FREE WHITEWATER

Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Hunger, Marketing, Uncategorized, University

On a Campus with Genuine Hunger, ‘Hungry’ Shouldn’t be a Marketing Tool

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One reads in an announcement from Assistant Vice Chancellor Sara Kuhl (that’s her title, truly) that a marketing firm is looking for students’ opinions, and will provide a free lunch or dinner. They’ve got quite the hook:

Wanted: Opinionated and hungry students

In a place of genuine hunger, with students using an on-campus food pantry, feeding a focus group takes on a meaning far beyond mere marketing. Seeking ‘opinionated and hungry students’ becomes in those conditions more than a marketing pitch; it becomes an outdated incentive or perquisite unsuited to actual conditions. Indeed, both local and national stories make this plan. See Hunger, homelessness a student concern and Millions of College Students Are Going Hungry.

A better notice would have simply stated that lunch or dinner would be provided, thereby offering food without identifying hunger expressly (so that those who are hungry would not become a mere word in the subject line).

A marketing firm’s transitory incentives do not address an ongoing problem; they wrongly cast that problem as trivial.

Either this notice was published without any review – or it was published without thoughtful review – of actual conditions on campus and in this city.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.22.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 5:36 PM, for 10h 55m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1732, George Washington is born.

Recommended for reading in full:

Catherine Rampell writes President Tariff Man may be learning all the wrong lessons from his trade wars:

Here’s the bigger problem. Though Trump may hold off on raising tariffs to 25 percent, he also looks likely to keep his existing 10 percent tariffs in place. Which would still leave plenty of U.S. firms twisting in the wind.

Most of the Chinese products that Trump has slapped tariffs on, after all, are inputs that U.S. companies must buy to manufacture their own products. As Syracuse University economist Mary E. Lovely has noted, in some cases, alternative sourcing is not available, especially not on short notice.

That means U.S. firms are facing higher costs and becoming less competitive. Some are contemplating moving production out of the United States to dodge Trump’s tariffs.

Lots of other U.S. businesses are also suffering, particularly as they face tit-for-tat tariffs that may or may not be alleviated in the weeks to come. Even if China were to decide for some reason to asymmetrically lift its retaliatory tariffs while we kept our 10 percent duties in place, perhaps as part of a commitment to buy more U.S. goods, in many cases the damage has already been done: Bankruptcies across the Farm Belt have soared to their highest levels in at least a decade.

Dan Friedman reports A Judge Just Imposed a Strict Gag Order on a Groveling Roger Stone:

US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson slapped a strict gag order on Roger Stone Thursday but stopped short of jailing him over an Instagram post by Stone showing what appeared to be a crosshairs next to Jackson’s head.  “Any violation of this order will be a basis for revoking your bond,” she told the longtime adviser to Donald Trump and self-professed dirty trickster.

Stone, who is awaiting trial on obstruction of justice and perjury charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, apologized profusely and repeatedly to Jackson on Thursday after his lawyer took the extraordinary step of putting Stone on the stand to defend his conduct.

….

Jackson ruled that Stone had posted the Instagram image with the intent of denigrating the court’s proceeding and tainting the jury pool in the case. She modified her order on media contact so that Stone’s bond will be revoked if he violates the new order. “From this moment on the defendant may not speak publicly about the investigation of this case,” she said.

How Did the Idea of the Loch Ness Monster Start?:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.21.19

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty.  Sunrise is 6:41 AM and sunset 5:34 PM, for 10h 52m 51s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1972, Pres. Nixon arrives in China for a week-long visit.

Recommended for reading in full:

Rick Barrett reports Dairy farmers are in crisis — and it could change Wisconsin forever:

Wisconsin lost almost 700 dairy farms in 2018, an unprecedented rate of nearly two a day. Most were small operations unable to survive farm milk prices that, adjusted for inflation, were among the lowest in a half-century.

As of Feb. 1, Wisconsin had 8,046 dairy herds, down 40 percent from 10 years earlier, according to state Department of Agriculture data.

Remaining dairy farmers have burned through their farm equity and credit to remain in business. Often, at least one family member works an off-farm job to put groceries on the table or pay for health insurance. Some work double shifts, farming during the day then heading to a local factory for the night. It’s exhausting, but it keeps families in agriculture and preserves a cherished way of life.

Much of Wisconsin’s $88 billion farm economy hangs in the balance. Hundreds of towns across the state depend on the money that dairy farmers spend at equipment dealerships, feed mills, hardware stores, cafes and scores of other businesses.

Each dollar of net farm income results in an additional 60 cents of economic activity, according to University of Wisconsin research.

This spring, though, farmers face crucial decisions. Some are running out of feed for their cattle. Do they seek operating loans to plant crops for livestock rations? Or do they quit and cut their losses that can add up to thousands of dollars a month?

  Natasha Korecki reports ‘Sustained and ongoing’ disinformation assault targets Dem presidential candidates:

A POLITICO review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms, as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists, suggests that the goal of the coordinated barrage appears to be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions of their positions. But the divisive nature of many of the posts also hints at a broader effort to sow discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.

The cyber propaganda — which frequently picks at the rawest, most sensitive issues in public discourse — is being pushed across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious approach than in the 2016 presidential election, when online attacks designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on a massive scale.

Recent posts that have received widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and messaging involving Harris, O’Rourke and Warren. In Warren’s case, a false narrative surfaced alleging that a blackface doll appeared on a kitchen cabinet in the background of the senator’s New Year’s Eve Instagram livestream.

See also Microsoft says it has found another Russian operation targeting prominent think tanks.

  Inside the ant lab: Mutants and social genes:

Courts, Law, Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, a Case of First Impression on Social Media Contacts

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Wisconsin’s Court of Appeals handed down a decision today concerning social media.  The appellate court held that a trial judge’s decision to accept a litigant’s Facebook friend request during litigation before his court created a risk of actual bias, resulted in the appearance of partiality, and so was a due process violation for which trial judge’s decision in the case was reversed and remanded. See Miller v. Carroll, No. 2017AP2132 (Wis. Ct. App. February 20, 2019).

A few obvious qualifications apply: (1) this seems to be the first case of its kind in Wisconsin (a case of ‘first impression’), (2) it involves a trial judge’s acceptance of a social media connection by one of the parties appearing before his court, (3) during – not after – proceedings involving that party.  The Wisconsin Supreme Court may, itself, consider this matter, and even if it does not, the ruling remains narrow.

There are other connections involving electronic social media that this decision does not (understandably) address.  It seems probable, however, that officials who exercise quasi-judicial authority (on various boards, commissions, etc.) may in time find their judicial decisions questioned as was the trial court’s in this case.

For a published story about the case, see A child custody dispute will get a new hearing because the judge became Facebook friends with the mother before his ruling.

The full opinion follows —

[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/MillerCarroll-2017AP2132.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.20.19

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be snowy with a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 5:33 PM, for 10h 50m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1962, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

 Corri Hess reports Gov. Tony Evers Says Business Incentives Should Be Discussed:

Evers said massive incentive packages are something the state is going to have to grapple with.

“I want Kimberly-Clark to be successful. I want Marinette Marine to be successful, but at the end of the day, can we continue to carry on this path?” Evers said. “I think it’s an important discussion to have as a state.”

In December, Walker reached a deal to keep a Kimberly-Clark plant open that’s worth up to $28 million over five years. Evers has said he will include $31 million in his state budget to help Fincantieri Marinette Marine expand its shipyard in northeastern Wisconsin.

Foxconn Technology Group has received the largest incentive from the state, more than $4 billion. Evers said he still believes it was too expensive. But he wants the company to be a success.

“Clearly, what they are planning to do has changed,” Evers said of Foxconn. “At the end of the day, several municipalities have provided financial support. The state has provided support. But the agreement is part of state law. We have to make sure their operation and their decision-making is more transparent than it is now.”

Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman, Nicholas Fandos, and Michael S. Schmidt report Inside Trump’s Two-Year War on the Investigations Encircling Him:

An examination by The New York Times reveals the extent of an even more sustained, more secretive assault by Mr. Trump on the machinery of federal law enforcement. Interviews with dozens of current and former government officials and others close to Mr. Trump, as well as a review of confidential White House documents, reveal numerous unreported episodes in a two-year drama.

….

Julie O’Sullivan, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University, said she believed there was ample public evidence that Mr. Trump had the “corrupt intent” to try to derail the Mueller investigation, the legal standard for an obstruction of justice case.

But this is far from a routine criminal investigation, she said, and Mr. Mueller will have to make judgments about the effect on the country of making a criminal case against the president. Democrats in the House have said they will wait for Mr. Mueller to finish his work before making a decision about whether the president’s behavior warrants impeachment.

In addition to the Mueller investigation, there are at least two other federal inquiries that touch the president and his advisers — the Manhattan investigation focused on the hush money payments made by Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and an inquiry examining the flow of foreign money to the Trump inaugural committee.

  To Survive, This Bug Builds a House of Bubbles:

Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Free Markets, Government Spending, Local Government, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC

Half-Right About the WISGOP

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Thomas Edsall, writing in the New York Times, quotes Jerry Taylor and Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center think tank on Republicans’ political economics. Two quotes from Taylor Wilkinson stand out – one right, and one wrong (at least wrong for Wisconsin).

From Will Wilkinson, a view of cultural issues’ importance:

The G.O.P.’s success in struggling places has given them a false impression that voters who live there will stay faithful as long as they keep feeding them culture-war chum. Trump’s populism offered a false but compelling diagnosis of their economic problems, immigrants and insufficiently protectionist trade policy, which dovetails neatly with rural white anxieties about declining cultural status and relative political power. If you can align threats to identity with threats to material security, as Trump did, it’s pretty powerful.

Yes, that’s right: this is an underlying WISGOP strategy.

From Jerry Taylor, however, comes a view of Republicans’ economic views that isn’t true of the WISGOP at all:

only reliably ensured when government is minimized, taxes are nearly inconsequential, and free markets and property rights are given the greatest scope possible. Marry that with their belief that a rising economic tide will lift all boats, and you can quickly see why they’re at a loss to explain what’s going on in rural America.

The conservatives of Wisconsin are most certainly not small-government advocates; they’re supporters of state capitalism (state intervention as a producer or partner) and crony capitalism (state intervention for buddies & pals) in amounts – literally, in Wisconsin – reaching billions.

The WEDC, Foxconn, and wasteful, nutty capital-catalyst projects like those from the Whitewater Community Development Authority (CDA) aren’t small government, limited government, responsible stewardship, or free-market ideas of any kind.  (FREE WHITEWATER has a category devoted to each of these agencies or projects.)  See also Nationally and Locally: The Big-Government Conservatives Are Economy-Wreckers.

In places like Whitewater, projects like this are an opportunity for pro-government conservatives to play with public money as though they were legitimate private capitalists.  They’re not legitimate capitalists at all; if they cared about being legitimate, they would use only their own money in their own private investments. 

At the same time, for a fraction of the amounts of public money they waste each year, genuine needs – long ignored – might be addressed.  These men have, instead, failed to improve individual and household well-being time and again.  See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA and Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade.

Wilkinson may be right about Wisconsin conservatives’ strategy, but Taylor is wholly wrong about Wisconsin conservatives’ economic and fiscal policies.

These are not free-market men; these are well-fed, public-money-sucking, control-what-they-can men.

America, Congress, History, Law, Misconduct, Trump, Trump-Russia

The Case for Impeaching Trump

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Yoni Applebaum contends It’s Time to Impeach Trump (“Starting the process will rein in a president who is undermining American ideals—and bring the debate about his fitness for office into Congress, where it belongs”):

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump stood on the steps of the Capitol, raised his right hand, and solemnly swore to faithfully execute the office of president of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. He has not kept that promise.

Instead, he has mounted a concerted challenge to the separation of powers, to the rule of law, and to the civil liberties enshrined in our founding documents. He has purposefully inflamed America’s divisions. He has set himself against the American idea, the principle that all of us—of every race, gender, and creed—are created equal.

This is not a partisan judgment. Many of the president’s fiercest critics have emerged from within his own party. Even officials and observers who support his policies are appalled by his pronouncements, and those who have the most firsthand experience of governance are also the most alarmed by how Trump is governing.

….

Trump’s bipartisan critics are not merely arguing that he has dishonored the presidency. The most serious charge is that he is attacking the bedrock of American democracy.

For those of us who are Never Trump, our early opposition has proved well-founded.  Impeachment, removal from office, and indictment on federal or state charges if prosecutors find a sufficient basis: that should be Trump’s fate.

Applebaum considers Andrew Johnson’s impeachment as a precedent for action against Trump.

So it is.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.19.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 5:32 PM, for 10h 47m 15s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1868, photographer Edward S. Curtis is born:

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born near Whitewater. As a young boy, he taught himself photography. His family eventually moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington state. He settled in Seattle and opened a photography studio in 1897. A chance meeting on Mount Rainier resulted in Curtis being appointed official photographer on railroad magnate E.H. Harriman’s expedition to Alaska. Curtis also accompanied George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream magazine, to Montana in 1900 to observe the Blackfoot Sun Dance. After this, Curtis strove to comprehensively document American Indians through photography, a project that continued for over 30 years. Working primarily with 6 x 8-inch reflex camera, he created over 40,000 sepia-toned images. His work attracted national attention, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, whose family contributed generously to his project. His monumental work, The North American Indian, was eventually printed in 20 volumes with associated portfolios. Curtis’ work included portraits, scenes of daily life, ceremonies, architecture and artifacts, and landscapes. His photographs have recently been put online by the Library of Congress.

(Morning Eagle – Piegan. 1910. Original caption: “At an age of more than ninety, Apinakuipita is still hale enough to ride his horse to the tribal gatherings.“)

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Charlie Savage and Robert Pear report 16 States Sue to Stop Trump’s Use of Emergency Powers to Build Border Wall:

The lawsuit is part of a constitutional confrontation that Mr. Trump set off on Friday when he declared that he would spend billions of dollars more on border barriers than Congress had granted him. The clash raises questions over congressional control of spending, the scope of emergency powers granted to the president, and how far the courts are willing to go to settle such a dispute.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in San Francisco, argues that the president does not have the power to divert funds for constructing a wall along the Mexican border because it is Congress that controls spending.

[Read the full lawsuit here.]

Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California, said in an interview that the president himself had undercut his argument that there was an emergency on the border.

“Probably the best evidence is the president’s own words,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s speech on Feb. 15 announcing his plan: “I didn’t need to do this, but I’d rather do it much faster.”

The lawsuit, California et al. v. Trump et al., says that the plaintiff states are going to court to protect their residents, natural resources and economic interests.

  Inside Corning’s Gorilla Glass Factory:

Corporate Welfare, Economics, Economy, Free Markets, Immigration, Local Government, Politics, Regulations, State Capitalism, That Which Paved the Way

Immigration as a Community Lifeline

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Art Cullen writes Help wanted: Rural America needs immigrants:

President Trump argues that keeping immigrants and refugees out of our country is a matter of vital national security. He has made it his campaign thesis and shut down the government over it. Here in Storm Lake, Iowa, where the population is about 15,000 and unemployment is under 2 percent, Asians and Africans and Latinos are our lifeline. The only threat they pose to us is if they weren’t here.

That’s been the case for years all over rural Iowa and southern Minnesota, in the heart of the Corn Belt, where anyone who wants a job cutting hogs or laying block or working as an orderly can get one.

One part of the rural condition in American today is that, after college, our young people go to Des Moines or some city beyond for a job in finance or engineering that simply doesn’t exist in the old, county-seat towns of 5,000 people. “Everybody has to go someplace else,” Iowa State University regional trade economist Dave Swenson says of the youth exodus. “There isn’t a Plan B or Plan C.”

As rural counties are drained of young people with higher educations, immigrants flow into the vacuum. The influx began 40 years ago and continues today. First, Laotians from Thai refugee camps (they fought alongside us in Vietnam) came to Iowa in the 1980s. A land debt crisis later that decade blew up the family farm and foreclosed the future of so many young people and small businesses. The farm boys who once raised hogs by day and worked the night shift at the packing houses lit out for Texas and the oil rigs. Young Latino men, mainly from the Mexican state of Jalisco, came in to work the meatpackers’ kill floors. Now, the pigs are raised in huge confinement buildings, not family farms, and Latinos keep them clean.

(Note: Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times in Northwest Iowa. He also recently wrote the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.”)

Here one sees a rural community’s challenge: it cannot survive productively without newcomers, but there’s resistance to newcomers who don’t think, sound, or look like the old-timers in these towns.

Even in small towns, there’s a futile defiance in resisting the free movement of labor, capital, and goods.  Subsidies, regulations, and prohibitions: they’re nothing against the collective energies of tens of thousands that reward the free & creative and punish the restrictive & controlling.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 2.18.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-five.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 5:30 PM, for 10h 44m 29s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Unified School Board meets at 6 PM and Whitewater’s Library Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1885, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

 Conor Friedersdorf writes of The Snowflake in Chief:

To support President Trump is to be complicit in the rule of a thin-skinned authoritarian who denigrates the free-speech rights of people who criticize him.

The latest illustration: his weekend outburst against Saturday Night Live, a sketch-comedy show that has regularly poked fun at every American president for 40 years. The most powerful snowflake in America was triggered by Alec Baldwin. “Nothing funny about tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!” Trump tweeted. “Question is, how do the Networks get away with these total Republican hit jobs without retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very unfair and should be looked into. This is the real Collusion!”

….

Trump’s SNL tweets are of a piece with a larger, disturbing pattern of behavior in which he violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by calling for First Amendment freedoms to be abridged by bureaucrats and legislators; and by calling the press a public enemy and a target of his “drain the swamp” agenda.

 Stephanie Mencimer reports Trump Judicial Nominees Are Refusing to Endorse Brown v. Board of Education (“In normal times, it would be unthinkable. Under Trump, it’s become a trend”)”

There’s no Supreme Court decision more widely celebrated than Brown v. Board of Education, the unanimous 1954 ruling that abolished school segregation. But this month, when Neomi Rao appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, she refused to say whether she thought the case had been correctly decided.

Asked by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) whether the court had made the right decision in Brown, Rao replied, “As a judicial nominee, I think it’s not appropriate for me to comment on the correctness of particular precedents.” Blumenthal asked her for a yes or no, but Rao would say only that Brown is “an incredibly important decision of the Supreme Court”—a dodge she twice repeated when pressed further.

….

Rao is one of at least 10 Trump nominees to the federal courts in the past year who have refused to offer an opinion on Brown. Several of those nominees have been confirmed or approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and set for a full Senate vote.

….

Both of former President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and archconservative Justice Samuel Alito, had no trouble answering the question in the affirmative during their confirmation hearings, nor did Justice Elena Kagan when she was nominated to the court by former President Barack Obama.

  Inside the ant lab – Mutants and social genes:

Crime, Law, Trump

Circumstantial Evidence is Often Very Reliable

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Trump’s defenders – many of whom would otherwise support aggressive criminal prosecutions – sometimes argue that the case against Trump is merely circumstantial (no “direct evidence of collusion”).  These apologists ignore what in other cases they might acknowledge: that circumstantial evidence can strongly, reasonably support a conclusion.  Eric Swalwell and Chuck Rosenberg (as recounted by Natasha Bertrand) offer some examples:

Swalwell:

What is circumstantial evidence? Suppose I’m trying to prove that my son Nelson ate some freshly baked brownies that we made together. When I turned away, all of the brownies were out. When I turned back, one was gone…

I didn’t see Nelson eat a brownie — that would be direct evidence. But when I returned, he had crumbs on his shirt, and chocolate on his lips and fingers. That would be considered circumstantial evidence that Nelson ate a brownie.

Rosenberg (via Bertrand):

Chuck Rosenberg gave me another example: you wake up with snow on your front lawn. Do you have direct evidence that it snowed? No. But the circumstantial evidence is strong, and far more likely than someone driving up to your house and throwing snow on your lawn.

So many of these law-and-order Trumpists set aside a principle of evidence underlying law and order when it comes to Trump.