Monday in Whitewater will see morning showers with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 5:12 PM, for 10h 07m 26s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Downtown Whitewater, Inc.’s board meets today at 5 PM.
On this day in 1863, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry fights a skirmish at Batesville, Arkansas.
A White House source has leaked nearly every day of President Trump’s private schedule for the past three months.
Why it matters: This unusually voluminous leak gives us unprecedented visibility into how this president spends his days. The schedules, which cover nearly every working day since the midterms, show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past 3 months in unstructured “Executive Time.”
We’ve published every page of the leaked schedules in a piece that accompanies this item. To protect our source, we retyped the schedules in the same format that West Wing staff receives them.
What the schedules show: Trump, an early riser, usually spends the first 5 hours of the day in Executive Time. Each day’s schedule places Trump in “Location: Oval Office” from 8 to 11 a.m.
But Trump, who often wakes before 6 a.m., is never in the Oval during those hours, according to six sources with direct knowledge.
Instead, he spends his mornings in the residence, watching TV, reading the papers, and responding to what he sees and reads by phoning aides, members of Congress, friends, administration officials and informal advisers.
President Trump’s time management — or lack thereof — is without recent historical precedent. To put our new reporting on his schedules in context, we spoke with former top aides to presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
The big picture: The difference between Trump and his recent predecessors is eye-popping.
Trump has the least in common with George W. Bush.
Bush’s calendar was tightly scheduled and booked out months ahead.
Bush would wake around 5:15 a.m.; have coffee with his wife, Laura; read the newspapers; and get to the Oval Office by 6:45 a.m., per a former top aide who spoke anonymously to avoid offending Trump.
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Barack Obama was similarly disciplined. But unlike Bush, he would sometimes stay up until 2 a.m. reading.
His daily private schedule would typically have 6 meetings, as well as intelligence and economic briefings, according to Alyssa Mastromonaco, his deputy chief of staff for operations.
Obama would usually get to the Oval Office around 9 a.m. and leave around 6 or 6:30 p.m. for dinner with the first lady and his daughters. He would have evening events around 3 nights a week and would travel domestically about 3 times a month, Mastromonaco said.
Never Trump conservative Tom Nichols, on Twitter, writes sensibly in reply to a question about which news sources one should read. He advises
Start with a national newspaper every morning. Any of them. NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT, whatever. If you just read one newspaper a day, you’re light years ahead of anyone who’s staring at Facebook. The next day, read a newspaper again. Repeat.
Spot on: quality rests on quality. Facebook doesn’t care at all about quality (which begins with accuracy) – it’s a data mining operation more than anything else. SeeThis Is How Much Fact-Checking Is Worth to Facebook (“More than nothing, but not much more”):
The amount that Facebook has paid out has increased, but also become more variable. Fact-checkers get paid per fact-check, but only up to a certain amount per month. The amount of money that’s flowing to all of Facebook’s 34 fact-checkers probably remains in the single-digit millions.
For perspective, Facebook generated $16.9 billion in revenue just last quarter. That same quarter, the company’s average revenue per user reached $7.37, so the money coming in from a million or two users over the course of just three months would be enough to cover the global fact-checking costs for the year.
At the local level, every newspaper in the Whitewater area (Gazette, Daily Union, or even the Register assuming a tree falling in the woods with no one nearby makes a sound) is a different version of the same reliance on press releases and puff pieces for right-leaning business welfare. Indeed, the publishers’ views are nearly indistinguishable from one another, and united in economic error and bad-ideas boosterism.
If that’s one’s news, one’s news comes not from quality but from inferiority. A day like that would begin with a weak and uncompetitive outlook, enmired as it would be in error, confusion, and fallacy.
We have a great and competitive country, accessible at the click of a keyboard, daily awaiting discovery and embrace.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 5:11 PM, for 10h 04m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
February 3, 1959 is the day the music died: “Bad winter weather and a bus breakdown prompted rock-and-roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper to rent a plane to continue on their “Winter Dance Party” tour. Icy roads and treacherous weather had nearly undermined their performances in Green Bay and Appleton that weekend, so after a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959, they boarded a four-seat airplane. The three performers and pilot Roger Peterson perished when the plane crashed about 1:00 AM on Monday, February 3rd.”
Harris, 54, now a U.S. senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, would be several firsts in the White House: the first woman, the first African American woman, the first Indian American and the first Asian American. The daughter of two immigrants — her father came from Jamaica — she would also be the second biracial president, after Barack Obama.
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She said she has not spent much time dwelling on how to categorize herself.
“So much so,” she said, “that when I first ran for office that was one of the things that I struggled with, which is that you are forced through that process to define yourself in a way that you fit neatly into the compartment that other people have created.
“My point was: I am who I am. I’m good with it. You might need to figure it out, but I’m fine with it,” she said.
It was early 2016, and he was lending tens of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign and had been spending large sums to expand the Trump Organization’s roster of high-end properties.
To finance his business’s growth, Mr. Trump turned to a longtime ally, Deutsche Bank, one of the few banks still willing to lend money to the man who has called himself “The King of Debt.”
Mr. Trump’s loan request, which has not been previously reported, set off a fight that reached the top of the German bank, according to three people familiar with the request. In the end, Deutsche Bank did something unexpected. It said no.
Senior officials at the bank, including its future chief executive, believed that Mr. Trump’s divisive candidacy made such a loan too risky, the people said. Among their concerns was that if Mr. Trump won the election and then defaulted, Deutsche Bank would have to choose between not collecting on the debt or seizing the assets of the president of the United States.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:09 PM, for 10h 02m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Last year, I detailed how Russia has figured out how to use the U.S. immigration courts and so-called “Red Notices” issued by Interpol to harass and even detain its enemies. But it doesn’t end there. Experts say Kremlin proxies have targeted their rivals and other disfavored individuals by exploiting U.S. courts to pursue bogus claims via “superficially legitimate lawsuits,” Anders Aslund, a resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said in a recent report.
When Mueller indicted Concord Management and Consulting in February 2018, along with two other corporate entities and 13 Russian nationals allegedly connected to the Internet Research Agency, it seemed highly unlikely that the indictment would result in a trial because Russians cannot be extradited to the United States. But Concord unexpectedly hired the well-connected American law firm, Reed Smith, to fight Mueller, arguing that the charges should be dropped because the special counsel was illegally appointed. The judge in the case, Dabney Friedrich, has twice refused to dismiss the case and recently lambasted Concord’s American lawyers for submitting “unprofessional, inappropriate and ineffective” court filings, and the legal battle has raged on.
Now, according to the Mueller filing this week, unidentified actors working out of Russia appear to have weaponize[d] the U.S. discovery process to Concord’s benefit. Over 1,000 files on the website that hosted the leaked documents “match those produced in discovery,” the special counsel said. The documents were published from a computer with a Russian IP address, according to Mueller, and whoever released them clearly “had access to at least some of the non-sensitive discovery produced by the government.” But forged documents were mixed in to the trove, too, apparently in an attempt to accuse Mueller of characterizing American websites and Facebook pages like Occupy Democrats as Russian disinformation operations.
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Mueller, for his part, appears to have foreseen how the Russians connected to Concord Management (it is owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, often referred to as “Putin’s chef”) might try to exploit the legal process: In June 2018, he asked Judge Friedrich for a protective order that would prevent Concord’s lawyers from sharing any discovery documents with the Russians named in the troll farm indictment, as well as with other foreigners such as lawyers outside the U.S. If the data were to be distributed outside of American law firms, Mueller said, “foreign individuals may try to use that avenue as a way to obtain sensitive materials as part of an intelligence collection effort.” The hoax website aimed at discrediting his investigation largely failed, but seemed to prove Mueller’s prescience, beyond any doubt.
It’s right to make bids for government services, just as it’s right to mitigate losses or vacancies. Yet, for it all, it’s telling that Whitewater’s Community Development Authority has so much vacant business space that it leases the empty lots out for cropland.
The Community Development Authority of the City of Whitewater, Wisconsin
(“CDA”) is seeking bids for the lease of vacant farmland for the 2019 crop year.
The available farmland, consisting of approximately 113± acres, is located easterly
of Highway 59, positioned in the Whitewater Business and Technology Park. Bids
will be accepted for the entire 113± acres
Years of the WEDC, years of capital catalyst grants and subsidies of other kinds, but still a business park for light industry that has abundant space for crops. Whitewater’s had large vacancies of land and buildings for many years.
Sell the land, lease the land, give the land away, give away subsidies for businesses to go on the land, and still…vacant spaces.
If all those offers haven’t spurred demand, then the rational course would be to change course, wholly and fundamentally.
Days after Foxconn’s Louis Woo told Reuters that the company is no longer planning to build a factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn says the factory plan is back on.
“After productive discussions between the White House and the company, and after a personal conversation between President Donald J. Trump and Chairman Terry Gou, Foxconn is moving forward with our planned construction of a Gen 6 fab facility,” a statement read. A Gen 6 facility is smaller than the factory Foxconn initially promised in 2017, but larger than the assembly facility Foxconn said it would build yesterday.
Today’s statement saying that the Gen 6 factory will be built after all does not contain a timeline or any further details.
(Emphasis added.)
If it takes a political discussion, it’s not a market-based deal. If it’s not a market-based deal, it’s economically unfounded.
It’s been unseasonably cold in southeastern Wisconsin this week, and in Whitewater that presents a challenge for the disproportionately large number of impoverished residents (some of whom occasionally lack utilities, even at the most unfavorable times).
The three large public institutions in the city – municipal government, school district, and public university – have collectively dozens of heated and illuminated buildings, and yet one cannot recall a notice that their facilities were available to struggling individuals or families. Perhaps there was an offer of that kind, but if so it was a nearly whispered one.
Indeed, the only offer heard was from a volunteer organization that recently opened at 834 Milwaukee Street.
One could say more, but the matter speaks for itself.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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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.
