In 1971 Durham, NC, civil rights activist Ann Atwater (Taraji P. Henson) faces off against C.P. Ellis (Sam Rockwell), the Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, over school desegregation.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 51m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Dane County citizens voted Judge Archie Simonson out of office. Simonson called rape a normal male reaction to provocative female attire and modern society’s permissive attitude toward sex. He made this statment while explaining why he sentenced a 15-year-old to only one year of probation for raping a 16-year-old girl. After the recall election, Simonson was replaced by Moria Krueger, the first woman judge elected in Dane County history.
Former Gov. Scott Walker is jumping back into Wisconsin politics — this time to promote his 25-year-old son’s potential candidacy for Congress.
Matt Walker, Walker’s oldest son, is one of 10 potential candidates considering running to succeed retiring U.S. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner in the 5th Congressional District, a conservative stronghold.
“I think in particular what intrigues him is he feels frustrated that (U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) somehow nationally is reflective of his generation,” Scott Walker said in an appearance on WISN’s “UpFront.” “He’s 25 and he feels there needs to be a counter-voice to that.”
Ocasio-Cortez is a 29-year-old freshman congresswoman from New York — and the youngest female to serve in Congress — who the former Republican governor frequently criticizes over her Democratic Socialist views.
(Oh, brother. The gerrymandered Fifth Congressional District stretches all the way down to Whitewater. Walker says his son wants to be a counter-voice to AOC, but the son isn’t using his voice – his father’s the one talking. If Matt Walker wants to take on Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, then he’s going to have to speak & stand on his own without papa’s help. This libertarian does not – and never will – support AOC’s fundamentally misguided confidence in government action. And yet, and yet – it is clear that AOC can speak and write on her own. She’s standing on her own feet. It’s always worth reminding of Scott Walker’s Three Fundamental Failures: Employment, Income, and Poverty.)
Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank, and Irina Novoselsky, chief executive officer at CareerBuilder, examine the U.S. August jobs report. They speak on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas.”
In Whitewater, there’s a top-notch think tank right-wing landlord’s business group that flacked Foxconn both privately and through that group’s sway over the Whitewater Community Development Authority. The group invited a state operative to spin Foxconn as a tech city of gold, and at the Whitewater CDA one could hear fantastic tales of high-tech wonders that Foxconn was sure to produce. These gentlemen could feel the magic, really they could…
Predictably, Foxconn’s simply a fiscal con, but perhaps the gentlemen of the Greater Whitewater Committee and the Whitewater CDA can grab themselves a robot-prepared cup of coffee at the airport:
Foxconn will help the company manufacture its units in its Wisconsin LCD factory, which doesn’t exist yet — and thus produces no LCDs, or any other product for that matter — and which Foxconn has previously claimed it plans to use for a variety of manufacturing purposes.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 7:20 PM, for 12h 54m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 53.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
To a first approximation, the best advice is to toss it into the average. Definitely do not assume that it’s the new normal. You don’t need to read dramatically headlined newspaper articles and watch breathless cable news segments about it. In a race with many polls, any one poll should rarely make all that much news. But you shouldn’t “throw out” the poll either. Instead, it should incrementally affect your priors. In the case of the Monmouth poll last week, for instance, you shouldn’t have assumed that the race had suddenly become a three-way tie, but you should have inched up your estimate of how well Sanders and Warren were doing compared with Biden.
For extra credit, pay attention to sample size. The Monmouth poll surveyed only 298 Democratic voters, which is small even by the standards of primary polls (which often survey fewer voters than general election polls do).
….
If a poll shows a significant change in the race, you should tend to presume it’s an outlier unless it’s precipitated by a major news or campaign event.
Corollary: You should be much more open to the possibility that a poll reflects a real change if it’s among the first polls following a major news or campaign event.
What do I mean by a “major” news or campaign event? Some fairly specific types of things. When I made you pinky swear earlier, I was asking you to stick precisely to this list:
Debates.
Candidates entering or exiting the race, or clinching their nominations.
Primary and caucus results (e.g., the Iowa caucuses occur and that has knockoff effects on the next set of states).
The conventions.
The announcement of vice presidential candidates.
The final week of the campaign.
Spectacular, blockbuster news events that dominate the news cycle for a week or more. (There generally are only one or two of these per campaign cycle, if that many.)
Squirrels eavesdrop on the casual chitchat of birds to figure out when it’s safe enough to be out in the open and foraging for food.
Researchers have found that a squirrel becomes incredibly vigilant when it hears the shriek of a red-tailed hawk, but it will relax and resume its food-seeking behavior more quickly if the predator’s call is immediately followed by the easygoing tweets of unconcerned birds.
One reads – thanks to a pointer from Joe in a comment – that Wisconsinites whose houses were ruined for Foxconn now see the loss of some homes was for nothing:
The Jensens had owned a home on nearly 3 acres along Southeast Frontage Road for more than 20 years, close to the planned Foxconn development. Cathy Jensen said she went to a couple of village board meetings to get more information, but it was “useless.”
Then, like dozens of fellow homeowners, the Jensens received a relocation order from Mount Pleasant.
“They said that they needed .13 acres of our frontage for a road project … but they would be generous and offer us basically twice the amount and buy our whole property — our whole 3 acres,” Jensen said.
Wisconsin law gives municipalities the power to acquire private property using eminent domain as long as there is fair compensation and the property will be used for a public purpose. This is typically for road improvements, or sometimes to take control of dilapidated property.
….
The records show the village threatened eminent domain against some homeowners, saying their property was needed for road improvements. But in some cases those plans changed or were dropped even before the homes — some of them newly built — were bulldozed, state records show.
One reads that F. James Sensenbrenner, the pro-Trump septuagenarian multimillionaire congressman from a gerrymandered district that stretches all the way down to Whitewater, is retiring when his current term ends. Consigned to the minority forever must look unappealing.
How time flies! It was not long ago that then-chairman of the Whitewater Community Development Authority was scampering off to thank Sensenbrenner in person for a portion of the Trump tax bill. SeeThe Trump Tax Bill: The Illusory Pay Bump and ‘Our Guy’ Isn’t Our Guy.
The former’s now out of office and the latter soon will be. These changes will leave Sensenbrenner plentiful opportunities for reminiscing over the manipulation of free markets, with moments left for complaining that he was never adequately appreciated by ordinary men and women who should damn well have known better.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 7:22 PM, for 12h 57m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 43.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
“President Trump promised Mexico would pay for his border wall and that’s clearly not true because he is taking money from our military to pay for it,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin said in a statement.
In another sign the president’s crusade against China is hurting the U.S. economy, factory activity shrank in August for the first time in three years, according to a new survey.
The measures the Institute for Supply Management uses for domestic manufacturing’s health fell nearly across the board. New orders for manufactured goods dropped for the second month in a row to a level not seen since late 2009; production and employment contracted for the first time in three years. Another reporton manufacturing activity — from IHS Markit, also released Tuesday — confirmed the findings, showing the weakest manufacturing activity in nearly a decade.
….
The slowdown in American manufacturing comes as the sector has hit a skid worldwide, a development dating to last year that has grown worse as trade tensions have intensified. But the ISM survey left little doubt that the president’s tariff fight is weighing on manufacturers. Four of 10 respondents that the survey quoted invoked the trade war as a top concern (“While business is strong, there is an undercurrent of fear and alarm regarding the trade wars and a potential recession,” one respondent working in chemical products said.)
President Trump’s political allies are trying to raise at least $2 million to investigate reporters and editors of the New York Times, Washington Post and other outlets, according to a 3-page fundraising pitch reviewed by Axios.
The group claims it will slip damaging information about reporters and editors to “friendly media outlets,” such as Breitbart, and traditional media, if possible.
People involved in raising the funds include GOP consultant Arthur Schwartz and the “loose network” that the NY Times reported last week is targeting journalists. The operations are to be run by undisclosed others.
The prospectus for the new project says it’s “targeting the people producing the news.”
So, I said when it comes to that situation [former chancellor Beverly Kopper’s failures as chancellor] it was situational it was not systemic. What happened in the past is a private and personal situation.
This is fundamentally mistaken. Kopper’s administrative failures of oversight and care for her own campus community were not private matters, they were public ones. Pete Hill [Kopper’s husband] was no ordinary, unconnected spouse: he was 1) appointed publicly 2) by this chancellor, Beverly Kopper 3) to attend public events 4) present often in chancellor’s office and 5) about whom the chancellor kept investigations secret for months despite knowing of harassment and assault allegations against Hill. SeeNo Ordinary, Unconnected Spouse: Public officials’ use of family appointees.
Regrettably, there’s an entire category at FREE WHITEWATER addressing assault awareness and prevention that establishes these failures have been systemic, and that chronicles even earlier acts of misconduct & obstruction.
From the video at 3:16:
It has been dealt with.
It’s only been dealt with if one defines the past tense dealt as encompassing possibilities that include doing nothing whatever for many people who have been injured on campus.
From the video at 3:19:
When it comes to the [former] chancellor working here at the institution, she has tenure within the psychology department, it’s a part of her contracted right to teach within her tenured department, and I’m glad she’s on board.
To have said in August that one was glad that Kopper would be on board is at best misguided, and at worst…something much worse.
And yet, one now reads (as one very well knew would prove true) that Kopper will not be teaching this fall, but is on paid leave. However disagreeable it is that she’s still being paid, it’s better (as both an ethical and a legal matter) that she’s not on campus in any capacity.
As for a contractual right of teaching implicitly superseding the ethical and moral obligations toward students and employees who have been injured: if that were true – as either a moral or legal matter – then anti-harassment laws would be unenforceable against anyone with a contract.
For the administrative officials at Hyer Hall, thin talking points cannot be – and so will not be – enough.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 13h 00m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 32.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1886, Apache leader Geronimo surrenders at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.
As the number of dairy farms nationwide has plummeted by nearly 20,000 over the past decade, there’s one corner of the industry doing just fine:
The top executives at Dairy Management Inc., who are paid from farmers’ milk checks.
The Illinois-based nonprofit is charged with promoting milk, cheese and other products — spending nearly $160 million a year collected through federally-mandated payments from dairy farmers.
In 2017, a year in which 503 dairy farms closed in Wisconsin and 1,600 were shuttered nationwide, IRS records show 10 executives at the organization were paid more than $8 million — an average of more than $800,000 each.
Pay for Thomas Gallagher, the group’s CEO, has topped $1 million three times from 2013 to 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation into spending by the group found. His compensation included access to first-class travel and money to cover part of his taxes.
As North Korea fired off a series of missiles in recent months — at least 18 since May — President Trump has repeatedly dismissed their importance as short-range and “very standard” tests. And although he has conceded “there may be a United Nations violation,” the president says any concerns are overblown.
Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, Mr. Trump explained recently, just “likes testing missiles.”
Now, American intelligence officials and outside experts have come to a far different conclusion: that the launchings downplayed by Mr. Trump, including two late last month, have allowed Mr. Kim to test missiles with greater range and maneuverability that could overwhelm American defenses in the region.
Japan’s defense minister, Takeshi Iwaya, told reporters in Tokyo last week that the irregular trajectories of the most recent tests were more evidence of a program designed to defeat the defenses Japan has deployed, with American technology, at sea and on shore.
Tent courthouses are the administration’s latest move in its “Remain in Mexico” policy, forcing asylum seekers to wait in one of Mexico’s most dangerous states until their hearings. We track the tents’ expansion through satellite imagery — and explain how they could make the asylum process even harder.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see occasional thundershowers with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 13h 03m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1783, representatives of Great Britain and the United States of America sign the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War.
When Wisconsin children return to school this week, close to 50,000 of them will have waivers that exempt them from vaccines, leaving them vulnerable to measles at a time when the nation has experienced its largest outbreak in 27 years.
Health officials across the U.S. have reported 1,215 cases of measles this year as of Aug. 22, the highest number since 1992, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Measles had been declared eliminated in 2000.
“I really do think it’s purely just dumb luck that this hasn’t spread to Wisconsin,” said James Conway, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Since November 2018, state health officials have investigated 382 suspected cases of measles; not one case has been confirmed.
Immunization rates of 92% to 95% are considered necessary to provide what health officials call “herd immunity.” The term is used to describe a level of immunization high enough to prevent the infection from spreading to those who are susceptible, possibly triggering a widespread outbreak. The vulnerable group includes children under a year who are too young to receive vaccines and children with weakened immune systems.
….
Not a single county in 2018 came close to the 92% threshold. In fact, 40 of the 72 counties had immunization rates below 80%.
The relationship between detention and increased mental health problems among children and families has been well-documented, according to Jaime Diaz-Granado, deputy chief executive for the American Psychological Association. His group has called the Trump administration’s rule change “a misguided attempt by this administration to stem the flow across the southern border.”
“The large majority of these children have already experienced trauma before arriving at immigration facilities, and the longer they are held in detention, the more likely their mental health will continue to suffer,” Diaz-Granado said.
Ample research has shown neglect harms children. In 2003, researchers published a series of foundational studies of the children raised in Romania’s orphanages that showed horrible consequences to those children and their society as a result of their institutionalization. Nelson was among the lead authors. When he hears reports of the U.S. separating immigrant children from their caregivers in federal custody, Nelson reflects on Romania where children were dropped off in institutions that had one untrained caregiver for more than a dozen children. “Yes, there are parallels,” he said.
About a year later, Oscar Brown, Jr. added lyrics to the song (giving it a more direct – and different – meaning than a presumed one about ordinary labor):
Labor Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with occasional showers, and a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:21 AM and sunset 7:27 PM, for 13h 05m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1945, aboard the United States Navy battleship USS Missouri, officials from the Japanese government sign a formal instrument of surrender.
This process [of explanation] has a number of steps — the stages of servility. At first, there is stunned silence. (Did he really propose to buy Greenland?) Then the frantic search for hidden wisdom. (Climate change — which the president sometimes views as fake science — will melt Arctic ice, open sea lanes and turn Greenland into the Panama Canal of the north.) Then the determined Googling of historical precedents. (Harry S. Truman, it turns out, also contemplated a Greenland grab.) Then growing defiance. (Greenland has loads of zinc! Doesn’t America deserve zinc?!)
….
But we should not play down the importance of having a president with harebrained notions. We should not explain away the craziness.
Certainly the president should not be allowed to lie away the craziness. In the face of good reporting on Trump’s nuclear idea, his claim of “FAKE NEWS” is entirely unconvincing. We have reached the point where the president’s denial of a charge actually makes it more credible. Recall his suggestion that the “Access Hollywood” tape isn’t real. And the claim that he never said Mexico would pay for the wall. And his claim that he never ordered White House counsel Donald McGahn to fire special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. And his claim that he never said Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election. And his claim that he never paid for the silence of a porn star. Self-serving deception by the president is now a justified expectation.
American farmers already stung by President Donald Trump’s trade wars now face billions of dollars in potential losses as controversial data from the U.S. government snuffs out a rally in corn.
The Agriculture Department on Monday [8.12.19] said farmers planted a bigger corn area than analysts estimated and pegged crop yields that also exceeded expectations, sparking the biggest rout in futures since 2013. That was a blow to growers who were holding back supplies, hoping a rally that started in May due to delayed sowing would extend through the fall.
The decline represents a potential loss of almost $3.5 billion for U.S. farmers, according to the American Farm Bureau, and is another setback for them after prices fell following the USDA’s previous acreage report, which was widely criticized for containing outdated data.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:28 PM, for 13h 08m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 6.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1972, Bobby Fischer wins the 1972 World Chess Championship: “The first game was played on July 11, 1972. The last game (the 21st) began on August 31, was adjourned after 40 moves, and Spassky resigned the next day without resuming play. Fischer won the match 12½–8½, becoming the eleventh undisputed World Champion.”
Even glimmers of good news come these days with a sobering twist. Milk prices have rebounded a little, but partly because enough farmers have quit that it has reduced milk production, said Matt Lippert, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agricultural agent in Wood County.
Asked to sum up perceptions of tariffs among farmers he talks to, Lippert said:
“Some of them are supportive of the president and say, ‘We just have to be patient. We’ve not been (treated) fair and the president is going to fix it.’ Then some of them are like, ‘We’ve given him enough time already.’ And there are others who are like, ‘No this wasn’t the way ever to do it.’ But they all uniformly think that loss of markets and the tariff thing is hurting them.”
(Tariffs are taxes on American consumers and businesses; trade wars bring these taxes. Those who support Trump – a fundamentally ignorant man – delude themselves if they think he offers an economic solution for America, let alone rural America. Those who support him more probably do so for cultural reasons, and yet in this, they are more closely aligned with the worst nativism of our past than a healthy contemporary society.
Note well — even among a supposedly loyal rural demographic, nearly 4 in 10 strongly disapprove of Trump – as many strongly disapprove as strongly approve.)
From the very beginning of his presidency, Donald Trump has denied or downplayed Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. He has, at various times, dismissed the whole idea as a hoax, as fake news, or as an excuse by Democrats for why they lost the election. At other times, he has proclaimed his innocence vis-à-vis Russian campaign interference. From the earliest days of his presidency when he fired FBI Director James Comey in an effort to stop the investigation, he has denigrated and dismissed the entire issue. In its place he has insisted that the real problem in 2016 was not Russian interference but rather illegal voting by immigrants. The president’s beliefs have put him at odds with his own government and his own appointees, creating some awkward moments as the machinery of the federal government comes into conflict with the tweets of the chief executive.
