee has made “quite a few referrals” to special counsel Robert Mueller of cases where witnesses questioned in the panel’s Russia probe were suspected of lying, adding he expects there will be more.
“We’ve made quite a few referrals,” Burr, who chairs the Senate panel, told The Hill on Thursday afternoon. “I won’t get into the numbers, but where we have found criminality, we have made those referrals, and I’m sure that they’re not the last.”
The dossier is, quite simply and by design, raw reporting, not a finished intelligence product.
….
With that in mind, we thought it would be worthwhile to look back at the dossier and to assess, to the extent possible, how the substance of Steele’s reporting holds up over time. In this effort, we considered only information in the public domain from trustworthy and official government sources, including documents released by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office in connection with the criminal cases brought against Paul Manafort, the 12 Russian intelligence officers, the Internet Research Agency trolling operation and associated entities, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos. We also considered the draft statement of offense released by author Jerome Corsi, a memorandum released by House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Adam Schiff related to the Carter Page FISA applications and admissions directly from certain speakers.
These materials buttress some of Steele’s reporting, both specifically and thematically. The dossier holds up well over time, and none of it, to our knowledge, has been disproven.
(I’ve not spent much time thinking about the Steele Dossier, but Grant & Rosenberg have published a serious review worth reading and pondering.)
Over the last ten years, while Wisconsin and America recovered from the Great Recession, in Whitewater poverty among families with children actually increased.
Afterward, most parts of America saw recovery, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, but recovery by either definition. That’s why for most Wisconsinites and most Americans, the new U.S. Census data released last Thursday show reductions in their communities’ levels of poverty. SeeCensus: Wisconsin incomes up, poverty down. That makes sense – the further in time from the recession, the greater the time for recovery.
The five year period from 2013 to 2017 should look better for families’ prospects than the five year period from 2008-2012 (part of which was during the Great Recession).
For Whitewater, however, that’s not true – poverty among families with related children shows an increase:
Students. Although there has been an increase in the student population over the period from 2008 to 2017, these data do not reflect that increase – these are families and families with related children under eighteen (or even five years of age) within Whitewater.
Data. These data are from the same methods applied to other communities; most of those communities show improvements against poverty, but rural communities in our area are notably weaker. Although smaller communities will have greater margins of error in data collection, cities of a similar size beyond our area have lower family poverty levels than Whitewater using the same data collection methods. (The same federal bureau, the United States Census Bureau, is reporting all these results.)
Situations. I don’t write from personal deprivation or want; by any measure, I’ve been fortunate and privileged.
More significantly, however one looks at this data, they reveal to us (as our own eyes should, too) that we live in a city with many struggling neighbors.
One should define struggling for it means: hunger, threadbare garments, and dilapidated homes (sometimes unheated or unelectrified).
Boosterism and babbittry (and endless press releases of supposed success through big-ticket projects and junk capital catalyst programs) in Whitewater have been worse than false – they have been morally and ethically perverse diversions from actual needs.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-nine. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 03m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Charles Dunst and Krishnadev Calamur report Trump Moves to Deport Vietnam War Refugees:
The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.
This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.
….
Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.
TV Martí, which aims broadcasts at Cuba, aired a segment in May that called the financier and Democratic donor George Soros, a longtime opponent of authoritarianism, “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals.”
….
Mr. Trump’s nominee as chief executive of the global government media agency is Michael Pack, who runs a conservative filmmaking business out of his house in suburban Washington. He declined to be interviewed.
Mr. Pack would join a couple of other Trump loyalists in the operation who some employees say have already shown a clear political tilt in their approach to broadcasting. Among those working in the Cuba office, for example, is Jeffrey Shapiro, a former Breitbart News writer who played a prominent role in a politically charged battle over the agency’s direction this year. Mr. Shapiro, an acolyte of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this article.
AMI, National Enquirer’s parent company, admitted it made $150,000 Cohen payment “in concert” with “a candidate’s presidential campaign” in order to “ensure that the woman did not publicize damaging allegations about the candidate before” 2016 election.
Trump’s 2016 campaign was one of lies and fraud, using foreign and domestic operatives to deceive the public and enrich himself.
The was an armed robbery in Whitewater this week. Robbery is wrong and armed robbery especially so. There’s neither justification nor excuse for the crime.
Radio station WFAW reported the crime in a straightforward way, but the Daily Union on Facebook crudely described the suspects not as black males (as would be conventional) but rather as male blacks. (Obvious point: there are probably people at the DU who don’t even understand the difference between the two descriptions.)
I don’t know, and so am not contending, that the awkward description is intentionally bigoted; it’s enough to know that at these local newspapers, and at local institutions, there’s often a weak staff that receives little or no training and oversight. Workers with limited still and narrow perspectives are hired and then left to their own limitations.
Genuine mentoring (rather than a press release about mentoring) is deficient in all these small rural towns. If the top level’s weak (and it sometimes is), one can guess that’s what’s below is often weaker still.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with morning flurries and a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 04m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 24.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM, the CDA Board at 5:30 PM, and there is a scheduled Community Meeting for the Lakes Drawdown Project at 6 PM.
Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen the Mona Lisa by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet, and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed.
Peter O’Rourke’s departure marks an unceremonious fall for a Trump loyalist once seen as a rising star at VA, where he nonetheless had a rocky tenure, first leading a high-profile office handling whistleblower complaints, next as chief of staff and then, for two months, as the agency’s acting secretary.
Since August he has held the nebulous role of senior adviser, with an uncertain portfolio and a senior executive salary as high as $161,000. VA Secretary Robert Wilkie asked for his resignation Friday, O’Rourke said.
….
Asked why he was getting paid not to work, O’Rourke said he was “available for anything the secretary asked me to do” and acknowledged that “there were times I didn’t have a lot to do.”
The intensity of his [Trump’s] disapproval (44 strongly disapprove, while only 30 percent strongly approve) remains a consistent problem for him and those who will appear on the ballot with him in 2020.
Republicans who have thrown their lot in with Trump, by smearing the FBI and attacking Mueller, may please the hardcore base but, overall, they are on the wrong side of public opinion — even before the public knows more than a fraction of what Mueller does.
Skyler White, in an argument with her husband, Walter, tells him he’s in over his head and expresses concern for his safety. Walter turns and responds with one of the most chilling lines in television history:
“I am proud to shut down the government for border security … I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it,” President Trump tells Senate Minority Leader Schumer in the Oval Office.
In much of Wisconsin, “Madison and Milwaukee” are code words (to some, dog whistles) for the parts of the state that are nonwhite, elite, different: The cities are where people don’t have to work hard with their hands, because they’re collecting welfare or public-sector paychecks.
….
Wisconsin Republicans amplified that idea this week, arguing that the legislature is the more representative branch of government, and then voting to limit the power of the incoming Democratic governor. The legislature speaks for the people in all corners of the state, they seemed to be saying, and statewide offices like governor merely reflect the will of those urban mobs.
There’s a version of this argument common in small-town Whitewater: older white residents who are a minority of the whole city mostly consider themselves the true voices of the community. One can find this view among middle-aged and elderly whites of both left and right: that they ‘live here’ (as though college-aged residents somehow don’t live here).
The actual demographics of the city show how narrow is the cohort that presumes it represents the whole community. From the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, 2013-2017 averages: an absolute majority of this city is under 24 years of age. Many of those over 24 are almost certainly Latino. The city’s leadership and insiders, however, are white and skewed older.
Newspapers in this area (and the Banner for almost its whole run until this year) have had conservative, big-government-favoring, white senior citizen publishers while claiming to speak for the ‘community.’ The community – and what it means to be community-minded – is more than a few buddies, pals, and mutual back-patters.
(I have never claimed to be demographically representative, and have always contended that I am, so to speak, an emissary of one — of my own views and of the political tradition on which they rest. These others have unctuously wrapped themselves in a community cloak that is ill-fitting on their shoulders.)
The policies of this city have been mostly ineffectual, and she remains a low-income community despite the crowing of self-promoting community development men. The true market of the city far exceeds officials’ narrow focus.
Neither in these last eleven years nor even in the next eleven-hundred could state or crony capitalism achieve a positive effect for this city.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 04m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM, and the Finance Committee at 7 PM.
On this day in 1833, Wisconsin’s first newspaper, the Green Bay Intelligencer, begins publication.
Recommended for reading in full:
Byron York contends that there’s been a “[s]udden shift in get-Trump talk; now it’s campaign finance, not Russia,” but Natasha Bertrand sets him straight:
There are two facets of the Russia-Trumpworld points of contact that are interesting. The first is the volume: More than a dozen people who worked with Trump’s campaign or who were close to him personally had meetings, emails or calls with Russians over the year-long span from the end of 2015 to the end of 2016. But the timing is also interesting. The bulk of those contacts happened in the spring and summer of 2016, a period when it looked increasingly like Trump would be the Republican nominee for president.
In the Collected Works of Robert Mueller, there are Russian names that come and go. But there’s only one of these figures who provides a recurring presence in this oeuvre. He is a diminutive man, whom Mueller has called an “asset” of Russian intelligence. His presence is either the sort of distracting irrelevance that Alfred Hitchcock described as a MacGuffin, or he is the shadowy character who steps into the frame to foreshadow an ominous return.
Konstantin Kilimnik trained in Russian military intelligence as a linguist; he spent decades by Paul Manafort’s side, serving as a translator and then rising through the ranks of his organization. Eventually, Manafort would come to describe Kilimnik—also known as K.K. or Kostya—as “My Russian Brain.” He would travel with Manafort to Moscow to meet with their client, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. When Kostya worked with Americans, they suspected him as some sort of spook. (Last June, I wrote this profile of him.)
