The use of government-issued New Market Tax Credits will bring Whitewater a Fairfield Inn and a building for the existing local campus to lease. Proponents of an ordinary hotel and a lease agreement for the university cannot offer any evidence that these projects will boost local individual or household incomes.
What one can show – now – is that the New Market Tax Credit program has been a federal failure. Nicole Kaeding explains New Market Tax Credits Fail to Deliver:
Created in 2000 as part of the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act, the federal New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program provides tax credits to “spur new or increased investments into operating businesses and real estate projects in low-income areas.” Two new reports [in 2014], one from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the second from [then] Senator Tom Coburn’s office, question the effectiveness of NMTC in accomplishing that goal.
The program provides tax credits to investors in low-income neighborhood development projects equaling 39 percent of the investment value over seven years. For example, a $1 million investment provides a $390,000 tax credit to the investor—a healthy sum. Congress has provided $40 billion in tax credits since 2003 with banks and other financial institutions receiving “nearly 40 percent of all NMTC[s]” since 2007.
But the program’s structure is flawed. According to GAO, the Treasury Department—which oversees the program—does not have adequate oversight of the program. For instance, the Treasury is unable to determine if a project has failed even after receiving seven years of tax credits. Treasury’s reporting on numerous aspects of the program is incomplete and missing.
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Unfortunately, these reports are not the first to document the NMTC program’s failings. GAO has issuance reports in 2004, 2007, and 2010 highlighting the program’s numerous flaws. Yet, Congress continues to reauthorize the program wasting billions of dollars.
A local story about the hotel and ‘community engagement’ center’s groundbreaking is unintentionally embarrassing —
PaltryAttendance. The Daily Union‘s stringer – because the publisher doesn’t seem to think Whitewater’s worth a dedicated reporter – writes that
“The ceremony, which drew about 75 people, was held under a tent set up on the future hotel site. Attending were UW-Whitewater officials, city and regional governmental representatives, members of the construction and contracting firms involved with the project and four elected officials from the county and state levels.”
Whitewater has 14,622 residents, but only 75 were at the groundbreaking for a community engagement center. With only one-half-of-one-percent of the local population in attendance, one can guess that Whitewater’s not that engaged at this time. Chancellor Kopper and university public relations flack Sara Kuhl have their work cut out for them.
(Kuhl will have to do better than the typical no comment/still reviewing via email she’s used in a recent campus assault case if she wants to turn around the lack of enthusiasm for community engagement. Kopper has no one in media relations who’s useful for more than tired boilerplate.)
Ray Cross, Man of Platitudes. Ray Cross, president of the UW System, had this to say:
Beginning his remarks, UW System President Cross pointed to the ceremonial hardhats and shovels near the tent for the groundbreaking.
“Those are symbolic of what we are doing — we are breaking ground on building a new partnership,” he said. “It is a mutually-beneficial partnership, and we all win from that. We appreciate the leadership and the campus for making this happen. On behalf of the Board of Regents, it is my pleasure to congratulate you.”
Cross said that Fairfield Inn & Suites was “making a bold move, but a good move,” jesting that “I hope you make a lot of money.”
Ceremonial hardhats and shovels as symbolic of construction – honest to goodness, does Cross think his audience needed a reminder of the symbolism? (Next up: Cross explains to Whitewater’s officials that a red octagon symbolizes a need to stop moving forward.)
“New partnership….mutually-beneficial partnership….we all win from that” – it’s the jargon of a statist official traveling about likely saying the same words for any occasion. Small wonder he’s lasted so well under this state administration.
By the way, it’s too funny that Cross thinks an average hotel in Whitewater is a “bold move” – it’s more subtle than saying ‘I’m surprised you yokels are getting even an ordinary hotel,’ but it amounts to the same thing.
Cross isn’t clever enough (or disciplined enough) to check his condescension in front of his own audience.
The Key Question. How will these millions in tax credits for a hotel and leased university space improve the individual and household incomes of Whitewater’s residents?
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 6:32 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 36m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-eighth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement Commission meets at 5 PM.
Lascaux….is the setting of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac, in the department of Dordogne in southwestern France. Over 600 parietal wall paintings cover the interior walls and ceilings of the cave. The paintings represent primarily large animals, typical local and contemporary fauna that correspond with the fossil record of the Upper Paleolithic time. The drawings are the combined effort of many generations, and with continued debate, the age of the paintings is estimated at around 17,000 years (early Magdalenian).[3][4][5] Lascaux was inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage Sites list in 1979, as element of the Prehistoric Sites and Decorated Caves of the Vézère Valley.[6]
On September 12, 1940, the entrance to the Lascaux Cave was discovered by 18-year-old Marcel Ravidat. Ravidat (died in 1995) returned to the scene with three friends, Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas, and entered the cave via a long shaft. The teenagers discovered that the cave walls were covered with depictions of animals.[7][8] Galleries that suggest continuity, context or simply represent a cavern were given names. Those include the Hall of the Bulls, the Passageway, the Shaft, the Nave, the Apse, and the Chamber of Felines. The cave complex was opened to the public on July 14, 1948.[9] By 1955, carbon dioxide, heat, humidity, and other contaminants produced by 1,200 visitors per day had visibly damaged the paintings. As air condition deteriorated fungi and lichen increasingly infested the walls. Consequently, the cave was closed to the public in 1963, the paintings were restored to their original state and a monitoring system on a daily basis was introduced.
Lascaux II, an exact copy of the Great Hall of the Bulls and the Painted Gallery opened in 1983 in the cave’s vicinity, a compromise and attempt to present an impression of the paintings’ scale and composition for the public without harming the originals.[8] A full range of Lascaux’s parietal art is presented a few kilometres from the site at the Centre of Prehistoric Art, Le Parc du Thot, where there are also live animals representing ice-age fauna.[10]
The owner of Qual Line Fence in Waunakee, a company [Ray] Statz founded in 1956, said he and about 16 employees put in about 500 fences a year made with steel, aluminum and cedar, all products that have seen steep cost increases stemming from U.S. tariffs.
“Wood, steel and aluminum,” he said. “They’re all hit.”
He estimates that since the beginning of the year, he has seen the cost of the materials he uses climb between 25 and 30 percent. That’s not enough to cause any layoffs, he said, but the trade dispute adds uncertainty to the market.
“It makes me lose some sleep at night,” Statz said. “It makes it difficult. We’re supposed to take a gamble and wonder what the future’s going to be by next spring. It’s not the good old days.”
President Donald Trump announced the tariffs in March — 25 percent on foreign steel and 10 percent on aluminum — and by the time they took effect on June 1, prices were already spiking. A year earlier the administration slapped tariffs on Canadian lumber, which combined with other factors pushed the price to record highs.
Three-hundred-thousand gallons of manure-contaminated water spilled into a creek in northeastern Wisconsin.
The spill is believed to have happened late Sunday after a week of heavy rains, combined with a faulty valve at the Phil Roberts farm, which is home to 220 head of cattle. According to the state Department of Natural Resources, a containment pit overflowed into Silver Creek — a tributary of the larger Duck Creek.
The manure went down a grassy slope into Silver Creek near the Outagamie and Brown county line, within the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin’s boundaries.
James Snitgen, water resources supervisor for the tribe, said, “because of the recent heavy rains there was way more water makeup in that, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it ‘manure,’ I’d call it a manure-water mixture going down.”
This matters
This should matter
This definitely used to matter to Republicans
Except the party is now being led by the self-proclaimed KING OF DEBT
Therefore
It is to be expected
This no longer matters https://t.co/2Rb1PA0g9G
Since the Council of Nicaea, Christians have been prone to issue joint statements designed to draw the boundaries of orthodoxy — and cast their rivals beyond them. Another one, not quite in the same league, was recently issued by a group including John MacArthur, a prominent (and very conservative) evangelical pastor and Bible teacher.
“The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” claims that social justice is not, in fact, a definitional component of the gospel, and that it is heresy to elevate “non-essentials to the status of essentials.” As you might expect, the document affirms traditional beliefs on same-sex relationships and “God-ordained” gender roles. But it seems particularly focused on rejecting collective blame in racial matters. “We deny that .?.?. any person is morally culpable for another person’s sin,” the statement argues. “We further deny that one’s ethnicity establishes any necessary connection to any particular sin.”
….
The purpose of “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” is clear enough. It is, as one prominent evangelical leader put it to me, “to stop any kind of real repentance for past social injustice, to make space for those who are indeed ethnonationalists, and to give excuse for those who feel Christians need only ‘preach the gospel’ to save souls and not love their neighbors sacrificially whether they believe as we do or not.”
The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.
It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the continuing social effects of hundreds of years of state-sponsored oppression, cruelty and stolen wages. It is neither realistic nor fair to ignore the current damage of mass incarceration and failed educational institutions on minority groups. Prejudice and institutional evil are ongoing — deeply ingrained in social practice and ratified by indifference. Repentance is in order — along with a passion for social justice that is inseparable from the Christian gospel.
(Trumpism threatens more even than the political order; it perverts Christian theology to a political end that is both dangerous and, fundamentally, heretical.)
Scientists are uncovering new clues to the origins of domestication in an unlikely creature: foxes. After nearly 60 years of selective breeding in Siberia, there are a few rare foxes that are pretty unafraid of people. So, of course, we wanted to meet them.
The story goes back to 1959, when geneticist Dmitri Belyaev set out to try domestication from the very beginning. He had this idea that was radical for its time: domesticated animals like dogs are friendly because of genes that govern their behavior. Meaning, the process that turned wolves into dogs thousands and thousands of years ago was essentially evolution.
So Belyaev began selectively breeding foxes: the ones that weren’t as aggressive or afraid of people were allowed to have offspring. After Belyaev’s death in 1985, geneticist Lyudmila Trut — co-author of How to tame a fox (and build a dog) — took over. Over time, the foxes became more dog-like: they’re not skittish around people, though they might not climb into your lap for a cuddle, either.
(Domesticated is a flexible description: it seems unlikely that these foxes are domesticated sufficiently to make safe, reliable pets. Beautiful, of course, but beauty is not gentleness. In any event, cats make great pets…)
Two questions haunt Old Whitewater (where Old Whitewater is a state of mind rather than an age or a particular person):
What does it mean to be a college town? and What is meaningful community development?
(There are other serious questions, but one can be sure – at the least – that these two have Whitewater in their gaze.)
The community has grappled openly with the first question – without resolution – long before I began writing in ’07. The second question, made more germane with each passing year, is likely to surpass even the first in local importance.
Neither question will when finally resolved – and both will be resolved – yield happy answers for the last thirty years of policymaking.
Indeed, between now and then, policymaking will look much as much like whistling past the graveyard as anything else.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:31 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 39m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-seventh day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6:00 PM.
Millions of dollars in federal funds are being withheld from local municipalities by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, Target 2 Investigates has learned.
Both Appleton and Green Bay are losing out on more than $3 million in funds. These municipalities don’t know where that money has been diverted.
“Where is the money going? We have no idea,” says Steve Grenier,
Green Bay Public Works Director.
Local officials were recently informed about a change in federal funding when it comes to Surface Transportation Block Grants. That’s money that Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) request to complete transportation projects.
Steve Grenier serves as the Vice President of Brown County’s MPO Policy Board.
“That’s federal money that comes down from Federal Highway Administration, filters through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and then comes to local programs,” Grenier says.
A five-year funding program has been reduced to a four-year program.
MPOs across the state are missing one year of federal funding. It was money they were depending on for upcoming projects.
Many goods produced by Wisconsin farmers, from milk to livestock, are sold to local buyers. But farmers, like Bob Pronschinske from North Creek, know the prices they receive are directly related to the world market.
“We have to have foreign trade, anybody can figure that out,” said Pronschinske, who owns a dairy farm with his son.
Pronschinske said he’s worried about the future of exports.
Since President Donald Trump placed new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, trading partners like China and Mexico have placed their own taxes on United States agricultural products. Despite the retaliation, Trump has said the tariff strategy will make trade more fair for United States producers.
Pronschinske said Wisconsin farmers who voted for the president are watching the situation closely.
“If this tariff works, yes, he’s going to be a great, great president. If this foreign trade all works out for us, yeah, we’ll have prices where they need to be. But the big question is if it’s going to work,” Pronschinske said.
Intelligence agencies investigating mysterious “attacks” that led to brain injuries in U.S. personnel in Cuba and China consider Russia to be the main suspect, three U.S. officials and two others briefed on the investigation tell NBC News.
The suspicion that Russia is likely behind the alleged attacks is backed up by evidence from communications intercepts, known in the spy world as signals intelligence, amassed during a lengthy and ongoing investigation involving the FBI, the CIA and other U.S. agencies. The officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the intelligence.
The evidence is not yet conclusive enough, however, for the U.S. to formally assign blame to Moscow for incidents that started in late 2016 and have continued in 2018, causing a major rupture in U.S.-Cuba relations.
Since last year, the U.S. military has been working to reverse-engineer the weapon or weapons used to harm the diplomats, according to Trump administration officials, congressional aides and others briefed on the investigation, including by testing various devices on animals. As part of that effort, the U.S. has turned to the Air Force and its directed energy research program at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, where the military has giant lasers and advanced laboratories to test high-power electromagnetic weapons, including microwaves.
The Trump administration, taking its third major step this year to roll back federal efforts to fight climate change, is preparing to make it significantly easier for energy companies to release methane into the atmosphere.
Methane, which is among the most powerful greenhouse gases, routinely leaks from oil and gas wells, and energy companies have long said that the rules requiring them to test for emissions were costly and burdensome.
The Environmental Protection Agency, perhaps as soon as this week, plans to make public a proposal to weaken an Obama-era requirement that companies monitor and repair methane leaks, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. In a related move, the Interior Department is also expected in coming days to release its final version of a draft rule, proposed in February, that essentially repeals a restriction on the intentional venting and “flaring,” or burning, of methane from drilling operations.
The new rules follow two regulatory rollbacks this year that, taken together, represent the foundation of the United States’ effort to rein in global warming. In July, the E.P.A. proposed weakening a rule on carbon dioxide pollution from vehicle tailpipes. And in August, the agency proposed replacing the rule on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants with a weaker one that would allow far more global-warming emissions to flow unchecked from the nation’s smokestacks.
Hardly new. It was developed to combat the truth being available on the internet in Russia, instead of China-style censorship. Then it was exported against Russian-speaking neighbors and then used globally by 2015. https://t.co/qEohvkRDIy
This Tuesday, September 11th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The 60 Yard Line @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
The 60 Yard Line (Comedy)
Tuesday, September 11, 12:30 pm
Rated R (language/adult themes); 1 hour, 30 min. (2017)
Filmed in Green Bay! Based on a true story: during the 2009 Packers football season, Ben “Zagger” Zagowski and Nick “Polano” Polano, best buds and co-workers, buy a house in the parking lot of Lambeau Field. They are forced to pick between a football lifestyle…and a girl. Lives change. She wants a wedding…he calls an audible. Oh, and there’s a cow. Guest appearances by Chuck Liddell, Ahman Green, John Kuhn, and Mark Tauscher.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy-two. Sunrise is 6:30 AM and sunset 7:12 PM, for 12h 42m 37s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-sixth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM.
Gov. Scott Walker’s former transportation secretary says the GOP governor isn’t telling the truth about road projects and is taking a high-risk gamble that could see the state invest billions of dollars in obsolete highways.
Walker has been “increasingly inaccurate” when describing the state’s highway system, said Mark Gottlieb, a Republican who was in the Assembly for eight years and served as Walker’s transportation secretary from 2011 to 2017.
Gottlieb is the third former top aide to Walker to speak out against the governor in recent months as he faces a re-election challenge from Democrat Tony Evers, the state schools superintendent.
….
Gottlieb said state and federal officials go through a lengthy process to determine when to add lanes to roads to reduce traffic congestion and accidents. The governor contended people may drive less in the future, but Gottlieb noted traffic has been increasing since the country climbed out of the 2008 recession.
Republican Gov. Scott Walker took 65 percent more taxpayer-funded flights last year than the Democratic governor of New York, whose flying was noted in a recent news report for being more frequent than any governor among the 10 most populous states.
….
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took 195 trips in taxpayer-funded planes and helicopters in 2017, the New York Times reported Friday. The article noted that while he is entitled by law to fly the fleet, the Democrat’s frequent trips this election year have raised questions of whether state aircraft gives him an unfair advantage over his primary opponent, Cynthia Nixon.
Walker, now running for a third term in a tough match-up with Democratic State Superintendent Tony Evers, took 322 flights last year. That was down from the 351 he took in 2016. Only about a dozen over both years were reimbursed by the campaign.
The latest reason to be suspicious is Trump’s attacks on a formerly obscure Justice Department official named Bruce Ohr. Trump has repeatedly criticized Ohr and called for him to be fired. Ohr’s sin is that he appears to have been marginally involved in inquiries into Trump’s Russian links. But Ohr fits a larger pattern. In his highly respected three-decade career in law enforcement, he has specialized in going after Russian organized crime.
It just so happens that most of the once-obscure bureaucrats whom Trump has tried to discredit also are experts in some combination of Russia, organized crime and money laundering.
It’s true of Andrew McCabe (the former deputy F.B.I. director whose firing Trump successfully lobbied for), Andrew Weissmann (the only official working for Robert Mueller whom Trump singles out publicly) and others. They are all Trump bogeymen — and all among “the Kremlin’s biggest adversaries in the U.S. government,” as Natasha Bertrand wrote in The Atlantic. Trump, she explained, seems to be trying to rid the government of experts in Russian organized crime.
I realize that this evidence is only circumstantial and well short of proof. But it’s one of many suspicious patterns about Trump and Russia. When you look at them together, it’s hard to come away thinking that the most likely explanation is coincidence.
Mount Pleasant’s millions in borrowing to support the construction of Foxconn Technology Group’s $10 billion factory there have led to a one-notch downgrade in the village’s credit rating over fears that the massive factory may not produce the economic benefits officials had promised.
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 45m 27s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-fifth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress official declares the United States the name for the new country:
The Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia on this day in 1776, declared that the name of the newly formed nation fighting for its independence from Great Britain would be “The United States.” This designation replaced the term “United Colonies,” then in general use.
….
The National Archives cites the first known use of the formal term “United States of America” as being found in the Declaration of Independence, recognizing Jefferson, its chief author and subsequently the nation’s third president, as its originator.
When it was written in June 1776, Jefferson’s “rough draught” employed a headline in capital letters that read: “A Declaration by the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in General Congress assembled.” In the final edit, however, that language was changed to read: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.” To archivists, the fact that the phrase “United States of America” appears in both versions of the Declaration offers sufficient evidence to credit Jefferson with having coined the phrase.
Historians have also noted the existence of a resolution prepared by Lee, another Virginian, which was presented to the delegates in Philadelphia on June 7, 1776, and approved on July 2, resolved: “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
To understand what has happened to the Republican Party under Donald Trump, consider the case of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
There was a time, not too many years ago, when Walker looked like a plausible, even likely, candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Walker, who spent nearly all of his adult life running for and holding office, rose to national prominence after a highly visible showdown with his state’s public sector unions. He wrote a book about the experience and toured the country touting his policy record and his state’s strong economy in the years after the recession. In many ways, he looked like—or at least played the role of—a serious, governance-focused conservative politician.
….
Among those who have fallen in line is Scott Walker, who spent part of yesterday—the first day of the NFL’s regular season—tweeting inane pablum about the kneeling players and asking whether Tony Evers, his Democratic opponent in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race, supports the player protests. (Walker and Evers are currently tied in the polls.) Among those tweets was this heart-on-flannel Bitmoji, which resembles a goofy parody of flag-waving GOP patriotism.
….
Walker’s policy record since exiting the presidential race (like his record prior to entering it) is rife with shady local deal making in the name of job creation, including a county-led plan to locate a FoxConn facility in the state using state subsidies and the threat of eminent domain. That effort was backed by none other than President Trump.
Walker is no longer a figure of national significance, nor is his political trajectory all that unusual. His tweets are embarrassing, but not in a way that stands out, particularly when compared to Trump himself.
But Walker’s evolution from policy-focused governor to figure of pure political pandering illustrates the overall trajectory of the GOP, which has surrendered itself almost entirely to Trump’s hostile takeover. Donald Trump’s victory over Scott Walker, and the Republican Party, is all but complete.
A review of coverage produced by regional media outlets over recent years found that many of the sheriffs who cheered the president have come under sharp scrutiny from the press for their own actions – or for those of the officers in their departments.
They have been held accountable by local journalists for incidents including the leaving of a service pistol in a casino bathroom, alleged mistreatment in jails, the wearing of blackface by an officer, and various other actions.
Here, the Guardian has compiled some of the notable reporting on the sheriffs who appeared with Trump:
1. Sheriff Ana Franklin, Morgan county, Alabama
Franklin is under investigation by the FBI and state authorities after a local news blogger, Glenda Lockhart, disclosed last year that the sheriff used $150,000 in public money to invest in a now-bankrupt used car dealership that was part-owned by a convicted fraudster. The money was taken from a fund meant for feeding inmates in the county jail.The sheriff’s office recruited Lockhart’s grandson as an informant as they attempted to find a source leaking information to the blogger. The grandson said he was paid to install spyware on Lockhart’s computer. Franklin’s deputies raided Lockhart’s home and seized her computer. Franklin was found by a judge to have broken the law.
Lockhart’s findings have been built upon by several local reporters, including WAAY-31 television’s investigations team and the Decatur Daily. In a statement posted to Facebook in April, Franklin incorrectly described the stories about her as “misinformation, false reports and slander”.
(The Guardian lists nine more sheriffs, all in the photo with Trump, who have had clashes with a free press.)
In occupied countries, large public events can spontaneously take on political overtones, too. When the Czech hockey team beat the Soviet Union at the world championships in 1969, one year after the Soviet invasion of the country, half a million people flooded the streets in a celebration that became a show of political defiance. In 1956, 100,000 people came to the reburial of a Hungarian politician who had been murdered following a show trial. The funeral oratory kicked off an anti-communist revolution a few days later.
I am listing all these distant foreign events because at the moment they have strange echoes in Washington. Sen. John McCain’s funeral felt like one of those spontaneous political events. As in a dictatorship, people spoke in code: President Trump’s name was not mentioned, yet everybody understood that praise for McCain, a symbol of the dying values of the old Republican Party, was also criticism of the authoritarian populist in the White House. As in an occupied country, people spoke of resistance and renewal in the funeral’s wake. Since then, public officials have also described, anonymously, new forms of “patriotic treason” within the White House and in comments to Bob Woodward and the New York Times. As in an unlawful state, these American officials say they are quietly working “within the system,” in defiance of Trump, for the greater good of the nation.
There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt. As the anonymous op-ed writer put it in the New York Times, despite “early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment,” none of the secret patriots “wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis” and backed off.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers called the results of the most recent Federal Reserve stress test of the largest banks “comically absurd,” and called on regulators to boost capital at financial institutions.
Summers made the comments after a presentation at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on the persistence of low interest rates in global economies, a phenomenon which he explained as excess savings pursuing a shortage of investments. That trend has been partially mitigated by fiscal programs, he said, such as Social Security and Medicare in the U.S., which reduce to some extent the propensity to save.
“If we are likely to live in a world of systematically lower interest rates, systematically more higher asset price multiples than we have in the past,” then the case “for prudential regulation and for high levels of capital requirements in banks and more financial institutions is greatly increased,” Summers said.
Continually low interest rates, a feature of the nine-year-old U.S. expansion where the policy rate is only 1.75 percent to 2 percent currently, can produce asset bubbles.
There are few things more magical in this world than hundreds of dolphins racing through the wild Monterey Bay on a foggy fall morning. For the last week, a superpod of common dolphins hundreds strong has been racing the Monterey Bay, hot on the tails of billions of baitfish. This video was filmed on Labor Day just off of Point Pinos in Pacific Grove, and is being played back at half speed.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 6:28 AM and sunset 7:16 PM, for 12h 48m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-fourth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this date the steamship Lady Elgin was lost on Lake Michigan and was one of the lake’s most tragic maritime disasters. The ship had been chartered by Milwaukee’s Irish Union Guards who had been in Chicago attending a fund raiser in order to purchase weapons to arm their unit. Their ship was struck by an unlit lumber schooner and sank. At least 300 lives were lost, many from Milwaukee’s Irish Third Ward community. [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers edited by Sarah Davis McBride, p. 17]
Gov. Scott Walker’s administration waited more than two years to tell the state Board of Nursing about a 14-year-old inmate who nearly died when nurses didn’t get him to a doctor for three days, according to state agencies.
Once the complaint was filed in July, the Board of Nursing — which itself is overseen by the Walker administration — waited seven weeks to process it, according to the board. Officials entered the complaint into the board’s electronic system on Tuesday, the first business day after the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published an article about the February 2016 incident.
Registered nurses at the state’s juvenile prison, Lincoln Hills School for Boys, gave the teen Sierra Mist, Gatorade and crackers for days when he was repeatedly vomiting because his appendix was at risk of bursting. A doctor who performed emergency surgery on him at the time called the nurses’ actions inexcusable and said they should have known to get him to a doctor three days earlier.
A spokesman for Walker’s Department of Corrections wouldn’t say why the agency held off seeking the review for 30 months. Likewise, Board of Nursing officials did not explain why the board waited a month and a half to process the complaint.
The administrator of the General Services Administration, which manages the FBI headquarters project, may have misled Congress about White House involvement in the project, according to a portion of a soon-to-be published report from the agency’s inspector general that was obtained by The Washington Post.
Last year the GSA and the FBI scrapped a long-delayed plan to build an FBI headquarters campus in the Washington suburbs in favor of a proposal to build a smaller headquarters in downtown D.C. and relocate some staff to Alabama, Idaho and West Virginia.
President Trump has said he supported the new plan. Although GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, speaking to the House Appropriations Committee in April, mentioned discussions of funding with the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, she downplayed the role of the White House in the decision-making process.
The conclusions section of the inspector general’s report, which is expected to be released publicly in the coming weeks, states Murphy’s testimony “was incomplete and may have left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials about the project.”
Michael Carpenter writes Russia Is Co-opting Angry Young Men (“Fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serve as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries”):
On the streets of the French city Marseille, Russian soccer hooligans sporting tattoos with the initials of Russia’s military intelligence service, GRU, brutally attacked English soccer fans in June 2016, sending dozens of bloodied fans to the hospital. Alexander Shprygin, an ultranationalist agitator and the head of the All-Russian Union of Supporters (a soccer fan club that he claims was established at the behest of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB), was arrested during the melee and deported from France.
It seems almost too strange to be true: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, and motorcycle gangs serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries. It sounds more like an episode of The Americans with a dash of Mad Max and Fight Club mixed in. Yet this is exactly what is happening across Europe and North America as Russia’s intelligence services co-opt fringe radicals and angry young men to try to undermine Western democracies from within. And not just in the virtual world, but in real life.
The League of the South, America’s leading neo-secessionist group, is a white supremacist organization that describes the Deep South as “White Man’s Land.” It speaks often of a coming race war, which its leader warns black people will surely lose. It hates Jews. It believes the antebellum South was a rare remnant of true Christianity in a godless world. It denounces egalitarianism as a “fatal heresy.” It openly embracesthe Ku Klux Klan and other extremists.
And it really, really likes Russia.
A few weeks ago, the League made that crystal clear with the introduction of a new Russian-language section of its website. In an essay headlined “To Our Russian Friends,” League President Michael Hill—a former academic who started out as a relatively moderate Southern nationalist but now urges followers to arm themselves in preparation for civil war—spelled out the reasons why.
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The politics of contemporary Russia are certainly different than those of the Soviet Union. But it is wildly naïve, not to say densely stupid, for groups like the League to see it as a natural ally. It’s true that Russia has cultivated extreme-right links in Europe and the U.S., but it does so in a cynical, opportunistic way.
“American right-wing radicals oppose communism, but modern Russia actively propagates the Soviet past, its symbolism, the cult of the KGB and Stalin,” Kseniya Kirillova, a respected Russian journalist living in the U.S. who specializes in analyzing Russian propaganda and influence operations abroad, told me.
A reader wrote in to ask me whether I thought that Elizabeth Warren was a capitalist. The question stems from an article in The Atlantic by Franklin Foer (‘Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism.’) Frequent readers know that I link to The Atlantic often. (I’m a subscriber.) I’m also a free-market guy, so here’s a quick stab at this. (I’ve replied to the reader directly, and this is a post along the same lines.)
Quick answer: Warren advocates a heavily-regulated market economy. While capitalism narrowly understood is private ownership of the means of production, free-market theory is far more expansive, so most discussion is about free markets in capital, labor, and goods (all three). (Indeed, that’s how Warren talks about the topic, too – as a matter of markets.) By strict definition, Warren is a capitalist, as she supports capitalism, as she is not calling for state ownership of the means of production, state employment of all workers, or state control of the means of distribution.
Hers, however, is a heavily regulated capitalism, although Foer positions Warren as ‘doubling down’ on capitalism (“A conversation with the Democratic senator about why she’s doubling down on market competition at a moment when her party is flirting with socialism”).
Heavy regulation here looks more like slow strangulation.
Distinctions where distinctions should be made: Warren is not a ‘democratic socialist’ in the vein of Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez. Foer sees that distinction, but he over-emphasizes – to my mind – her ‘capitalist’ zeal. Warren does know well, however, how markets work, as an anecdote she relates to Foer shows:
Markets create wealth. Okay, so I used to teach contract law, and if you really want to go back to first principles: On the first day, I used to take my watch off and I would sell it to someone in class. We’d agree on a price, $20. Then the question I always asked the students was: What did the buyer value the watch at? Much of the class would say $20.
That’s not the right answer. All we know is that the person would rather have the watch than have the $20 bill. What did you know about the value I placed on it? Exactly the inverse. I’d rather have the $20 bill than have the watch. Now, most people think the benefit of markets is: I walked away with a $20 bill, great, which I valued more highly than the watch, and you walked away with the watch that you valued more highly than the $20, but look at all the excess value there.
Maybe you wanted that watch because it completed your fabulous watch collection or you desperately needed a watch or it was so attractive to you that the value you placed on it would be in the hundreds of dollars. You got all that surplus value, and me, I really needed that $20. I had an investment opportunity over here for that $20 that has yielded a manyfold return for me. That’s how markets create additional value.
That’s right: the transaction amounts to more – for the parties and society – than shifting a twenty dollar bill from one person to another. Warren easily sees that, and sadly fewer people each day see that.
How heavily Warren would regulate markets – in capital, labor, and goods – is significant on its own. For her recent positions – ones Foer in fairness cites – see in particular the Accountable Capitalism Act – one sees her willingness to require by law that major public corporate board elections include a large electorate of non-owners. It’s worth reminding that free markets by their very nature are accountable to communities through the choices of an unfettered people.
The second of Warren’s two proposals – the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act – is her way of getting at special interests’ manipulation of government institutions. I’d support much of this, but would offer the obvious suggestion that a smaller government offers less for lobbyists to manipulate in the first place.
As for her plan to limit lobbyists’ influence (the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act), I doubt that her proposal will eliminate Washinton corruption. If, however, Warren’s proposal might reach even part of her goal, I’d support her plan as heartily as a proposal to eradicate locusts before a harvest. If every lobbyist in Washington were to vanish today, the lot of them wouldn’t merit a single, salty tear in remorse.
Most important of all: We’ve a long way from ’18 to ’20, but I’d wish every democratically-minded person – including Warren – the very best in the effort against Trumpism.
Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:26 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 51m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred sixty-third day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Turtle (also called American Turtle) was the world’s first submersible vessel with a documented record of use in combat. It was built in 1775 by American David Bushnell as a means of attaching explosive charges to ships in a harbor, for use against Royal Navy vessels occupying North American harbors during the American Revolutionary War. Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull recommended the invention to George Washington, who provided funds and support for the development and testing of the machine.
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Just before midnight at 11:00 pm on September 6, 1776, Sgt. Lee piloted the submersible toward Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, Eagle, then moored off Governors Island.
On that night, Lee maneuvered the small craft out to the anchorage. It took two hours to reach his destination, as it was hard work manipulating the hand-operated controls and foot pedals to propel the submersible into position. Adding to his difficulties was a fairly strong current and the darkness creeping overhead, which made visibility difficult.
The plan failed. Lee began his mission with only twenty minutes of air, not to mention the complications of operating the craft. The darkness, the speed of the currents, and the added complexities all combined to thwart Lee’s plan. Once surfaced, Lee lit the fuse on the explosive and tried multiple times to stab the device into the underside of the ship. Unfortunately, after several attempts Lee was not able to pierce Eagle’s hull and abandoned the operation as the timer on the explosive was due to go off and he feared getting caught at dawn. A popular story held that he failed due to the copper lining covering the ship’s hull. The Royal Navy had recently begun installing copper sheathing on the bottoms of their warships to protect from damage by woodworms and other marine life, however the lining was paper-thin and could not have stopped Lee from drilling through it. Bushnell believed Lee’s failure was probably due to an iron plate connected to the ship’s rudder hinge.[38] When Lee attempted another spot in the hull, he was unable to stay beneath the ship, and eventually abandoned the attempt.
Stormwater rushed from the construction site of Foxconn Technology Group in Mount Pleasant this week after a deluge pummeled many areas of southern Wisconsin in recent days.
A video taken by a resident on Monday afternoon shows rain pooled in low-lying areas and surging off the Foxconn property in Racine County near Highway H and KR and into a ditch that flows to the Pike River.
A group of residents has expressed concerns to village officials about how Foxconn would manage water at the massive complex — both during construction and after the $10 billion industrial project is completed.
One of those is Kelly Gallaher, who took the video of conditions about 3 p.m. Monday and posted it on Facebook.
“The biggest concern is that with all of these different consultants, what the village told us is that there wasn’t going to be a problem,” said Gallaher, who is a member of A Better Mount Pleasant, a local group.
“Clearly, this past weekend, the last few days, there has been a problem.”
(Perhaps the local business lobby, the Greater Whitewater Committee, so very attentive and solicitous of the state operative overseeing Foxconn, is even now hatching a plan to help residents whose properties are threatened. However much one might credit an effort, should there even be one, it seems probable that an after-the-fact assistance of any kind won’t be half so valuable as a before-the-fact recognition of the project’s risks.)
“Obviously, Lincoln Hills has been a mess,” the Juneau Republican said. “It’s been a mess for some time. So, often times when you read these articles (about problems there), I’m not necessarily shocked, but very disappointed that there wasn’t more action taken directly by DOC at the time.”
Pro-Trump commentator Scottie Nell Hughes has landed a full-time position as an anchor on the Russian propaganda network RT. Her multiyear deal was described as “lucrative.””It’s an honor and privilege to anchor RT America’s weeknight newscasts,” she said. https://t.co/PckMnndFhP
(Sympathy to America’s foreign adversaries makes one a fellow traveler. Working for them, however, makes one a fifth columnist. There’s no way back from that. RT – formerly Russia Today – is a tool of Russian state propaganda, so much so that it has had by our law to register as a foreign agent, that is, as something like a foreign-paid lobbyist.)
What we are finding from books, from insider leaks and from investigative journalism is that the rational actors who are closest to the president are frightened by his chaotic leadership style. They describe a total lack of intellectual curiosity, mental discipline and impulse control. Should the views of these establishment insiders really carry more weight than those of Uncle Clem in Scranton, Pa.? Why yes, in this case, they should. We should listen to the voices of American populism in determining public needs and in setting policy agendas — but not in determining political reality.
We should pay attention to the economic trends that have marginalized whole sections of the country. We should be alert to the failures and indifference of American elites. But we also need to understand that these trends — which might have produced a responsible populism — have, through a cruel trick of history, elevated a dangerous, prejudiced fool. Trump cannot claim the legitimacy of the genuine anxiety that helped produce him. The political and social wave is real, but it is ridden by an unworthy leader. The right reasons have produced the wrong man.
The testimony of the tell-alls is remarkably consistent. Some around Trump are completely corrupted by the access to power. But others — who might have served in any Republican administration — spend much of their time preventing the president from doing stupid and dangerous things. Woodward’s book recounts one story in which then-economic adviser Gary Cohn heads off U.S. withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement by removing documents from Trump’s Oval Office desk. Think on that a moment. A massive change in economic policy was avoided — not by some brilliant stratagem — but by swiping a piece of paper and trusting in Trump’s minuscule attention span.
Active Measures is a 2018 documentary describing Russian (derived from Soviet) techniques to undermine American democratic institutions, and those of our democratic allies. (Active measures: “A Soviet term for the actions of political warfare conducted by the Russian security services to influence the course of world events.”)
The film is now in limited theatrical release, but also available on iTunes for rental or download.
ACTIVE MEASURES chronicles the most successful espionage operation in Russian history, the American presidential election of 2016. Filmmaker Jack Bryan exposes a 30-year history of covert political warfare devised by Vladimir Putin to disrupt, and ultimately control world events. In the process, the filmmakers follow a trail of money, real estate, mob connections, and on the record confessions to expose an insidious plot that leads directly back to The White House. With democracy hanging in the balance, ACTIVE MEASURES is essential viewing. Unraveling the true depth and scope of “the Russia story” as we have come to know it, this film a jarring reminder that some conspiracies hide in plain sight.
No reasonable person, committed to a democratic government for our people and others, should doubt that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a dictator, murderer, and imperialist.
There is no reason to dislike Russians; there is every reason to oppose Putin and his ilk.
Perhaps some few see opposition to Putin as a dull echo of a past conflict. One may be sure that countless American voters, Ukrainian & Syrian citizens, and murdered Russian ex-patriots have a more contemporary – and darker – description for Putin’s depredations.
Jack Bryan directs the one-hour, forty-nine-minute film, featuring interviews with many of America’s and our allies’ leading policymakers:
Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State (2008–2013), Toomás Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia (2006–2016), Mikheil Saakashvili, President of Georgia (2004 – 2013), the late Senator John McCain, Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Senate Judiciary Committee, Congressman Eric Swalwell, House Intelligence Committee, Steven Hall, CIA Chief of Russia Operations (1985–2013), Michael McFaul, U.S. Ambassador to Russia (2012–2014), Nina Burleigh, Journalist and Newsweek Correspondent, Craig Unger, Journalist and Vanity Fair Contributing Editor, James Woosley, Director of Central Intelligence (1993–1995), John Mattes, Bernie Sanders Organizer, Investigative Journalist, Richard Fontaine, President, Center for New American Security, Michael Isikoff, Author, Russian Roulette, John Dean, White House Counsel to President Nixon (1970–1973), Dr. Herb Lin, Director Cyber Policy and Security, Stanford University, Clint Watts, Former FBI Special Agent on Joint Terrorism Task Force, Evan McMullin, U.S. 2016 Presidential Candidate, CIA Operative (1999–2010), Dr. Alina Polyakova, Brookings Institution, Foreign Policy Fellow, Center on the United States and Europe, John Podesta, Chair, Hillary for America, Founder, Center for American Progress, Jonathan Winer, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement (1994–1999), Jeremy Bash, CIA Chief of Staff (2009–2011), Pentagon Chief of Staff (2011–2013), Ambassador Daniel Fried, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2005–2009), Scott Horton, International Law and Human Rights Attorney, Columbia Law School, Heather Conley, “Kremlin Playbook” Author, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Steven Pifer, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (1997–2000), U.S. Department of State (1978–2004), Asha Rangappa, FBI Special Agent on Counterintelligence (2002 – 2005), Associate Dean of Yale Law, Molly McKew, Information Warfare Expert, Alexandra Chalupa, DNC Consultant.
The documentary, carrying a PG-13 rating, and has received widespread critical praise.
I found the film (a purchased iTunes copy) disturbing, in the way any foreign attack on a free people would be. It’s an informative, unsettling, and yet grimly motivational film. We have much work before us, each of us in his or her own way, to bolster our institutions against foreign attack.
We are not alone in this effort. Here and abroad, talented men and women are committed to democratic societies, with each of us, too, having a part to play. That shared commitment requires an informed foundation, and Active Measures pours a reliable and sturdy foundation on which to stand.
The use of government-issued New Market Tax Credits will bring Whitewater a Fairfield Inn and a building for the existing local campus to lease. Proponents of an ordinary hotel and a lease agreement for the university cannot offer any evidence that these projects will boost local individual or household incomes.
