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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Animals, Cats, City, Dogs

Friday Cat and Dog Blogging: Beanie Shows the Way Forward

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Longtime readers know that this website has warned residents about the dangers of marauding coyotes, and their stealthy efforts to overwhelm civilization and rule this planet.  See Coyotes Begin War Against Humanity. Reports about coyote designs on Milwaukee (part of FW’s Daily Bread post for today) show how little time is left to act.

Doubtless, a key component of their strategy is the conquest of Whitewater.

Even if residents have little regard for themselves, the least they could do is prepare their pets.  A chihuahua in the southwest named Beanie, now a viral sensation for wearing products from Coyote Vest, shows us the way forward:


Beanie wears her coyote vest to ward off attacks in the desert.  AMINA AKHTAR / COURTESY

Earlier this week, an image of a tiny dog in some kind of wild neon dog armor began to ricochet around the internet. A popular dog-rating Twitter account pronounced her coyote-proof. The comedian Andy Richter named the little pup the next host of the Academy Awards.

Coyote Vest has a full line of products for dogs – and cats – to keep them safe from coyotes, hawks, or aggressive dogs.  Dogs and cats wearing this gear will not only be safe, but will look sharp in a Mad Max/punk rocker kind of way. (I have no connection to the company, obviously; I just like the idea of denying coyotes and hawks a meal of domesticated pets.)

So, Whitewater: even if thousands of residents foolishly allow the city to be overrun, at least a few properly-equipped pets might survive to carry on, and perhaps one day even rebuild.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.7.18

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-three.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 08m 12s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service attacks the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

  Tory Newmyer writes Trump wants to narrow the trade deficit. It just reached a ten-year high:

President Trump’s favored gauge for the health of U.S. trade is veering hard in the wrong direction.

The country’s trade deficit reached a 10-year high in October, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. The U.S. bilateral trade deficit with China also reached a monthly record, rising 7.1 percent to $43.1 billion.

Trump has been calling out that gap since the campaign trail as a sign that China is taking advantage of the United States. Never mind that a trade deficit doesn’t mean, as Trump argues, that the United States is losing money to China — rather, simply, that Americans are buying more from the Chinese than the Chinese are buying from Americans.

  Annie Lowrey asks Does Trump Even Understand How Tariffs Work?:

Fundamentally, Trump seems to misunderstand how tariffs work, insisting that they act as a tax on foreign companies and translate into more American wealth. “I am a Tariff Man,” he wrote on Twitter. “When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs.” But the tariffs are acting, as one would expect them to act, as a tax on American consumers, raising domestic prices and slowing the domestic economy. (They’re slowing the global economy, too.)

Despite the back-and-forth, it seems likely that at some point Trump will get some trade concessions from the Chinese and both sides will lift their tariffs. At that point, Trump will undoubtedly declare a “win.” But he won’t have managed to change the Chinese economy, revitalize the heartland, or reduce the United States’ trade deficit—which has grown to a record gap with China since he took office.

  Justin Amash responds to Trump in tweets from 12.4 and 12.5:

I am a Liberty Man. Trade is not raid. Voluntary exchanges make Americans wealthier. ’s tariffs, which create barriers to exchange, are paid for by Americans. Taxing Americans to steer our decisions is social engineering that reduces our economic power and makes us poorer.

….

International trade is like other trade in that it takes place between people or businesses, not countries. Believing that X country is buying/selling Y product from/to the United States likely leads to more mistakes in economic analysis than any other misconception about trade.

Yelping pack brings presence of coyotes alive in Milwaukee area:

Economy, Trump

Pro-Trump Areas Worse Off Than Ever

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Economics professor Anthony W. Orlando writes Is Trump country really better off under Trump? No. It’s falling further behind:

Two years have passed since Donald Trump made his famous campaign promise in disaffected regions across the country: “We are going to start winning again!” For many voters who felt that they had lost ground in recent decades, the candidate argued, a vote for him would be rewarded with renewed prosperity and prominence.

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By most measures, my latest research shows, Trump counties — and especially counties with higher proportions of Trump voters — continue to fall farther behind the rest of the country economically. The story of our economy, like the story of our politics, continues to be a story of division and divergence.

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Consider the stark differences in basic measures of local economic performance — employment and housing prices — between counties where the majority of votes were cast for Donald Trump and counties where the majority voted for Hillary Clinton. The average Clinton county employs seven to eight times as many workers as the average Trump county, with nearly double the market value per single-family home. In part, this difference reflects the higher population density of the urban areas, which voted disproportionately for Clinton. But as my analysis shows, it has been growing over time, as the Clinton counties outperform their Trump counterparts.

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Using a standard statistical technique called “difference-in-differences,” I estimate the difference between Trump and Clinton counties before and after the election and show whether the difference … differs. In other words, I look at whether the economic performance gap narrows. The answer: No. Statistically, there appears to be no significant improvement in job growth. The gap in housing price growth actually widens. In fact, the larger the Trump electorate and the larger the degree of Trump support, the worse the county’s economic performance.

See Orlando, Anthony W., Where’s the Winning? (October 16, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3267509 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3267509.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.6.18

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 09m 12s of daytime.  The moon is new with 0.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6:00 PM.

On this day in 1884, a 100-ounce (2.83 kg) aluminum apex/lightning-rod tops, and so completes,  the Washington Monument’s construction.

On this day in 1821, Wisconsin’s first post office opens.

Recommended for reading in full:

  Mireya Solís writes Enjoy the Trump-Xi trade war truce while it lasts (“But brace for 2019”):

Moving back from the brink of a tariff spiral that would kill the chances of any bilateral talks is certainly good news. But what Trump and Xi have done is merely punt the ball on heated (and perhaps intractable) trade and investment negotiations to 2019. The structural negotiations highlighted above are supposed to move at a fast clip, with only a 90-day window to show substantial results or end the tariff ceasefire.

  Mark Follman observes The Mueller Investigation Grows More Ominous for Trump and His Inner Circle:

“The time that he can get away with lying to the American people all the time and evading accountability is coming to an end.”

That was one of several pointed remarks on Sunday from Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, as he spoke about Donald Trump and the latest revelations from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. In a plea deal made public on Thursday, the president’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about the extent and duration of his boss’ efforts to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the 2016 presidential campaign. “The fact that [Trump] was lying to the American people about doing business in Russia and that the Kremlin knew he was lying gave the Kremlin a hold over him,” Nadler said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “One question we have now is, does the Kremlin still have a hold over him because of other lies that they know about?”

  William Saletan writes Trump Is More Loyal to Dictators Than to the U.S.:

Trump’s perpetual dishonesty about U.S. intelligence is a threat to national security and American democracy. It’s also a manifestation of his fundamental disloyalty to the United States. Seven months ago, when Haspel was nominated to succeed Pompeo as CIA director, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner cautioned her about serving “a president who does not always seem interested in hearing, much less speaking, the truth.” Other Trump officials, Warner noted, had been “attacked for telling a truth in public that contradicts the White House narrative.” That’s the paradox of working in Trump’s CIA. The despot you have to manage is your own boss.

Why Do Fish Float Upside Down When They Die?:

Gov. Walker, Politics, Wisconsin

The Incredible Shrinking Man

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How very odd, truly, that even now Gov. Walker feels compelled to retweet a story from the MacIver Institute praising his tenure. (That organization’s motto –  ‘the free market voice for Wisconsin’ – is incredible: they’ve spent years boosting Walker’s corporate welfare and crony capitalism.  Walker’s shown no understanding of, or respect for, free-market economics.)

It’s part sad, part laughable that he has to reach all the way over to the MacIver Institute to find a publication to praise his tenure – there are few mainstream Wisconsin publications that will.

One has to be small and needy, and likely getting even smaller by the day, to retweet puff pieces on the way out.

Many Wisconsinites – even those of us opposed to @GovWalker – will be surprised at how quickly the state moves on emotionally from him.  His failures will still bedevil, but Walker will resemble the ex-spouse happily ditched and (mostly) put out of mind.

I am reminded of an expression my late father occasionally used at the departure of someone who would not be missed: ‘he’ll be someone else’s headache now.’

Health, Walworth County, Wisconsin

Walworth County Average or Below Average in Health of Residents, Influences Contributing to Health

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Most of Whitewater sits within Walworth County, a county that ranks in Wisconsin’s bottom half for the overall health of its residents (‘ length and quality of people’s lives’) and average for the influences on health (‘individual health behaviors, social and economic conditions, access to healthcare and the quality of the physical environment’).  Malia Jones of WisContext asks Which Counties Rank Best For Health?  Here’s how Walworth County ranks:

(Jefferson County, in which a smaller part of Whitewater is situated, ranks far better, at 12 of 72 for health outcomes and 14 of 72 for health factors.)

Economy, Immigration, Mendacity, Trump

Entire Trump tweet on immigrant aid is wrong

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The Associated Press reports an [e]ntire Trump tweet on immigrant aid is wrong:

TRUMP’s retweet: “Illegals can get up to $3,874 a month under Federal Assistance program. Our social security checks are on average $1200 a month. RT (retweet) if you agree: If you weren’t born in the United States, you should receive $0 assistance.”

THE FACTS: Wrong country, wrong numbers, wrong description of legal status of the recipients. Besides that, immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally do not qualify for most federal benefits, even when they’re paying taxes, and those with legal status make up a small portion of those who use public benefits.

The $3,874 refers to a payment made in Canada, not the U.S., to a legally admitted family of refugees. It was largely a one-time resettlement payment under Canada’s refugee program, not monthly assistance in perpetuity, the fact-checking site Snopes found a year ago in debunking a Facebook post that misrepresented Canada’s policy. A document cited in the Facebook post, showing aid for food, transportation and other basics needs, applied to a family of five.

Apart from confusing Canada with the United States, the tweet distributed by the president misstated how much Americans get from Social Security on average — $1,419 a month for retired workers, not $1,200.

Overall, low-income immigrants who are not yet U.S. citizens use Medicaid, food aid, cash assistance and Supplemental Security Income aid at a lower rate than comparable U.S.-born adults, according to an Associated Press analysis of census data. Noncitizen immigrants make up only 6.5 percent of all those participating in Medicaid, for example.

(Emphasis added.)

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.5.18

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 10m 15s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 2.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

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

On this day in 1879, the Humane Society of Wisconsin is organized.

 

 

Recommended for reading in full:

  Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes describe A Flynntriguing Sentencing Memorandum:

First, the document is chiefly interesting for what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that Flynn has breached his plea agreement and lied to investigators, as Mueller has said about Manafort. It doesn’t say that he failed to provide substantial assistance to the investigation, as Mueller said in the George Papadopoulos sentencing memorandum. It says, rather, that Flynn began cooperating early, that his early cooperation was important in encouraging other witnesses to be candid, and that he has provided substantial assistance to the probe in a number of areas.

Second, Flynn’s cooperation with federal authorities has been diverse and extensive. The document says he has met 19 times with the Special Counsel’s Office and other components. His cooperation appears to involve not merely the Russia probe but also other matters as well. Putting this point together with the absence of complaints about Flynn’s behavior, the affirmative statement that he has given substantial assistance, and the recommendation that he get as little as no jail time, the only conclusion is that Mueller has gotten everything he needs from Flynn.

….

Third, because the addendum to the sentencing memo is mostly redacted, one is left reading tea leaves in the document’s redactions. Some of these are reasonably legible. It seems that Flynn is cooperating in at least three ongoing investigations: a criminal investigation about which all details are redacted; Mueller’s investigation into “any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald J. Trump”; and at least one additional investigation about which all information is redacted.

As BuzzFeed News’s Chris Geidner noted, it appears likely from the length of the redaction bar that the first criminal investigation is not a matter being conducted by the special counsel’s office—though, of course, it’s impossible to know for certain. Notably, however, the addendum does state that Flynn has “participated in 19 interviews with the SCO [Special Counsel’s Office] or attorneys from other Department of Justice [“DOJ”] offices,” which would be consistent with significant cooperation in a matter not under Mueller’s jurisdiction (emphasis added).

See Sentencing Memorandum and Addendum.

The Fall And Rise Of A Fearless Fox:

Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Conflicts of Interest, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Elections, Gov. Walker, Kakistocracy, Law, Laws/Regulations, Local Government, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, Tony Evers, WEDC, Wisconsin

Once a Gerrymanderer…

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Wisconsin, with a gerrymandered legislature and a crony capitalist, lame-duck governor, was never going to have an easy transition back to a tradition of democratically representative government and sound economic policy.  The men who engineered years of the wrong approach were never going to go gently to the political outer darkness that, deservedly, awaits them.

And yet, and yet, the underlying demographics in Wisconsin are unfavorable to the WISGOP.  They can inhibit these changes, but they cannot prevent them.

Governor-elect Evers promises that he “will take any steps possible” to prevent Republican lawmakers from removing key powers from his new administration.  (I supported Evers in this race, and one would have hoped – but not truly expected – that he would have had a fairer start than the WISGOP is giving him.  No doubt, he wasn’t looking for any of this, but a steady and firm response will do him well, and only increase his popularity with his fellow Wisconsinites.)

It’s worth noting that the WISGOP wants to change the WEDC’s board structure to increase the Republican majority’s control over it, but [e]ight former economic development directors tell lawmakers not to change job creation board (“If the head of WEDC isn’t a trusted, even central, part of the governor’s cabinet, the whole economic development enterprise will suffer”).

Indeed, the WISGOP’s efforts will only speed the collapse of the WEDC as an agency.

In any event, for Whitewater and other small towns, there are nests of state capitalist and ‘development’ men, hawking government spending for ‘tools,’ ‘partnerships,’ and ‘capital catalysts.’ These tools have been tried for years in Whitewater, and for it all we’re still a low-income economy.

No one, however, should have expected any less than the worst from this legislature’s gerrymanderers and this outgoing administration’s schemers.

Babbittry, Blogging, New Media, Newspapers, Politics

The New Version of Old

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One reads that the Daily Union has a new publisher.  Stories about that chain publisher show that (so far) it has changed little at its papers.  A sale of some kind, to someone, is no surprise.  The new publisher has a string of small-town papers, and no sign of a strategy for better reasoning or better writing at any of them. Even practically, they’ve no unified look to any of the publications purchased over the last few years, and no compelling digital strategy for them.

(The patriarch of the family is reportedly a billboard magnate and Trump supporter, but the papers acquired are mostly stumbling and ineffectual, with no evidence that anyone on staff could make Trumpism appear other than it is.)

These are troubled times for small, rural communities, and anyone taking over a publication in them with high hopes of quick success is deluded.

The day should begin not with grand expectations but with a diligent commitment to good reasoning and good writing, in the service of good principles.  Officials and notables in these small places are mostly – but not always – situationally motivated, and that’s among the worst motivations.

One should hold to something bigger than the mutual back-patting of a few middling cronies. There are important ideas (of reasoning, politics & economics, law, history, philosophy, and conscience) to advance and defend.  One begins each day with The Better Approach of the Dark-Horse Underdog.

The Daily Union has a new publisher?

No, it has a new old publisher.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.4.18

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-one.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 11m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waning crescent with 7.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1864, the Wisconsin 10th Light Artillery fights in the Battle of Waynesborough, Georgia.

 

 

Recommended for reading in full:

  Justin Glawe reports Facebook Lets Users Post About Killing Immigrants and Minorities:

Facebook users freely post about killing immigrants, minorities, and public figures in spite of the company’s terms of service that clearly prohibit threats of violence and hate speech.

The company just two weeks ago touted new technology it says detects 52 percent of hate speech before anyone reports it. (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed the technology caught 90 percent of pro-ISIS and al Qaeda content.) Yet that technology didn’t catch more than 100 instances in the last six months of Facebook users advocating to shoot or kill others, according to a Daily Beast review.

….

“Just shoot them as they cross. Ammo is cheaper than barbed wire,” wrote a police officer in Oklahoma.

“Just shoot them,” wrote a Maine man wearing a Make America Great Again hat in his profile picture. “Line up a few dead ones as well,” added the safety supervisor at the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant.

Jennifer Rubin observes Trump’s not winning anything, anywhere:

This is what comes from nationalistic know-nothingism, from deploring the very institutions and relationships that have kept us from world war and spread prosperity since the end of the WWII. It’s what flows from a foreign policy that amounts to a series of discrete gestures to please his base (move the embassy to Jerusalem, get out of the JCPOA and Paris accord) but lacks an answer to the question that follows each of these moves: What next?

  Julia Davis writes Putin’s Media Roasts Trump: Russia ‘Should Spit’ on Him and the United States:

“Rossiya 1” news anchor Kirill Kleymenov pulled no punches, asserting that by canceling his G20 meeting with Vladimir Putin, “Donald Fredovych Trump” subjected the world to a roller coaster ride, everyone in the Trump administration needs tranquilizers, and Donald Trump himself could use a teleprompter—after all, he’s “pushing 80.” (Trump is 72.)

  Mike McIntire, Megan Twohey and Mark Mazzetti report How a Lawyer, a Felon and a Russian General Chased a Moscow Trump Tower Deal:

When Donald J. Trump took a run at building a tower in Moscow in the middle of his 2016 presidential campaign, it was the high point of a decades-long effort to plant the “Trump” flag there.

The role his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen played in the endeavor entered the spotlight again on Thursday after he pleaded guilty to misleading Congress. But the effort was led in large part by Felix Sater, a convicted felon and longtime business associate with deep ties to Russia.

 The Last Chess Shop in New York City:

Corruption Probe, Crime, Misconduct, Russia, Sanctions, Trump, Trump-Russia

Lifting Russian sanctions key to Trump deal exposed by Cohen

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Rachel Maddow shows how the Trump Organization’s continued pursuit of a Trump Tower Moscow deal into the 2016 campaign, exposed by Michael Cohen this week, explains Donald Trump’s soft stance on sanctioning Russian entities, including the bank that would finance the Trump Tower deal.

Trump has survived dozens of political or financial acts that would have rightly ruined anyone else; he is in this way a master of maneuver, of actions at the moment.

The case against Trump and his ilk, however, is one of attrition, resting as it does on the crushing, inescapable weight of carefully accumulated evidence.