When UW-Whitewater’s enrollment was expanding, and so student housing was in demand, some residents opposed to more rental properties rushed to local government in a futile effort to hold back the student tide, through zoning or code enforcement.
Now that there’s a worry that student enrollment is declining, and rental properties are less in demand, some residents are rushing to local government to do something – anything, anything at all – to reconvert former rental properties back single-family homes.
Honest to goodness, expecting local government to direct effectively the housing trends of the area is like rushing to a kitchen junk drawer for the tools to dig a ditch or build a tower.
Indeed, to repeat a point made here before: “Imagine what it would take to produce even a 50-50 distribution of owner-occupied homes in Whitewater: to equal the number of rental units Whitewater has now, she would have to add 1,758 owner-occupied units – more than the entire stock of existing owner-occupied units.” (Emphasis in original.)
Spring begins in Whitewater with mostly cloudy skies, an occasional shower, and a high of fifty. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 7:07 PM, for 12h 10m 53s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks and Rec Board meets at 5:30 PM.
The meeting’s organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name “Republican” which had been suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. You can see eyewitness accounts of the meeting, early Republican campaign documents, and other original sources on our page devoted to Wisconsin and the Republican Party. Though other places have claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican.
Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview that offers a real alternative to liberalism. Communism was an ideology — and some thought fascism was, as well — that offered a comprehensive understanding of human nature, politics, economics and governance to shape the behavior and thought of all members of a society in every aspect of their lives.
We believed that “traditional” autocratic governments were devoid of grand theories about society and, for the most part, left their people alone. Unlike communist governments, they had no universalist pretensions, no anti-liberal “ideology” to export. Though hostile to democracy at home, they did not care what happened beyond their borders. They might even evolve into democracies themselves, unlike the “totalitarian” communist states. We even got used to regarding them as “friends,” as strategic allies against the great radical challenges of the day: communism during the Cold War, Islamist extremism today.
Like so many of the theories that became conventional wisdom during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, however, this one was mistaken. Today, authoritarianism has emerged as the greatest challenge facing the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. Or, more accurately, it has reemerged, for authoritarianism has always posed the most potent and enduring challenge to liberalism, since the birth of the liberal idea itself. Authoritarianism has now returned as a geopolitical force, with strong nations such as China and Russia championing anti-liberalism as an alternative to a teetering liberal hegemony. It has returned as an ideological force, offering the age-old critique of liberalism, and just at the moment when the liberal world is suffering its greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s. It has returned armed with new and hitherto unimaginable tools of social control and disruption that are shoring up authoritarian rule at home, spreading it abroad and reaching into the very heart of liberal societies to undermine them from within.
Writing yesterday at the New York Times, liberal economist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman addressed economic challenges of rural communities in Getting Real About Rural America. It is a blog post about which reasonable observers of any ideology – left, center, right, or libertarian – could agree. Krugman writes
There’s nothing wrong with discussing these issues. Rural lives matter — we’re all Americans, and deserve to share in the nation’s wealth. Rural votes matter even more; like it or not, our political system gives hugely disproportionate weight to less populous states, which are also generally states with relatively rural populations.
But it’s also important to get real. There are powerful forces behind the relative and in some cases absolute economic decline of rural America — and the truth is that nobody knows how to reverse those forces.
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So what can be done to help rural America? We can and should make sure that all Americans have good health care, access to good education, and so on wherever they live. We can try to promote economic development in lagging regions with public investment, employment subsidies and, possibly, job guarantees.
But as I said, experience abroad isn’t encouraging. West Germany invested $1.7 trillion in an attempt to revive the former East Germany — more than $100,000 per capita — yet the region is still lagging, with many young people leaving.
It says all one could say about the conditions of rural economies that a gifted economist on the left sees the limitations of a strategy of “public investment, employment subsidies and, possibly, job guarantees.”
Bluntly stated: if Krugman lacks a public-spending solution for rural areas, there’s not the slightest chance that (far) lesser thinkers at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation or tiny local versions of the WEDC in towns across Wisconsin will be able to craft an effective solution. At the WEDC and local level, the discussion isn’t even economics as a social science – it’s political sorcery and rhetorical alchemy.
There’s no claim here that Krugman is an unbridled free-market man – it’s merely that he’s practical about state-sponsored solutions.
Krugman’s willingness to speak plainly to his fellow Democrats (“As you read this, Democratic presidential hopefuls are crisscrossing Iowa, trying to assure farmers that they share their concerns”) is admirable. (His criticism of Modern Monetary Theory – that theory being a fad of the far left – is compelling.)
Strangest of all, in Wisconsin: the strongest advocates of those rural solutions Krugman doubts aren’t Democrats, but WEDC Republicans.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 7:06 PM, for 12h 07m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 96.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
It doesn’t take a person with an advanced degree in psychology to see Trump’s narcissism and lack of empathy, his vindictiveness and pathological lying, his impulsivity and callousness, his inability to be guided by norms, or his shamelessness and dehumanization of those who do not abide his wishes. His condition is getting worse, not better—and there are now fewer people in the administration able to contain the president and act as a check on his worst impulses.
This constellation of characteristics would be worrisome in a banker or a high-school teacher, in an aircraft machinist or a warehouse manager, in a gas-station attendant or a truck driver. To have them define the personality of an American president is downright alarming.
Whether the worst scenarios come to pass or not is right now unknowable. But what we do know is that the president is a person who seems to draw energy and purpose from maliciousness and transgressive acts, from creating enmity among people of different races, religions, and backgrounds, and from attacking the weak, the honorable, and even the dead.
Donald Trump is not well, and as long as he is president, our nation is not safe.
Unfortunately, most Republicans are fine with Trump, or say they are. They have tax cuts and some judges, so what do they care if the presidency is sullied, racial anger builds, the United States’ reputation in the world is damaged, decency and objective truth are obliterated, and none of our real challenges (e.g. income inequality, climate change) are addressed? Republicans will still tell you that they are victims of liberal elites. In their minds, Trump is just evening the score on their behalf.
There is no moral or intellectual reason that will persuade them. There is no respectful conversation to be had with people who argue in bad faith. The only solution is to defeat Trump and his party so thoroughly that Trumpism is permanently discredited.
If there’s one thing that’s difficult during the NCAA Tournament, it’s figuring out where to focus your attention on Thursday and Friday, when as many as four games are going on at the same time. If your allegiance is simply the state of Wisconsin, here’s what to watch for [scheduling and other information folows].
(The whole tournament is worth watching as much as one can, but this is a good Wisconsin-only guide.)
One reads that today Foxconn is promising a less advanced facility in Wisconsin by 2020, and today’s promise has captured a few headlines.
The truth – even if Foxconn follows through on this latest promise – is an embarrassing retreat, as Bloomberg’s Tim Culpan observes:
Sounds like it’s more than a year late, and well below scale. Foxconn taking THREE years to create 1,500 jobs is a glacial pace for them. Long term target was 13,000, with ~2,000 by end 2019.
But more than six months later, it’s hard to tell what kind of progress has been made on the deal.
Foxconn representatives did not answer a list of questions related to their partnership with Wisconsin’s flagship university, instead providing a statement that said the Taiwanese electronics maker is proud of its partnership with UW-Madison.
In the late 1960s, almost all prime-working-age men, typically defined as 25 to 54, worked—nearly 95 percent. That figure had dipped to 85 percent by 2015—a decline most acutely felt among men without college degrees. The trend of men dropping out of the labor force, particularly non-college-educated men, has been building for more than six decades. It has been a slow withdrawal, but a steady one—a flow that began with a sharp decline in opportunities for men who dropped out of high school, and grew to include those who earned a diploma but not a degree.
Economists have been working to understand the roots of the decline, and have come up with a cadre of theories: Perhaps it’s a case of insufficient wages for jobs that don’t require a degree; or maybe rising incarceration rates are the real culprit (people with criminal records have a harder time getting jobs); or it could be that more jobs that did not require a degree in the past do now.
A recent working paperfrom the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that maybe it’s all of the above and then some—a complex combination of low wages for non-college-degreed jobs; incarceration rates, which are higher among men without degrees; and a sharp decline in marriage rates among less educated men, which may remove an economic incentive to work—all wrapped up into a slowly rolling ball that’s knocking more and more men out of the workforce. Sure, these issues are affecting college-educated men as well, but each of them is felt more acutely by those without degrees.
Whatever the cause, it is reasonable to conclude that a government policy that provides publicly-funded relocation incentives (money, land, etc.) for businesses using a non-college labor force is economically suspect.
A plan like that is simply doubling one’s efforts on a part of the economy from which employers are walking away (perhaps in favor of automation), and for which there are fewer good-paying opportunities and long-term prospects.
The price of enticing workers to stay in publicly-subsidized industries (often so that development gurus can claim another supposed short-term success) is a long-term dead-end for workers. A memorandum of understanding to subsidize a business like that would memorialize nothing so much as a lack of understanding.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 7:05 PM, for 12h 05m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM, and the Whitewater School Board’s open session tonight begins at 7 PM.
On this day in 1953, Braves Move to Milwaukee: “the Braves baseball team announced that they were moving from Boston to Milwaukee.”
He has talked about “Second Amendment people” preventing the appointment of liberal judges. He’s encouraged police officers to bang suspects’ heads against car roofs. He has suggested his supporters “knock the hell” out of hecklers. At a rally shortly before 2018 Election Day, he went on a similar riff about Bikers for Trump and the military.
I’m well aware of the various see-no-evil attempts to excuse this behavior: That’s just how he talks. Don’t take him literally. Other Republicans are keeping him in check. His speeches and tweets don’t really matter.
But they do matter. The president’s continued encouragement of violence — and of white nationalism — is part of the reason that white-nationalist violence is increasing. Funny how that works.
Twenty-five years ago, Democrats and Republicans felt the same way about immigrants: The Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of both parties agreed they were a burden. Immigration critics were confident that those numbers would increase as a backlash to rising immigration took hold among native-born Americans. Instead, the opposite happened. By the time Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign, the share of Democrats and independents who said immigrants strengthen America had nearly doubled, while Republican opinion on the question had barely budged.
And under Trump, anti-immigrant sentiment has fallen even further as the president’s rhetoric about immigrants alienates large swaths of the public. According to a Pew poll from January, 55 percent of Republicans—8 percent fewer than in May 2015—and a record-low 13 percent of Democrats believe that immigrants burden the United States by taking jobs, housing, and health care from native-born Americans. And according to Gallup surveys, 67 percent of Americans now say immigration should be increased or kept at its present level, the highest number since Gallup began asking the question in 1965.
The United States is in the midst of a two-decade-long shift in favor of immigration, and it is only accelerating under Trump. For all the nativist movement’s efforts over the decades to rein in immigration, the chances of preserving a white majority are effectively gone.
St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 02m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Lost in the ongoing debate over whether Wisconsin should expand eligibility for Medicaid — and accept roughly $184.9 million a year in federal dollars for doing so — is one small detail:
Former Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature already expanded the Medicaid program.
They just didn’t take the federal money available to states to offset much of the cost.
Wisconsin is the only state in the country that expanded eligibility for its Medicaid program — the change made in 2014 covered 147,000 adults without dependent children as of January — while not accepting the federal money available to states through the Affordable Care Act.
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Republicans in the Legislature — whose votes Evers would need — have largely stood firm in their opposition. And now legislators are citing a study that contends expanding the program would shift $1.1 billion in costs to private health plans.
The study — released last month by Republican lawmakers at a news conference at the state Capitol — was by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and the Center for Research On the Wisconsin Economy, or CROWE, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Economists and policy analysts quickly criticized the study for what they contend is a lengthy list of flaws, with one describing it as “baloney.”
“My real concern is they are trying to affect policy with such garbage work,” said Tim Classen, a professor of economics at Loyola University in Chicago.
The authors of the study — Will Flanders at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Noah Williams, an economics professor at UW-Madison — stand by the study and its conclusions.
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Critics of the study done by Flanders and Williams also contend that it did not account for the fact that Wisconsin already partially expanded Medicaid.
“The issue that really is not addressed for me is Wisconsin’s expansion has sort of already happened,” said Laura Dague, an economist and associate professor of health policy at Texas A&M University. “The application of these numbers to the Wisconsin context is pretty questionable.”
Basically, the study comes up with a national average of the purported cost shift to private health plans from a broad group — adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty threshold. It then applies that average to a subset of that group — those with incomes between 100 percent and 138 percent of the threshold.
The study’s critics contend that isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison.
(The WISGOP, especially, has found researchers – like Williams who know better – willing to do low-quality work on its behalf.)
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-two. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 7:02 PM, for 11h 59m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket on March 16, 1926, in Auburn, Massachusetts. Present at the launch were his crew chief Henry Sachs, Esther Goddard, and Percy Roope, who was Clark’s assistant professor in the physics department. Goddard’s diary entry of the event was notable for its understatement:
March 16. Went to Auburn with S[achs] in am. E[sther] and Mr. Roope came out at 1 p.m. Tried rocket at 2.30. It rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs., after the lower half of the nozzle burned off. Brought materials to lab. …[14]:143
His diary entry the next day elaborated:
March 17, 1926. The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn. … Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.[14]:143
A friend just returned from some time with a group of wealthy conservative donors. “They were ambivalent about Donald Trump two years ago,” he said. “Now they are vociferously pro-Trump. There’s a psychological study to be done here.”
Those in and around Republican politics have seen this dynamic at work. In spite of past misgivings, most GOP partisans seem to have accepted the idea that President Trump is their guy in the broader culture/political war.
….
So, in the 2018 midterm elections, Trump tried to nationalize the election on issues that motivate his party — appealing to those voters who are excited by exclusion. And GOP partisans responded by turning out in large numbers. But it was not nearly enough to counteract greater public fears.
In other words, the politics of partisan mobilization works only if you don’t scare the rest of America to death. Republicans have come to the defense of a man who is incapable of widening his appeal. And this has opened up a reality gap between the GOP and the rest of our political culture. The rift between Republican perceptions of the president and the view of the broader public has grown into a chasm. This is now the main political context of the 2020 campaign.
One has heard so much these last eight years about how Wisconsin has been ‘open for business,’ and for Walker and the WEDC that has meant countless subsidies and tax breaks for conservatives’ preferred businesses. Walker was never a free-market man; his whole approach rested on state capitalism (government funding some producers) and crony capitalism (government funding producers who are pals).
Given declining demand for milk, one might expect that the last thing state government would decide to do is encourage more milk production. Yet, on March 13, 2012, Governor Scott Walker announced a new program called Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20. His accompanying news release explained the name came from the intention to “achieve an annual milk production of 30 billion pounds by 2020.” The release went on to say, “The goal of the Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 program is to improve the long-term viability of Wisconsin’s dairy industry through services … to meet the growing demand of the marketplace.”
Grow Wisconsin Dairy 30×20 quickly achieved its goal. Rather than waiting until 2020, Wisconsin milk production passed 30 billion pounds in 2016.
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This odd misdiagnosis is reflected in a 2012 op ed by Ben Brancel, at that time Wisconsin’s secretary of agriculture:
Production grew less than 1 percent in 2011 to 26.1 billion pounds. Good, but not good enough to keep us on pace to meet the demands of the state’s growing processing industry and customers around the world. Wisconsin dairy farmers produce approximately 90 percent of the milk volume needed by the state’s dairy processors. We need it to be 100 percent.
This suggests that Walker and his administration were influenced less by farmers than by “the state’s growing processing industry.” Unfortunately, the demand for milk did not grow along with increased production.
A second blow to dairy farmers came more recently as the result of President Trump’s tariff war against America’s trading partners. This war was triggered by the Trump administration’s series of tariffs on imports of certain products from America’s trading partners. Several countries responded by imposing retaliatory tariffs on selected American products, including agricultural.
Rather than allow market conditions to set supply and demand through the price system, Walker chose to boost supply to help processors and in doing do devastated the dairies that produce milk. Trump came along and made dairies’ distress worse by rejecting free trade in favor of tariffs and a trade war.
Small-town, pro-business notables have adopted this same approach, directing local development agencies to waste hundreds of thousands – and in Whitewater over the years millions – of dollars for their pet projects and crackpot ‘capital catalyst’ ideas. For it all, they’ve done nothing to advance individual and household incomes, and family poverty in Whitewater has increased during their control of the Whitewater Community Development Authority. See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade, and Private Businesses Craving Public Money.
Walker and Trump, meanwhile, have harmed the very dairies on which America’s Dairyland depends.
Lil Bub is a kitten-size cat with 2 million Instagram followers, a talk show, a stage production, an album and a book. The new study reveals the weird DNA behind what is often described as her magical appeal.
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It helps to know what Lil Bub looks like to understand why they did this [examined her DNA]. The cat has a short snout, enormous green eyes and a pink tongue that hangs from her stunted jaw like an errant piece of bubble gum. She never developed teeth, and she stopped growing around four pounds. Each of her paws boasts an extra toe, for a total of 22. (Six on the front paws, five on the back.)
….
First, they compared her genome with that of a reference cat, then they focused on genes that control bodily functions. Finally, they asked a colleague who specializes in bone disorders which of those are known to cause osteopetrosis.
That led them to a mutation in a gene called RANK/TNFRSF11A, which has been found in about 15 humans and one mouse — all of whom, the researchers said, share physical similarities with Lil Bub. In X-rays, their bones look deformed and bright white, with little to no marrow cavity. The mouse, like Lil Bub, also was missing teeth, because they can’t erupt through bone that hardens too quickly. (Bub can eat just fine, and she runs and jumps thanks to a pulsed electromagnetic field therapy.)
Friday in Whitewater will be breezy with a high of forty. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 7:01 PM, for 11h 56m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 61.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Documents unsealed Thursday in a lawsuit have shed new light on how hackers breached Democratic Party email accounts before the 2016 election.
The documents include a forensic analysis by a former top official in the FBI’s cybercrime division, which concluded that a Web server company owned by a Russian Internet entrepreneur was used by Russian operatives to hack Democratic Party leaders.
The Russian businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, has denied involvement in the hack, and his lawyers argued for months that the forensic analysis should be kept under seal and hidden from public view.
The analysis was completed as part of a federal lawsuit Gubarev filed in Florida against BuzzFeed, the online news outlet. Gubarev argued BuzzFeed defamed him by publishing a dossier written by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier alleged that hackers used servers from two of Gubarev’s companies — Webzilla and its parent company XBT Holding.
The 35-page Steele dossier also alleged that Gubarev played a “significant” role in the hacking operation “under duress” from the Russian security agency FSB. Gubarev has also denied that allegation — and the new forensic analysis, conducted by an expert paid by BuzzFeed as part of the suit, provides no evidence to support the claim that Gubarev was involved.
Sergey Danilochkin, a Russian real estate investor charged with tax fraud in connection with the organized crime figures behind the Magnitsky case, now lives in South Florida and attended a January 2018 fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, during which he made a video bragging about his inside access to the property and noting the surprising number of Russian-speakers in attendance.
While the guests sipped cocktails and studied photos of African wildlife, Danilochkin, who is also an aspiring journalist, filmed the bustling ballroom on a smartphone and posted the footage on YouTube. Holding a flute of champagne and wearing a dark suit, the Russian émigré addressed the camera in his native tongue, alluding to the uncanny way Russians seem to turn up in the president’s orbit.
“The most interesting thing,” Danilochkin said, “is that we met a lot of people here who speak Russian.”
