Hyper-localism in politics has affected – and harmed – Whitewater and countless other small towns. The idea that there were better local standards on economics, open government, and politics than the best American standards was always a truly risible conceit. The best standards on these matters were always broad and wide. (See How Many Rights for Whitewater?, What Standards for Whitewater? and Methods, Standards, Goals.)
Anyone who ever said – and so many men in this city have said – that the goal of local politics was merely to place adults in the room underestimated the possibilities for politics and over-estimated his own importance.
We are now in a time where it should be clear that political hyperlocalism is dead. Trumpism has nationalized politics, the way any bigoted authoritarianism gripping the federal government necessarily would. In truth, even before Trumpism, there has been a trend toward nationalization of our politics.
And look, and look – this distinction between national and local was always a bad idea, but now it’s a delusional one, a false longing for a false past.
Hyper-localism always produced bad policy; in our time, it’s now also an abdication of moral responsibility. Shielding local Trumpist candidates from the scrutiny of their views only gives them an easier entry to power, after which they will afflict life in even the smallest cities and towns.
A proper League of Voters – composed either of men or women – should amount to something more than unwitting handmaidens of Trumpism.
No person should have prioritized local politics in 1925 Italy, 1939 Spain, or 1974 Chile. The issues there and then were national.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:06 PM, for 10h 53m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
A description of the events was published in Finland six years later, written by a blacksmith named T. Ahllund, who had been recruited to work in Sitka only less than two years previously.[23]
We had not spent many weeks at Sitka when two large steam ships arrived there, bringing things that belonged to the American crown, and a few days later the new governor also arrived in a ship together with his soldiers. The wooden two-story mansion of the Russian governor stood on a high hill, and in front of it in the yard at the end of a tall spar flew the Russian flag with the double-headed eagle in the middle of it. Of course, this flag now had to give way to the flag of the United States, which is full of stripes and stars. On a predetermined day in the afternoon a group of soldiers came from the American ships, led by one who carried the flag. Marching solemnly, but without accompaniment, they came to the governor’s mansion, where the Russian troops were already lined up and waiting for the Americans. Now they started to pull the [Russian double-headed] eagle down, but—whatever had gone into its head—it only came down a little bit, and then entangled its claws around the spar so that it could not be pulled down any further. A Russian soldier was therefore ordered to climb up the spar and disentangle it, but it seems that the eagle cast a spell on his hands, too—for he was not able to arrive at where the flag was, but instead slipped down without it. The next one to try was not able to do any better; only the third soldier was able to bring the unwilling eagle down to the ground. While the flag was brought down, music was played and cannons were fired off from the shore; and then while the other flag was hoisted the Americans fired off their cannons from the ships equally many times. After that American soldiers replaced the Russian ones at the gates of the fence surrounding the Kolosh [i.e. Tlingit] village.
Recommended for reading in full — Trump family’s dishonest business practices, Midwest dairy farmers reach out to immigrants, proof Julian Assange was the Russian tool we all knew he was, indicting an unnamed culprit through his DNA profile, and video on how to make a good-tasting veggie burger —
Heather Vogell, Andrea Bernstein, Meg Cramer, and Peter Elkind report Pump and Trump (“Donald Trump claims he only licensed his name for real estate projects developed by others. But an investigation of a dozen Trump deals shows deep family involvement in projects that often involved deceptive practices”):
SINCE DONALD TRUMP’S FORTUNES came surging back with the success of “The Apprentice” 14 years ago, his deals have often been scrutinized for the large number of his partners who have ventured to the very edges of the law, and sometimes beyond. Those associates have included accused money launderers, alleged funders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and a felon who slashed someone in the face with a broken margarita glass.
Trump and his company have typically countered by saying they were merely licensing his name on these real estate projects in exchange for a fee. They weren’t the developers or in any way responsible.
But an eight-month investigation by ProPublica and WNYC reveals that the post-millennium Trump business model is different from what has been previously reported. The Trumps were typically way more than mere licensors or bystanders in their often-troubled deals. They were deeply involved in these projects. They helped mislead investors and buyers — and they profited handsomely from it.
Patterns of deceptive practices occurred in a dozen deals across the globe, as the business expanded into international projects, and the Trumps often participated. One common pattern, visible in more than half of those transactions, was a tendency to misstate key sales numbers.
In interviews and press conferences, Ivanka Trump gave false sales figures for projects in Mexico’s Baja California; Panama City, Panama; Toronto and New York’s SoHo neighborhood. These statements weren’t just the legendary Trump hype; they misled potential buyers about the viability of the developments.
Another pattern: Donald Trump repeatedly misled buyers about the amount (or existence) of his ownership in projects in Tampa, Florida; Panama; Baja and elsewhere. For a tower planned in Tampa, for example, Trump told a local paper in 2005 that his ownership would be less than 50 percent: “But it’s a substantial stake. I recently said I’d like to increase my stake but when they’re selling that well they don’t let you do that.” In reality, Trump had no ownership stake in the project.
The Trumps often made money even when projects failed. And when they tanked, the Trumps simply ignored their prior claims of close involvement, denied any responsibility and walked away.
See also“Trump, Inc.” is a joint reporting project from WNYC Studios and ProPublica that digs deep into the mysteries of the President’s businesses.
Roberto Tecpile often puts in 70 hours a week at the Rosenholm dairy farm in Cochrane, Wisconsin — a place where winter days are short and can be bitterly cold. It is a job that farmers say most Americans refuse to do.
Tecpile, a native of Astacinga, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, has spent nearly 20 years in the United States, the past four working for farmer John Rosenow. According to his boss, Tecpile is the “go-to guy” for fixing farm equipment — whether it be a lawnmower or a gauge. Tecpile said the job is going well, and right now it is the most important thing as he prepares to return home in a year or two.
….
Rosenow has visited Tecpile’s family twice in Astacinga. Rosenow’s farm is one of 60 to 70 in western Wisconsin and southeast Minnesota involved in Puentes/Bridges, a small nonprofit that organizes annual trips to Mexico to bridge the cultural gap between farmers and their employees — and the physical gap between the workers and their families.
Newly released Ecuadorean government documents have laid bare an unorthodox attempt to extricate the WikiLeaks founder from his embassy hideaway in London by naming him as a political counselor to the country’s embassy in Moscow.
But the 47-year-old Australian’s new career in international affairs was nipped in the bud when British authorities vetoed his diplomatic status, effectively blocking him from taking up the post in Russia.
The files were made public late Tuesday by Ecuadorean opposition lawmaker Paola Vintimilla, who opposes her government’s decision to grant Assange nationality. They largely corroborate a recent Guardian newspaper report that Ecuador attempted the elaborate maneuver to get Assange to Moscow just before Christmas last year.
Russian diplomats called the Guardian’s story “fake news,” but the government files show Assange briefly was made “political counselor” to the Ecuadorean Embassy in Moscow and eligible for a monthly salary pegged at $2,000.
Ecuador also applied for a diplomatic ID card, the documents show, but the plan appears to have fallen apart with the British veto.
The anonymous person had mailed two threatening and racially tinged letters to Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colás, the Wisconsin county’s first Hispanic judge, after one of the most controversial decisions of his career. It was early October 2012, and Colás had just struck down a law that gutted collective bargaining rights for public employees, resulting in praise from unions and piles of hate mail from others — including death threats from this anonymous mailer. The judge’s decision was later overturned. But the pursuit of the anonymous letter-writer continued.
The first threat on the judge’s life came enclosed with a Los Angeles Times newspaper clipping that detailed the murders of two Mexican politicians, suggesting Colás may be next. The second came enclosed with an advertisement for dentures, suggesting Colás may be losing his teeth soon — or perhaps worse.
No one has received more enthusiastic advocacy from Trump than the world’s most infamous human rights abuser, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “Great personality and very smart — good combination,” Trump said after the Singapore meeting. “I learned that he’s a very talented man. I also learned that he loves his country very much.” Last month at a rally in West Virginia, he gushed that “We fell in love, okay? No, really — he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters.”
….
The sender has never been caught. They don’t know his name. But he put a 9-cent stamp on one of the envelopes he mailed — never mind that the last time that stamp was sold by the Postal Service was about 1975. And forensic analysts took the spit left on the back of the stamp and ran it through the lab to obtain a DNA profile, which, as it happened, matched the DNA found on anonymous threatening letters mailed to three other public officials in Wisconsin.
But they still had no name. So on Oct. 8, the night before the statute of limitations would have made an indictment impossible, the Wisconsin Department of Justice filed felony charges, in a case now known as State of Wisconsin vs. John Doe, Unknown Male With Matching Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) Profile at Genetic Locations D3S1358 (15, 18), etc.
And yet, and yet – one reads that even during the third investigation for sexual harassment & assault concerning the relative she appointed, supervised, and allowed to work without community warning during two prior investigations – Chancellor Beverly Kopper proposes an advisory council “that will seek to expand and build new partnerships between business, community, and governmental organizations.”
She’s sure that “[a] strong community benefits a university, and a thriving university benefits the community.”
A trite platitude will not do. In any event, someone who has been in Whitewater for years, and managed in her current role so poorly, now presumes to promote a community effort.
No, and no again.
A strong community and a strong university both rest on sound principles of diligence, servant leadership, and institutional and personal accountability for wrongs inflicted on individuals.
Over these years I’ve been writing, dozens and dozens of officials who touted themselves, or residents who fancied themselves, the next big thing have come and gone, often in disappointment.
Whitewater’s true betterment requires better – higher – standards of leadership and official accountability.
No ‘legislative and community outreach’ man will cure what afflicts Whitewater’s officials and political culture. His work, of whatever kind, will be nothing more than a diversion from actual injuries to individuals who are as much (or one could say more) members of this community than he is.
There will be no worthy ‘governmental affairs’ solution, no ‘advisory council solution,’ and no ‘community’ solution in this city until all its residents are treated with equal rights and afforded equal consideration.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:08 PM, for 10h 56m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board is scheduled to meet at 5:30 PM.
On this date President Richard Nixon traveled to Green Bay to speak at a testimonial dinner in honor of Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr
Recommended for reading in full — Trump as defender of dictators, Trump’s tax cuts didn’t reduce the deficit despite his promises, the middle class needs a tax cut but Trump hasn’t given them one, ICE separates tens of thousands of U.S. citizen children from their parents, and video of getting over your ex through science —
President Trump is the best advocate the world’s worst human rights offenders and state-backed murderers could ever hope for. When it comes to international thugs, who include the United States’ enemies, they have no better friend than Trump.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has routinely received aid and assistance from Trump. During the campaign, Trump defended Putin’s alleged involvement in deaths of journalists. “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?” he told Bill O’Reilly. Since the election, Trump has been Putin’s go-to guy for casting doubt on Putin’s interference in U.S. elections. In Helsinki, Trump declared: “My people came to me. Dan Coats came to me, and some others. They said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” (He later claimed he meant to say “why it would not be,” which makes absolutely no sense.) He told Lesley Stahl on Sunday, “They [the Russians] meddled. But I think China meddled, too.” (Stahl pointed out: “This is amazing. You are diverting the whole Russia thing.”)
No one has received more enthusiastic advocacy from Trump than the world’s most infamous human rights abuser, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “Great personality and very smart — good combination,” Trump said after the Singapore meeting. “I learned that he’s a very talented man. I also learned that he loves his country very much.” Last month at a rally in West Virginia, he gushed that “We fell in love, okay? No, really — he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters.”
On the campaign trail, Trump first proposed a $10 trillion tax cut, far larger than any Republican rival’s, but insisted it wouldn’t boost the federal budget deficit because the economy would “take off like a rocket ship.”
Though Trump sharply pared back this proposal, he continued to maintain the deficit wouldn’t rise.
That claim was politically important for congressional Republicans who used it to convince holdout lawmakers to vote yes.
But even as growth has accelerated, the Treasury reported that the 2018 deficit swelled to $779 billion. That level, the highest in six years, marks a 17 percent increase over 2017.
At a recent rally in Montana, President Trump claimed that “Republicans passed the biggest tax cuts in American history, the biggest in American history. Everybody in this room is better for them. Everybody is better for them.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Everybody is not better off from the recent tax cuts, which have only served to increase the federal budget deficit—now $779 billion for FY 2018 according to new data released by the Treasury Department. To be sure, the middle class gets help temporarily, but over the longer run, the middle class will be worse off.
THE MIDDLE CLASS IS SEEING SLOWER INCOME GROWTH THAN BOTH THE RICH AND THE POOR
This fact is made all the more egregious in light of evidence that the middle class isn’t doing well and needs help. Stagnating incomes, opportunity gaps, and fragile families are all reasons to worry about the middle class. Public policy has done little to ameliorate these concerns. After accounting for taxes and transfers, growth in average middle-class household incomes has lagged significantly behind the lowest and, especially, the highest income quintiles. Incomes of the top 20 percent rose by 97 percent from 1979-2014—over twice as much as middle-class incomes. Even the lowest quintile has seen faster income growth, 69 percent, or two thirds higher than income growth for the middle class. In short, both public policy and the economy are leaving the middle class behind.
THE 2017 TAX LAW DOESN’T HELP THE MIDDLE CLASS
The new tax law—known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA)—will exacerbate this trend. The benefits of the law tilt toward the well-off both now and in the future, according to the distributional analysis of the Tax Policy Center. By 2027, benefits of the tax law flow entirely to the rich. (The Joint Committee on Taxation finds similar results using a different measure.)
As of July 2010, Congress began requiring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to ask people slated for deportation if they are parents of minor children who are U.S. citizens. Those questioned provide the information on a voluntary basis, and it is compiled into reports submitted twice a year to Congress. According to three recent years’ worth of data reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity, ICE deported a total of 87,351 people between 2015 and the end of 2017 who claimed to have at least one U.S.- citizen child.
In 2015, ICE counted 31,411 parents of minor citizen children deported. The number declined slightly to 28,860 in 2016. The number declined again to 27,080 in 2017. In the second half of 2017, a report shows, the number of deported people identifying themselves as parents of citizen children increased by 2,152 over the first half of 2017.
ICE officials said there is no data available yet for 2018.
….
Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a Syracuse University-based research organization, recently created a profile of detainees currently held in 217 ICE detention centers. As of June 30 of this year, ICE was holding 44,435 people in custody. Out of this group, 58 percent had no criminal convictions. About 21 percent had committed a minor infraction, such a traffic violation; another 5 percent had committed an offense defined only as “other;” and 16 percent had committed what ICE considers a serious crime, which can include selling marijuana.
Some of Whitewater’s residents may have heard – because it’s been falsely told to them – that diversity – the inclusion of people from different backgrounds and characteristics – is a group value resting on subcultures of varying size. Hearing this, they’ve heard something else, too: that to abandon a particular leader in Hyer Hall is to abandon a progressive commitment to diversity, leaving that principle undefended from ideological attack.
Diversity doesn’t – and so politically needn’t – rest on a progressive or collective political foundation. Indeed, there are people who believe in individual liberty, free markets, and peaceful international relations (we’re called libertarians) who know that a diverse society rests on rights and respect for individuals as individuals, rather than a collective social foundation.
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.
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.
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.
Now, fearing the consequences of a failed leadership, the denizens of Hyer Hall point to support for diversity as one of their supposed gifts to this small city, and warn their friends that should they go, a commitment to diversity will go.
This pointing and these warnings are self-serving lies: diversity rests on respect for individuality, and it will have a robust defense in this city long after one scheming, selfish administrator or another departs the public scene.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 6:09 PM, for 10h 59m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 47.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s CDA meets at 5:30 PM, the Alcohol Licensing Committee at 6:10 PM, Common Council at 6:30 PM, and the Finance Committee at approximately 7 PM.
On this date the Milwaukee Bucks opened their first season with an 89-84 loss to the Chicago Bulls. The loss was witnessed by 8,467 fans in the Milwaukee Arena. The starting lineup featured Wayne Embry at center, Fred Hetzel and Len Chappell at forward, and Jon McGlocklin and Guy Rodgers in the backcourt. Larry Costello was the head coach. The Bucks had its first win in their sixth game of the season with a 134-118 victory over the Detroit Pistons.
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s era of cruelty, the false morality of sheer power, Newt Gingrich as wrecker, signs of fascism, and video of the science of a frog’s leap —
It is difficult to trace causality in foreign affairs, but there is little doubt that Trump has reduced the cost of oppression and political murder in the world by essentially declaring it none of America’s business. And when you reduce the cost of something, you get more of it. U.S. indifference on human rights abuses is taken by other governments as a form of permission.
The story of a journalist [Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi] killed while picking up documents for his wedding is particularly powerful. But the aggregation of such horrors — the sum of killing and human misery at this historical moment — is stunning. The Trump era is also — perhaps not coincidentally — the age of mass atrocities. And the United States’ president is not concerned enough to be ashamed of it.
Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, the Trump administration is trying to persuade its audience of a deeply pernicious version of “might makes right:” that a political victory counts as moral vindication. The case at hand is the idea that now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation by the Senate somehow disproves the allegations of sexual assault against him. Trump was unusually explicit about this on Monday, but expect to hear variations of it from him, other members of his administration, and the talking-points-reciting apologists in Congress and elsewhere for a long time to come.
No one actually, consciously believes that a political victory can prove the victor innocent of charges that were under dispute at the time. In any dispute about whom to elect or appoint to a public office, many different issues are in play and the decision-makers (voters, senators, etc.) might decide that a particular charge is true, or probably true, and yet outweighed by other considerations. Or the decision-makers might think the charge is false and be wrong about that, since the election or the confirmation hearing wasn’t a criminal trial and didn’t involve the careful presentation of all the evidence. (And even a not-guilty verdict at a criminal trial doesn’t prove innocence; it only says that proof beyond a reasonable doubt hasn’t been provided to the satisfaction of these jurors and/or this judge.) Stated generally, there’s surely nothing controversial about any of this. Treating an election or a confirmation vote as proof of innocence is an updated version of the superstition associated with trial by combat: If I were guilty, the gods wouldn’t have let me win.
And yet the repeated use of this kind of might-makes-right argument by the Trump administration doesn’t strike their audience as jarringly absurd. It resonates, and lends itself to easy repetition.
McKay Coppins profiles The Man Who Broke Politics (“Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements”):
In the clamorous story of Donald Trump’s Washington, it would be easy to mistake Gingrich for a minor character. A loyal Trump ally in 2016, Gingrich forwent a high-powered post in the administration and has instead spent the years since the election cashing in on his access—churning out books (three Trump hagiographies, one spy thriller), working the speaking circuit (where he commands as much as $75,000 per talk for his insights on the president), and popping up on Fox News as a paid contributor. He spends much of his time in Rome, where his wife, Callista, serves as Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican and where, he likes to boast, “We have yet to find a bad restaurant.”
But few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise. During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction. Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence.
Trump justifies his treatment of Christine Blasey Ford by the outcome of the Kavanaugh hearings: “It doesn’t matter. We won.”
One wouldn’t have to go to Washington, or wait for Trump to speak, to find this sort of act utilitarianism. Long before Trump’s 2016 campaign, officials and self-described community leaders in small towns across America shared a similar calculus. For the sake of some imagined overall gain, individual injuries and injustices have been swept aside.
And so, and so — officials justify financial and personal injuries to individuals on behalf of the supposed greater good of being ‘community-minded,’ of defending the ‘university family,’ or some such collective claim.
Trump’s act utilitarianism did not begin with Trump: it grew in cities and towns in which factions decided they’d take what they want, and conveniently sweep aside others by use of nebulous ‘community’ principles. (In the video above, Trump betrays his amorality early on, as he shrugs his shoulders when part of Christine Blasey Ford’s injury is recounted to him.)
In most of these cases of supposed collective gain, of course, it turns out to be a particular politician, particular businessman, or particular university official who reaps the most at the expense of ordinary individuals, but these community leaders would prefer one didn’t look too closely into that selfish benefit, thank you kindly.
Whether a highly-placed person’s selfish gain, or community’s supposed overall gain, the disregard for individual rights reveals a dark, calculating amorality.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 6:11 PM, for 11h 02m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this date 2,500 Marinette-Menominee lumbermen walked off the job to support a reduction in workday hours. Mill owners locked out the workers in an attempt to force acceptance of an eleven-hour workday. The lockout failed as many lumbermen simply moved away from the area rather than agree to work eleven hour days. The employers were forced to negotiate with unions and conceded to a ten-hour work day and cash payment for wages.
Recommended for reading in full — GOP majority leader’s family benefited from program for minorities, the relationship with Saudi Arabia is out of control, Trump’s Middle East policy is a fantasy, Trump admits Putin is ‘probably’ a murderer, and video about a woman who searches for missing women —
A company owned by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s in-laws won more than $7 million in no-bid and other federal contracts at U.S. military installations and other government properties in California based on a dubious claim of Native American identity by McCarthy’s brother-in-law, a Times investigation has found.
The prime contracts, awarded through a federal program designed to help disadvantaged minorities, were mostly for construction projects at the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in McCarthy’s Bakersfield-based district, and the Naval Air Station Lemoore in nearby Kings County.
Vortex Construction, whose principal owner is William Wages, the brother of McCarthy’s wife, Judy, received a total of $7.6 million in no-bid and other prime federal contracts since 2000, The Times found.
….
Wages says he is one-eighth Cherokee. An examination of government and tribal records by The Times and a leading Cherokee genealogist casts doubt on that claim, however. He is a member of a group called the Northern Cherokee Nation, which has no federal or state recognition as a legitimate tribe. It is considered a fraud by leaders of tribes that have federal recognition.
Possible Saudi involvement in the disappearance—and alleged murder—of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi presents the U.S.-Saudi relationship with its greatest crisis since 9/11. If the Saudis are proven guilty of this heinous crime, it should change everything about the United States’ long-standing relationship with Saudi Arabia. Regrettably, it probably won’t.
….
Donald Trump’s enabling of Saudi Arabia began even before he became president. He talked openly on the campaign trail about his admiration for Saudi Arabia and how he couldn’t refuse Saudi offers to invest millions in his real-estate ventures. His predecessors may have gone to Mexico or Canada for their first foreign foray; Trump chose Saudi Arabia. In a trip carefully choreographed by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who quickly established close personal ties with the soon-to-be crown prince, Trump was feted, flattered, and filled with hopes of billions in arms sales and Saudi investment that would create jobs back home. Trump’s aversion to Barack Obama’s Iran deal also fueled the budding romance. Trump used his anti-Iranian animus (even while he boasted that he’d make a better deal with the mullahs) to energize his ties with Riyadh, and MbS [crown prince Mohammed bin Salman] was only too happy to exploit his eagerness. Reports that MbS saw Trump’s team, particularly Kushner, as naive and untutored should have come as no surprise.
Previous administrations—both Republican and Democratic—also pandered to the Saudis, but rarely on such a galactic, unrestrained, and unreciprocated scale. Through its silence or approval, Washington gave MbS—the new architect of the risk-ready, aggressive, and repressive Saudi policies at home and in the region—wide latitude to pursue a disastrous course toward Yemen and Qatar. The administration swooned over some of MbS’s reforms while ignoring the accompanying crackdown on journalists and civil-society activists. Indeed, The Guardian and other outlets reported that MbS had told Kushner in advance of his plans to move against his opponents and wealthy businessmen, including some royals, in what might be termed a “shaikhdown.”
When Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected president, two nations in the Middle East that had been particularly aggrieved by the policies of the Obama administration rushed to take advantage. They were Saudi Arabia and Israel — and they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
….
Trump and his supporters argued that this radical shift would lead to Mideast breakthroughs that eluded the Obama administration, including a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that the Saudis would help to broker. His son-in-law and Middle East point man, Jared Kushner, talked expansively both of forging that “ultimate deal” and of an “Arab NATO” to roll back Iranian influence across the region.
Today, those ambitions have been revealed as the misguided fantasies they always were. The disappearance and alleged murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul has exposed the real return on Trump’s gambits: a string of reckless acts by the Saudis and Israelis that have made the region more rather than less unstable.
The leaders of the two countries, Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu, have given Trump what he most craves: sycophantic support. On substance, however, they have done next to nothing to reciprocate unilateral Trump concessions such as the embassy move or the resumption of U.S. support for Saudi bombing in Yemen. Netanyahu expanded West Bank settlements and rejected confidence-building steps with the Palestinians. The Saudis, predictably, have failed to deliver on the $110 billion in arms purchases Trump boasted about last year.
Most U.S. presidents make their first foreign trip to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Trump went to Riyadh, where he was lavishly flattered and feted. He deputized his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to manage the relationship with the Gulf states, which were more than willing to mentor the young presidential aide in the ways of Middle Eastern diplomacy while dangling the ever elusive proposition of Gulf support for Israel (which they still do not recognize). Trump touted the potential for tens of billions of dollars in Saudi investment in the U.S., and heaped praise on the Saudi leadership. In a picture that seemed to capture perfectly the way in which the dynamic in the Middle East had changed, Salman, Trump, and the Saudi-backed Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi placed their hands on a glowing orb as if they were masters of the globe. The days of Egyptian democracy and of diplomacy with Iran were a thing of the past, and so were any U.S. restraints on Saudi foreign policy or attention to complaints about human rights.
President Trump said he believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin “probably” has been involved in assassinations and poisonings, but he appeared to dismiss the gravity of those actions, noting that they have not taken place in the United States.
“Probably he is, yeah. Probably,” Trump told CBS’s Lesley Stahl when asked during an interview on “60 Minutes” whether he thinks Putin is involved “in assassinations, in poisonings.”
“But I rely on them; it’s not in our country,” Trump added.
A long line of Russian dissidents, journalists and others critical of Putin have been poisoned or died under mysterious circumstances; in one of the most recent cases, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter were poisoned in Britain, allegedly by Russian operatives. Russia denies any involvement in the attack.
“If you’re just out there somewhere on the land, dead, and nobody’s looking for you—that’s the worst thing in the world,” says Lissa Yellowbird-Chase in Vanished, a new documentary from The Atlantic. Yellowbird-Chase, a private citizen and volunteer investigator, has devoted her life to searching for missing American Indians.
American Indian women and girls are reported missing at a disproportionately high rate compared with most other demographics. Although there is no federal database that tracks their disappearances, Mary Kathryn Nagle, a tribal sovereignty attorney, told The Atlantic that legal structures help to “create a climate in the United States where Native women go murdered and missing.”
Recently, Yellowbird-Chase has been focused on one case in particular: that of Melissa Eagleshield, who disappeared in 2014 in Minnesota. “It was like she just vanished,” says Jodi Dey, Eagleshield’s aunt. No arrests have been made in relation to her case. In the film, Yellowbird-Chase and Eagleshield’s family visit the last place that Melissa was seen alive in order to search for clues.
But in the end, these turn-of-the-20th-century African-American activists [in Richmond and dozens of other southern cities in 1904] could not stop Jim Crow’s advance. Their suits, sit-ins, letter-writing campaigns, boycotts, marches and impassioned pleas to lawmakers failed to make a difference when legislators were determined to segregate no matter the costs. Segregation or exclusion became the law of the land in the American South, and remained so for many years, separating black and white Southerners not only on trains and streetcars but also in schools, neighborhoods, libraries, parks and pools.
Progressives, liberals and sexual assault survivors and all those who desire a more just and decent America and who feel they lost when Kavanaugh was confirmed despite their protest should remember Mitchell, Plessy, Walker and Wells, along with Elizabeth Jennings, James Pennington, Lola Houck, Louis A. Martinet, Rodolphe Desdunes, P.B.S. Pinchback, W.E.B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, J. Max Barber and many others, including those whose names we do not know. All of these men and women were on the side of justice and lost. None of these people, who fought for full and equal public access as free citizens on trains and streetcars, stopped fighting. None abandoned what they knew was right. They all tried again. Most would not live to see things made right, but they continued.
Those who see Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a lost battle in the larger war for gender equality and dignity for women — and sexual assault survivors, specifically — should emulate the activists of generations past. They should keep organizing, connect with like-minded people, volunteer for organizations that advocate for survivors, consider running for office, and work on the campaigns of those they believe in. A week after his confirmation, a reminder is in order: Movements are about more than moments; they are about thoughtful networks of dissent built over time.
My scholarship has taught me that activism requires a certain resilience, and the willingness to be long-suffering in pursuit of the cause. I hope people remember this. I hope they keep going.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with occasional showers, and a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset 6:13 PM, for 11h 05m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Such was the difficulty in this task that the answer to many of the inherent challenges was along the lines of “Yeager better have paid-up insurance.”[25] Two nights before the scheduled date for the flight, Yeager broke two ribs when he fell from a horse. He was worried that the injury would remove him from the mission and reported that he went to a civilian doctor in nearby Rosamond, who taped his ribs.[26][Note 2] Yeager told only his wife, as well as friend and fellow project pilot Jack Ridley, about the accident. On the day of the flight, Yeager was in such pain that he could not seal the X-1’s hatch by himself. Ridley rigged up a device, using the end of a broom handle as an extra lever, to allow Yeager to seal the hatch.
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s son-in-law paid no federal taxes for year after year, Schimel-Kaul debate, American leadership & Saudi Arabia, LaCroix as ersatz faith, video of canine vacation ambassadors—
Jesse Drucker and Emily Flitter report Kushner Paid No Federal Income Tax for Years, Documents Suggest (“Confidential documents reviewed by The Times indicate that Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, probably paid little or no income tax from 2009 to 2016”):
Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million.
And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes, according to confidential financial documents reviewed by The New York Times.
His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.
….
Thirteen tax accountants and lawyers, including J. Richard Harvey Jr., a tax official in the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations, reviewed the documents for The Times. Mr. Harvey said that, assuming the documents accurately reflect information from his tax returns, Mr. Kushner appeared to have paid little or no federal income taxes during at least five of the past eight years. The other experts agreed and said Mr. Kushner probably didn’t pay much in the three other years, either.
In 2014, the state Department of Justice discovered some 7,000 untested sexual assault kits being stored across Wisconsin. In September, Schimel announced that that backlog was gone.
But in Friday’s debate, Kaul questioned why it took so long for the kits to be tested.
“In his first year in office, Wisconsin received millions of dollars to address that backlog, but after he served for two years as attorney general, only nine of the kits in the backlog had been tested,” Kaul said.
Kaul added that the delay in testing led to a delay in getting justice for survivors of sexual assault — a task he’d prioritize if elected.
“Now Schimel said mission accomplished, I fundamentally disagree with that, the goal here is not simply to test these kits, it’s to get justice for survivors of sexual assault and there’s a lot of work left to be done to get justice,” Kaul said.Wisconsin U.S. Senate race: Vukmir, Baldwin debate in Wausau with key clashes on health care and immigration
When Donald Trump took office, any effort to restrain the Saudi regime disappeared. Instead, Trump and his team fell comfortably into the full embrace of MbS [Saudi Mohammad bin Salman] and MbZ [Emerati Mohammed bin Zayed]. These men understood well the mind-set of a transactional, egocentric, New York real-estate developer who cared little for universal rights or the liberal international order that the United States had built. Indeed, Saudis and Emiratis have invested in New York real estate for decades, and Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric about Iran and the nuclear deal was music to their ears. Here was the opposite of Obama, the analytical, deliberate, and idealistic leader whom they found so frustrating.
Most U.S. presidents make their first foreign trip to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico. Trump went to Riyadh, where he was lavishly flattered and feted. He deputized his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to manage the relationship with the Gulf states, which were more than willing to mentor the young presidential aide in the ways of Middle Eastern diplomacy while dangling the ever elusive proposition of Gulf support for Israel (which they still do not recognize). Trump touted the potential for tens of billions of dollars in Saudi investment in the U.S., and heaped praise on the Saudi leadership. In a picture that seemed to capture perfectly the way in which the dynamic in the Middle East had changed, Salman, Trump, and the Saudi-backed Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi placed their hands on a glowing orb as if they were masters of the globe. The days of Egyptian democracy and of diplomacy with Iran were a thing of the past, and so were any U.S. restraints on Saudi foreign policy or attention to complaints about human rights.
A recent class-action lawsuit against LaCroix claims that the sparkling-water company has misled consumers by calling its products “natural.” From a certain perspective, it’s a slam-dunk case: Flavored sparkling water does not gush directly from Mother Nature’s teat, and aluminum does not spontaneously form convenient gleaming cylinders so we may drink refrigerated cans of “naturally essenced” LaCroix, popping them open with fingers designed by evolution for precisely that task.
Of course, this is not what LaCroix means by “natural.” Rather, its label — and the plaintiff’s attraction to it — can be understood only in light of our tendency to conflate “natural” with “goodness.” It’s no coincidence that the word “innocent” also features prominently in LaCroix’s marketing materials and packaging. “Natural” invokes a religious myth, an origin story about pure beginnings. With giant islands of garbage floating in the seas, microplastics polluting the oceans and human-caused climate change ravaging the globe, it makes sense to be suspicious of human tampering.
….
Buying “natural” is the modern equivalent of buying indulgences — deep down, we probably know that holiness can’t be purchased, but the opportunity is just too tempting to pass up. In this sense, both LaCroix and the people who buy it because it’s “natural” are guilty of reinforcing the false faith of consecrated consumption and the false idol of nature to which it is dedicated. Instead of confusing “natural” with innocence and goodness, we should think hard about who stands to benefit from the ritual practices that result.
But seeSean Biggerstaff’s thread on Twitter (“I am disappointed and also angered to say that I will not be appearing at the @WandWFestival in Jefferson, Wisconsin this month. This is due to incompetence and dishonesty on the part of Scott Cramer, the head of the festival, who has known for some time that the event is in trouble, has been lying about it, and is now in breach of contract with me….So why the hell are city councils getting into bed with these shysters?”)
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-three. Sunrise is 7:06 AM and sunset 6:14 PM, for 11h 07m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 20.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress establishes an American navy: “On this day, Congress authorized the purchase of two vessels to be armed for a cruise against British merchant ships; these ships became Andrew Doria and Cabot.[1] The first ship in commission was the USS Alfred which was purchased on November 4 and commissioned on December 3 by Captain Dudley Saltonstall.[6] On November 10, 1775, the Continental Congress passed a resolution calling for two battalions of Marines to be raised for service with the fleet.[7]”
Recommended for reading in full — Trump asks black voters to honor him while he praises Robert E. Lee, meet the researchers unmasking Russian assassins, myths of the 2018 midterms, for a young Jesuit grad at the synod justice for migrants is personal, and video of a really big Peruvian tarantula —
LEBANON, Ohio — President Trump praised the Confederate general Robert E. Lee while asking African American voters to “honor us” by voting for him at an Ohio rally that featured an unexpected and provocative monologue on America’s Civil War history.
Addressing an open-air rally of around 4,000 supporters, Trump appeared buoyant as he declared that Lee was a “true great fighter” and “great general.” He also said Abraham Lincoln once had a “phobia” of the Southern leader, whose support of slavery has made his legacy a heavily contested and divisive issue.
The comments came during an anecdote about Ohio-born President Ulysses S. Grant’s alleged drinking problems, which historians deem exaggerated.
….
Minutes earlier, Trump had hailed African American unemployment numbers and asked black voters to “honor us” by voting Republican in November. “Get away from the Democrats,” he told them. “Think of it: We have the best numbers in history. … I think we’re going to get the African American vote, and it’s true.” He also celebrated hip-hop artist Kanye West’s visit to the Oval Office on Thursday, adding: “What he did was pretty amazing.”
Aric Toler isn’t exactly sure what to call himself
“Digital researcher, digital investigator, digital something probably works,” Toler says.
Toler, 30, is part of an Internet research organization known as Bellingcat. Formed in 2014, the group first got attention for its meticulous documentation of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Toler used posts to Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, VK, to track Russian soldiers as they slipped in and out of eastern Ukraine — where they covertly aided local rebels.
Since then, Toler and his colleagues have been up to a whole lot more. They’ve used commercial satellite images to track Chinese air bases; watched security operations unfold on social media in Venezuela; and pinpointed the locations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria.
Now Toler and the nine other full-time members of Bellingcat’s small, international staff are increasingly being drawn into some of the biggest news stories in the world. This week they unmasked one of two Russian agents believed to be behind a spate of poisonings in the U.K. (they exposed the other one last month). And they’re collaborating with news outlets to help identify suspects in the disappearance of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
It’s a rapid rise for what was, just a few years ago, a group of amateurs. Bellingcat was founded by Eliot Higgins, a British native whose previous jobs included helping the settlement of refugees in the U.K. and administrator in a women’s lingerie factory.
The Brookings Cafeteria podcast will release new episodes on the issues shaping the 2018 midterms every Tuesday and Friday leading up to Election Day. You can follow the series where we list all episodes of the Cafeteria podcast, and visit our 2018 Midterms page for more research and analysis on the upcoming elections.
In the first episode of a special series on the 2018 midterm elections, Senior Fellow John Hudak describes some of the issues shaping the upcoming midterm elections and which common narratives around the elections are not supported by data.
Also in this episode, David Wessel explains the Federal Reserve’s recent decision to raise interest rates and the inherent difficulties in forecasting the economy.
The church must go out and encounter young people “in detention centers, at the borders” and “in all places where their safety and family unity are threatened,” Yadira Vieyra said to the Synod of Bishops on Oct. 11. Speaking as a young immigrant living in the United States, Ms. Vieyra was sharply critical of the “hateful rhetoric and policies” she has witnessed, and she described the “sustained distress” experienced by migrants, which affects the way “they pray and remain hopeful.”
To show that the church values the lives of young people, she said the church needs to develop “innovative ways to minister to this vulnerable community” while helping people to know that Jesus Christ “stands with the oppressed and challenges the oppressor.”
Pope Francis appointed Ms. Vieyra, 29, as an auditor to the synod that is meeting from Oct. 3 to 28 in Rome to discuss “young people, faith and vocational discernment.” The synod includes 267 voting members who are mostly cardinals and bishops, 50 auditors (half men, half women) and other delegates and collaborators.
Hyper-localism in politics has affected – and harmed – Whitewater and countless other small towns. The idea that there were better local standards on economics, open government, and politics than the best American standards was always a truly risible conceit. The best standards on these matters were always broad and wide. (See How Many Rights for Whitewater?, What Standards for Whitewater? and Methods, Standards, Goals.)