Evaluating the credibility of these competing accounts is a question about which people of good will can and do disagree. The editors of this review have no special insight into who is telling the truth. If Dr. Blasey’s allegation is true, the assault and Judge Kavanaugh’s denial of it mean that he should not be seated on the U.S. Supreme Court. But even if the credibility of the allegation has not been established beyond a reasonable doubt and even if further investigation is warranted to determine its validity or clear Judge Kavanaugh’s name, we recognize that this nomination is no longer in the best interests of the country. While we previously endorsed the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh on the basis of his legal credentials and his reputation as a committed textualist, it is now clear that the nomination should be withdrawn.
….
If this were a question of establishing Judge Kavanaugh’s legal or moral responsibility for the assault described by Dr. Blasey, then far more stringent standards of proof would apply. His presumption of innocence might settle the matter in his favor, absent further investigation and new evidence. But the question is not solely about Judge Kavanaugh’s responsibility, nor is it any longer primarily about his qualifications. Rather it is about the prudence of his nomination and potential confirmation. In addition to being a fight over policy issues, which it already was, his nomination has also become a referendum on how to address allegations of sexual assault.
….
While nomination hearings are far from the best venue to deal with such issues, the question is sufficiently important that it is prudent to recognize it as determinative at this point. Dr. Blasey’s accusations have neither been fully investigated nor been proven to a legal standard, but neither have they been conclusively disproved or shown to be less than credible. Judge Kavanaugh continues to enjoy a legal presumption of innocence, but the standard for a nominee to the Supreme Court is far higher; there is no presumption of confirmability. The best of the bad resolutions available in this dilemma is for Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to be withdrawn.
One way in which we frequently attempt to interact with the animals that live with us is by pointing at things. It is possible that this shows our limitations rather than our animal friends since this is a particularly human means of communication. However, in 2005 a study by Miklósi et al. demonstrated that cats could indeed follow human gestures to find food. The researchers also investigated whether, when unable to solve a task, whether the cats turned to the humans for help at all. They did not.
Another study looked to see whether cats turn to humans when unsure about a certain situation. This ‘social referencing’ is something that we do both as children and as adults, for example a clown might initially seem terrifying but if everyone else is having a good time we may quickly learn that this isn’t a situation to be feared (there are always exceptions to this of course). To see whether cats do this too, the researchers exposed cats to a potentially scary fan with streamers. The cat was brought into a room with their owner and the fan was put on. The owner was then told to act either neutral, scared of the fan, or happy and relaxed around the fan. The researchers found that most cats (79%) looked between the fan and their human owner, seeming to gauge their response. The cats also responded to the emotional response of their owner, being more likely to move away from the fan when their owner was looking scared, as well as being more likely to interact with their owner. It’s difficult to know how to interpret this, but the authors suggest that the cats may have been seeking security from their owner.
Other research has also shown that cats are sensitive to human moods, being less likely to approach people who were feeling sad and more likely to approach people who described themselves as feeling extroverted or agitated. However, why this should be isn’t clear.
Friday in Whitewater will see morning showers with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 6:40 PM, for 11h 50m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Recommended for reading in full — ABA recommends Kavanaugh nomination delay, Walker Admin confiscates millions from disabled, what Erik Prince talked about with Russians, Madison nurse charged with injuring babies, video of the world’s largest battery factory —
The American Bar Association is calling on the Senate Judiciary Committee to halt the consideration of President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh until an FBI investigation is completed into the sexual assault allegations that have roiled his nomination.
In a strongly worded letter obtained by CNN Thursday, the organization said it is making the extraordinary request “because of the ABA’s respect for the rule of law and due process under law,” siding with concerns voiced by Senate Democrats since Christine Blasey Ford’s decades-old allegations became public.
“The basic principles that underscore the Senate’s constitutional duty of advice and consent on federal judicial nominees require nothing less than a careful examination of the accusations and facts by the FBI,” said Robert Carlson, president of the organization, in a Thursday night letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.
“Each appointment to our nation’s Highest Court (as with all others) is simply too important to rush to a vote,” Carlson wrote. “Deciding to proceed without conducting additional investigation would not only have a lasting impact on the Senate’s reputation, but it will also negatively affect the great trust necessary for the American people to have in the Supreme Court.”
Gov. Scott Walker’s administration has been partnering with a private company to search for foster children who are disabled or have dead birth parents — in order to take their money for state revenue. The state is even confiscating veterans’ benefits from foster children whose parents died in the military.
Contract documents obtained by public records request explain the practice. A 2011 contract signed with MAXIMUS Inc. shows that Wisconsin has collaborated with the company to maximize revenue obtained from foster children. In part of the contract focused on Milwaukee County, MAXIMUS has helped the state increase the number of children classified as disabled and to locate children with deceased birth parents — not to provide more services to the children, but so the state can take their resources.
In Milwaukee County alone, the Walker administration has been taking between $3 million and over $4 million in survivor and disability benefits from foster children each year — and the state has been taking millions more from foster children in other jurisdictions.
MAXIMUS has helped the state apply for the children’s Social Security disability (SSI) and and survivor benefits, and helped the state insert itself as representative payee to gain control of the children’s money. As representative payee, the state is obligated to use or conserve the children’s money only in their individualized best interests. But instead, the state abuses its position of trust and diverts the children’s money to state coffers — taking the children’s funds to repay state foster care costs that the children rightfully have no legal obligation to pay for.
Joint U.S.-Russian raids to kill top terrorists. Teamwork between an American government agency and a sanctioned Russian fund. Moscow pouring money into the Midwest.
These are just a few of the ideas the head of a Russian sovereign wealth fund touched on during his meeting with former Blackwater head Erik Prince in the Seychelles, just weeks before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, according to a memo exclusively reviewed by The Daily Beast.
The meeting between Prince, an influential Trump ally, and Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the sanctioned fund, took place on Jan. 11, 2017, at the Four Seasons Hotel in a bar overlooking the Indian Ocean. George Nader, a Lebanese-American businessman who advises the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, was also present.
Special counsel Robert Mueller has looked into the meeting as part of his larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. And nearly a year after the meeting, Prince told Congress his discussion with Dmitriev was just happenstance and took place “over a beer.” Prince also said he did not attend the meeting as a representative of the Trump team.
A former nurse accused of injuring 10 newborns at a Wisconsin hospital has been charged with child abuse.
A criminal complaint filed in Dane County charges 43-year-old Christopher Kaphaem with 19 felonies relating to injuries on infants born prematurely from March 2017 through early 2018.
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According to the complaint, a pediatrician with the University of Wisconsin Child Protection program reviewed the records of 40 infants who had been in the neonatal intensive care unit, reviewing medical histories, blood samples and bone mineralization samples to rule out medical causes for injuries to infants.
Investigators later identified a total of 10 infants that Kaphaem had cared for with injuries consistent with child abuse.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says five infants suffered serious injuries. The charges include intentional child abuse and abuse of a patient causing great bodily harm to babies. The injuries ranged from bruises to a broken arm and a skull fracture.
Kaphaem worked in UnityPoint Health-Meriter’s NICU since October of 2016 and worked overnight. Fellow nurses told detectives that Kaphaem would often close the door to do an infant’s care exam.
According to detectives who interviewed nurses who worked with Kaphaem, he had once told a fellow nurse “he was happy to work in the NICU because he would not have to deal with patients talking back to him.”
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-seven. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 6:42 PM, for 11h 53m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the 29th Wisconsin Infantry musters in: “The 29th Wisconsin Infantry mustered in. It would go on to participate in the battles of Port Gibson, Champion Hill, the Sieges of Vicksburg and Jackson, the Red River Campaign, the siege of Spanish Fort and the capture of Fort Blakely, Alabama.”
Recommended for reading in full — New techniques of Russian propaganda, Rand Paul fails to lessen Russian sanctions, suspected Russian assassin was a military agent, not a ‘tourist,’ the new Federal Reserve chairman sees risks of tariffs, and video of Hindu bagpipers in New Jersey —
To an untrained eye, USAReally might look like any other fledgling news organization vying for attention in a crowded media landscape. Its website publishes a steady stream of stories on hot-button political issues like race, immigration and income inequality. It has reader polls, a video section and a daily podcast.
But this is no ordinary media start-up. USAReally is based in Moscow and has received funding from the Federal News Agency, a Russian media conglomerate with ties to the Internet Research Agency, the “troll farm” whose employees were indicted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
Caught flat-footed by the influence campaigns of 2016, intelligence agencies and tech companies in the United States have spent months looking for hidden Russian footprints ahead of the midterm elections.
USAReally’s website, which began publishing in May, does not advertise its Russian roots. But in many ways, it is operating in plain sight.
Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) push to lift U.S. sanctions on Russian lawmakers failed on Wednesday, with his colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioning the motives behind the proposal.
An aide said Paul was the only lawmaker to vote for his amendment, which would scrap U.S. sanctions on members of the Russian Federal Assembly if Moscow agrees to lift its sanctions on American lawmakers. The 20 other senators on the foreign relations panel voted against it. The Daily Beast first reported that Paul would be introducing the amendment.
The Kentucky lawmaker’s push to normalize U.S.-Russia relations comes a month after he traveled to Moscow and met with Russian lawmakers. During that trip, he invited members of Russia’s legislature to visit the U.S. But many of them are subject to U.S. sanctions and are therefore unable to travel to the United States.
(Hard to overstate what a despicable fellow traveler Rand Paul has become. See alsoAppeasement Isn’t Peace.)
In fact, Boshirov is really Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a Russian military intelligence (GRU) officer.
Online investigative outlet Bellingcat and The Insider uncovered the truth:
The suspect using the cover identity of “Ruslan Boshirov” is in fact Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga, a highly decorated GRU officer bestowed with Russia’s highest state award, Hero of the Russian Federation. Following Bellingcat’s own identification, multiple sources familiar with the person and/or the investigation have confirmed the suspect’s identity.
This finding eliminates any remaining doubt that the two suspects in the Novichok poisonings were in fact Russian officers operating on a clandestine government mission.
While civilians in Russia can generally own more than one passport, no civilian – or even an intelligence service officer on a personal trip – can cross the state border under a fake identity. The discovery also highlights the extent of the effort – and public diplomacy risk – Russia has taken to protect the identities of the officers. President Putin publicly vouched that “Boshirov” and “Petrov” are civilians. As it is established practice that the awards Hero of the Russian Federation are handed out by the Russian president personally, it is highly likely that Vladimir Putin would have been familiar with the identity of Colonel Chepiga, given that only a handful of officers receive this award each year.
(…)
Bellingcat has contacted confidentially a former Russian military officer of similar rank as Colonel Chepiga, in order to receive a reaction to what we found. The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed surprise that at least one of the operatives engaged in the operation in Salisbury had the rank of colonel. Even more surprising was the suspects’ prior award of the highest military recognition.
In our source’s words, an operation of this sort would have typically required a lower-ranked, “field operative” with a military rank of “no higher than captain.” The source further surmised that to send a highly decorated colonel back to a field job would be highly extraordinary, and would imply that “the job was ordered at the highest level.”
The true identity of his accomplice Alexander Petrov remains unclear, but The Telegraph has established that he was travelling under his real first name and had only changed his surname to an alias.
Counter-terrorism police and the security services are understood to know his real name.
[Federal Reserve Chairman] Powell — measured to the point of hedging on several key fronts, businesslike and brief in his answers — pointed to a fundamentally strong economy as justifying the central bank’s decision to hike interest rates by a quarter-point for the third time this year while penciling in a fourth for December. Yet he warned of a “rising chorus of concerns from businesses all over the country about disruption of supply chains, materials cost increases,” from the administration’s trade confrontations.
“If this, perhaps inadvertently, goes to a place where we have widespread tariffs that remain in place for a long time, a more protectionist world, that’s going to be bad for the United States economy,” Powell said. (Watch the whole news conference here.)
Those of us who are residents and citizens, who by birth or naturalization have a right to vote, should not have to run a governmental maze to exercise that right. On the contrary, government officials and their bureaucracies are mere instrumentalities of a popular sovereignty, and their officiousness and obstacles at best offend, and at worst truly transgress, the rights of free men and women.
I’d not require anyone to vote, as it would be an infringement on one’s free choice. It seems right, however, that government at all levels that takes millions or billions in taxes each year should devote a portion therefrom to assuring that citizens are properly registered to vote. Automatic registration – with an easy remedy to correct bureaucrats’ mistakes – seems among the least one might expect of government.
A citizen should not owe voter registration paperwork to government; government should provide registration to assure that citizens may vote with the minimum of effort or difficulty.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of clouds and sun with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM, for 11h 56m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Recommended for reading in full — Evers considers tax cuts for needy families, Walker’s former transportation secretary escalates criticism, members of the U.N. laugh at Trump, Russian propagandists try new tricks, and video of a bear catching fish underwater —
Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public schools and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, says he wants to help more than 860,000 of Wisconsin’s neediest families with a tax break. But how he would fund those cuts is a fluid process.
Speaking at a Milwaukee Rotary Club event Tuesday, Evers cited an August United Way of Wisconsin report that found almost 40 percent of Wisconsin families struggled to pay for basic needs like transportation and child care.
Evers said giving these families a tax cut would boost the state’s economy more evenly. Funding these cuts, he said, is a matter of priorities.
“You go to the budget, you get the best you can and you try to do it without any taxes and it happens,” Evers said. “It happens every single time.”
Evers maintains the state can find savings in parts of government, including the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s job creation agency, which Evers has vowed to eliminate and replace.
In a Tuesday interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Mark Gottlieb, a Republican who led the state Department of Transportation from 2011 to 2017, also said Walker is “fear-mongering” by claiming his campaign opponent, Democrat Tony Evers, could raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar per gallon.
Those comments came shortly before Walker appeared at a Milton Interstate rest stop Tuesday, touting his expedited plans for part of the Interstate 39-90 project in Dane and Rock counties.
How to pay for roads and bridges has been a longstanding political flashpoint for Walker. Gottlieb’s latest remarks are an indicator the issue will not abate as the general election nears.
President Trump has long argued that the United States has been taken advantage of by other nations — a “laughing stock to the entire World,” he said on Twitter in 2014 — and his political rise was based on the premise that he had the strength and resolve to change that.
But at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump got a comeuppance on the world’s biggest stage. Delivering a speech that aimed to establish U.S. “sovereignty” over the whims and needs of other nations, the president’s triumphant moment was marred in the first minute when he was met by laughter — at his expense.
The embarrassing exchange came when Trump boasted that his administration had accomplished more over two years than “almost any administration” in American history, eliciting audible guffaws in the cavernous chamber hall.
The ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Russia-linked propagandists and tech companies now includes a simple tactic the Russians are using to sidestep social media bans — changing web addresses.
Reddit users last week were able to trace links posted to a pro-Trump community back to a Russian propaganda website that shares web infrastructure with the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). The links appeared to have been custom-made to appeal to a particular community, /r/The_Donald, which is known to be the most fervent and active in support of the president.
The address-changing effort highlights how propagandists continue to push disinformation on digital media platforms, employing new strategies to hide their origins as companies begin to crack down on foreign influence campaigns.
Cosimo Mortola, an analyst who tracks Russian disinformation for security firm FireEye, said that propaganda operations that started years ago have learned new tricks.
“We’ve been tracking the IRA for several years and there’s no doubt that they’re getting more sophisticated,” Mortola said.
Noah Smith of Bloomberg recently published a thirteen-tweet thread in reply to Tucker Carlson’s dismissive questioning of diversity. The small town from which I write is a diverse place, of different ethnicities, occupations, and ages. Smith’s defense of diversity as a social strength was first published on 9.9.18, beginning at 10:02 AM. His full remarks appear below, from first to last.
Smith sees the underlying advantage, and necessity, of a diverse society: “to treat people as individuals and respect their individuality.”
1/ Tucker Carlson’s question – “How is diversity our strength?” was not asked in good faith, but for purposes of racist demagoguery.
But I will try to answer it in good faith, because it’s an important question in its own right.
2/ I have lived in a non-diverse country – Japan in the mid 2000s – and it was pretty nice. About as nice as America, on average. (Though I should mention that Osaka, where I lived, benefited from some immigrant influence that helped give it a unique attitude and culture).
3/ But America is different. It has special strengths – as a nation, and as a culture – that will always give it an advantage, assuming we choose to keep those strengths.
And diversity is central to those.
4/ Many people who defend diversity-for-diversity’s sake will point to either the ideas and products that people from diverse backgrounds offer (Taco trucks on every corner! Korean BBQ on every block! Etc.). And sure, that is certainly nice…
5/ Others point to the benefits of diversity for work teams. A diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds may lead to more creativity, force team members to sharepen their performance, etc. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter… That sounds plausible, and may in fact be true…
6/ But I believe that the benefit America draws from diversity is much, much more important than either of those things. The main benefit, I believe, comes from the nature of the institutions that are necessary to deal with diversity successfully.
7/ In order to make a diverse society function, you can’t expect people to follow the rules. You can’t expect everyone to have a deep-rooted knowledge of their proper place in society. To a greater extent, you have to treat people as individuals and respect their individuality.
8/ People from diverse backgrounds are constantly struggling to understand each other better, to take each other’s divergent family histories and cultural backgrounds into account, in order to get along at work, at school, in marriages, etc. That effort strengthens us.
9/ Our institutions, too — schools, companies, etc. – are forced to take more of an account of people’s backgrounds than they would if they could simply assume that everyone came from the same background. Diversity means we can’t expect or force people to fall in line.
10/ In other words, diversity strengthens America’s core values of individuality and freedom. Diversity provides a backstop defense against the natural tendencies of homogenization and conformity.
11/ In other words, America chooses to embrace diversity not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because the payoff – a society that instinctively respects each individual’s irreplaceable, unique humanity – is worth it.
12/ I believe that there is a chance our experiment might fail. That building a free society from people of all races, religions, and national origins might in fact prove too hard a task. Tucker Carlson and his ilk are living proof that we might fail. They are the failure mode.
13/ But if we succeed – if we CONTINUE to succeed – then I believe the payoff will be unique and unmatched. A country with institutions strong enough not to have to rely on homogeneity will be the strongest country imaginable. The America experiment must continue.
Imagine a world where public officials appointed spouses to high-visibility positions in the very same workplace, over which they had supervisory authority, but then disclaimed any responsibility over those appointees when they committed acts of assault and harassment (“that wasn’t me, that was my spouse, brother, sister, or cousin,” etc.). They’ll rely on their own use of nepotism as a defense.
The relative’s familial connection would naturally concern and intimidate potential complainants, but at the same time allow the official to contend falsely that the relative’s conduct was merely and exclusively the relative’s fault despite the appointment, the supervisory responsibility, and the official’s obligation to keep a workplace same and free from coercion and intimidation.
Multiple allegations of harassment and assault at UW-Whitewater are more than simply a matter of a spouse‘s misconduct toward others (now numbering five complainants). They reveal the failure of the appointing official.
Pete Hill was no ordinary, unconnected spouse: he was 1) appointed publicly 2) by this chancellor, Beverly Kopper 3) to attend public events 4) present often in chancellor’s office and 5) about whom the chancellor kept investigations secret for months despite knowing of allegations against Hill.
Doubt not that public relations flacks and smarmy operatives will try to spin this in the press, trying to make the worse appear the better reason, to protect the high-level leader who made the appointment.
And yet, and yet — the actual conditions of these coercive acts – found to have merit after a state investigation – are public ones showing the failure of supervisory authority and workplace safety.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 59m 29s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council and Finance Committee will hold a joint meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, Little Rock High School in Little Rock, Arkansas is integrated under federal order: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”
Recommended for reading in full — Brad Schimel’s assault prosecutions, recovery from racism, Rosenstein and the Mueller investigation, and former Burnett County D.A. investigated for dating requests of women who were defendants in his cases —
Attorney General Brad Schimel did not recommend jail time in a pair of cases where 17-year-olds sexually assaulted younger victims when he was a county prosecutor in the early 2000s, court records show.
As an assistant district attorney in Waukesha County in 2003, Schimel prosecuted Dustin Yoss for attacking two 15-year-olds. In one incident, Yoss was alleged to have held down a girl and pulled down his pants before she escaped.
In another, Yoss allegedly badgered a different 15-year-old to have sex with him and offered her $500 to do so. She repeatedly refused but eventually relented. Afterward, he allegedly badgered her to have sex a second time until she agreed. During that second time, she told him to stop but he wouldn’t stop, according to the criminal complaint.
Schimel charged Yoss with five felonies and four misdemeanors. In 2004, he reached a deal in which Yoss pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a child. The other charges were dismissed, though some of them could be considered for sentencing purposes.
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“Both victims consider their decisions they made that night to be very bad judgment to put themselves in the bedroom alone with Mr. Yoss,” Schimel told the judge.
As to the victim who eventually agreed to have sex, Schimel told the judge, “She said no, no, no, no, but then eventually gave in and then let the defendant do it out of fear. That’s a little tougher call to — or a lot tougher call to make the force allegation, and she knows that.”
As the son of agrand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Derek Black was once the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement.
Growing up, he made speeches, hosted a radio show and started the website KidsStormfront — which acted as a companion to Stormfront, the white nationalist website his father, Don Black, created.
“The fundamental belief that drove my dad, drove my parents and my family, over decades, was that race was the defining feature of humanity … and that people were only happy if they could live in a society that was only this one biologically defined racial group,” Black says.
It was only after he began attending New College of Florida that Black began to question his own point of view. Previously, he had been home-schooled, but suddenly he was was exposed to people who didn’t share his views, including a few Jewish students who became friends.
Black’s new friends invited him over for Shabbat dinner week after week. Gradually, he began to rethink his views. After much soul-searching, a 22-year-old Black wrote an article, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2013, renouncing white nationalism.
Derek Black’s “awakening” is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow’s new book, Rising Out Of Hatred. Saslow also interviewed Black’s father and other leaders in the white nationalist movement.
But we have to remember that if one way or another Trump can find someone to fire Mueller, it would be a political crisis even more dramatic than most of the ones he has already created. Every newspaper and TV news program would be talking about impeachment. If his aides have succeeded in convincing him not to fire Sessions, they may well be able to convince him not to order Mueller’s firing.
And it’s probably too late anyway. If this were all happening a year ago when the Mueller investigation was still getting off the ground, firing the special counsel might have done the trick. But at this point, Mueller and his team have done an enormous amount of work — and gotten guilty pleas and cooperation from five of Trump’s former aides (though his personal attorney Michael Cohen is cooperating not with Mueller at the moment but with the U.S. attorney in New York). Mueller may not be quite done, but he is surely close.
And given how meticulous they’ve been, it would be a shock if Mueller and his team haven’t prepared for the eventuality of being shut down. Perhaps they’ve kept a running, frequently updated report outlining everything they’ve found, a report that would one way or another find its way to the public. I’m guessing that if Democrats take over the House in November as everyone expects, they’ll use their power to subpoena documents and witnesses to do everything they can to bring the information assembled by the Mueller team to light.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating a retired county prosecutor over date requests he allegedly made to women who had cases in his county.
KMSP-TV reports former Burnett County District Attorney William Norine reached out through Facebook to at least six women who were defendants in criminal cases.
One woman whose two children were in protective custody told the station Norine asked her out through Facebook Messenger. She says she had to respond because she didn’t want to jeopardize her freedom or her children “by ticking him off.”
Over these years of writing, I have sometimes referred to self-important political and community figures in Whitewater as notables, town squires, etc. It should be clear (at least one hopes!) that these descriptions rest not on the basis of others’ actual talent as elites but instead on their overweening (ludicrous, unjustified) sense of entitlement. (Most people – not merely a few – are very clever; society could not function otherwise.)
Still, Eliot A. Cohen’s description of national elites does convey the same selfishness one finds among many small-town ladder-climbers:
The stories of [Ed] Whelan and [Judith] Butler [recounted in Cohen’s full essay] have nothing to do with whether one thinks Kavanaugh and Ronell did nothing at all or behaved appallingly. They have everything to do with the current crisis of American elites in many fields, including the law and higher education. For the lawyer and the professor are exquisitely similar. Their academic pedigree is magnificent: Harvard Law School, Yale graduate school. Their position in their profession is eminent, if detached from the rest of the world. If you are a liberal, you probably do not know or care that Whelan writes often for National Review and is a leading figure in conservative legal circles; if you do not know, or care to know, much about critical theory, the writings of Butler are academic in the unflattering sense of that term. But in their world, they are, if not royalty, lords of the realm.
Their motives here are also similar: Eminent friends are being taken down at the peak of their professional career by someone who is, in their world, a nobody. It’s outrageous, and it has to be stopped. And if, by so doing, you defame a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, accusing him of attempted rape, or effectively threaten to obliterate a graduate student’s career by lending a mob of literature professors the imprimatur of the MLA [Modern Languages Association], so be it. That is the point and that is the sin: the willingness to stomp hard on a defenseless little guy in order to protect your highly privileged pal.
Of the many forms of cruelty, that directed against those who are weak or powerless is one of the worst. Of itself, it undermines whatever legitimacy a person can claim by virtue of intellectual or professional distinction. Societies and governments will have elites—that is simply inescapable, except perhaps in an ancient city-state, and probably not even then. But in a free society, for those elites to exercise their power—their very real power, as those subject to it well know—they have to do so with restraint and good judgment. The alternative is, sooner or later, revolt, which is why higher education often finds itself battered by angry citizens who, in a different setting, conclude that the legal system, too, is rigged.
The libertarian impulse is, and always will be, to contend and balance against those who use powerful institutions for themselves and their few friends. Those who have this tendency to climb so high as they can, into government in particular, and then kick down at any and all is not confined to major cities; small towns, too, have their share of this, albeit on a narrower scale.
That narrower scale, however, is not so much smaller that cliques, filled with a false sense of their own merit, cannot (and do not) torment anyone who interferes with their thin schemes and wide self-image.
After – and only after – the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story of repeated sexual harassment claims against Pete Hill – appointed to a public role as ‘associate of the chancellor’ (and chancellor Beverly Kopper’s husband) – did Kopper herself make a public statement of the matter.
Kopper’s statement is notable for its utter lack of mention – let alone sympathy – for the individual complainants’ conditions and equal membership in the university community. Indeed, it’s striking in that regard:
I want to share with you a difficult situation for me personally and professionally. The UW System completed, and has now released an independent investigation into sexual harassment allegations made against the Associate of the Chancellor, Pete Hill, who is my husband. Although we typically do not discuss personnel issues publicly, I feel it is important to make this one exception and I have UW System’s permission to do so.
I fully supported and cooperated with UW System’s investigation. It was determined that the allegations had merit. UW System has ended my husband’s unpaid appointment as Associate to the Chancellor and restricted him from attending UW-Whitewater events. I supported this decision and put it into effect immediately.
As Chancellor, my top priority has always been and will continue to be ensuring that UW-Whitewater is a welcoming campus for all and that students, faculty and staff have a positive and safe environment in which to learn, live and work.
As you can imagine, this is a challenging and unique set of circumstances for me as a wife, as a woman, and as your Chancellor. As your Chancellor, I have worked diligently to ensure each of you has the supportive environment you need and deserve in which to do your amazing work.
I remain deeply committed to serving you and continuing the work of our University to provide our students with an education that is truly transformational and to make a difference in our communities, the state, nation and the world.
(Needless to say, Kopper’s failed in achieving her stated top priority of a safe and welcoming campus for all, or she would not have admitted – after the matter was already public in a newspaper – that the complainants’ allegations had merit. There’s now a third investigation underway which may show how well Kopper actually cooperated with the prior investigations. One can see from the public records already released that she in fact disputed some of the investigative findings of fact.)
The statement begins with Kopper’s description of her own challenges but mentions nothing about complainants as individuals. While Kopper mentions herself in the first paragraph and in the first-person singular, there’s not even a collective, third-person plural for the complainants (not even a ‘they’ or ‘them.’)
It’s not that one would expect Kopper or UW-Whitewater to name those who were at that time unnamed; it’s that Kopper doesn’t mention them as people – as individuals – even through a pronoun.
Two-hundred fifty-one words, and yet not a single word of sympathy for any of the women whose allegations have, by Kopper’s own admission, genuine merit.
This Tuesday, September 25th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Tag @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
Tag (Comedy)
Tuesday, September 25, 12:30 pm
Rated R (language, sexual content) – 1 hour, 40 min (2018)
Tag, you’re it! Boys never grow up. Based on the true story of a group of men who have spent three decades tagging each other across the country in order to stay in touch with each other over the years. A rollicking comedy starring Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson and Jon Hamm.
