I’m not a Democrat, and never will be, but then I’ve never been tempted to abandon America for any reason, let alone because there are Democrats here, or because somehow being a Democrat in America might be more objectionable than living under Putin.
These gentlemen are sure that they’d be better off in Russia than as Democrats in America.
They are free to go, and to take others of their ilk with them – Aeroflot offers flights to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from several convenient U.S. locations.
The three of us came into the airport and the flight was delayed by nearly two hours. We could tell that everyone was a little bit unhappy about this and Geoff (the banjo player in the video) suggested that we play a bit of a music session. He played a set of traditional Irish dance tunes on the banjo and I (Daoiri Farrell) backed him on the Bouzouki. Robbie Walsh (Bodhran Player) then joined us and we had the attention of everyone in the room immediately. I then proceeded to sing a song. I picked one that I thought everyone would know, The Galway Girl. It went down really well. By this stage my dad had the Canon out and here is the video footage he took. His name is Desmond Farrell and his hobby is photography. Myself Geoff and Robbie are music pals for years. We were in Cumbria at a music festival called “Maddy Prior’s Steppingstones Folk Festival”. My website is Daoiri.com and Robbie’s is “The Bodhran Buzz” if anyone wants to check out any more of our music. I’ve recorded two solo albums now with Robbie and various things with Geoff also:
Monday in Whitewater will see thunderstorms, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 8:08 PM, for 14h 16m 14s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 30.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirty-first day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1945, after more than three-and-a-half years of war since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and years more of Japanese aggression across Asia, the United States detonates an atomic bomb over Hiroshima:
The discovery of nuclear fission by German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938, and its theoretical explanation by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch, made the development of an atomic bomb a theoretical possibility.[53] Fears that a German atomic bomb project would develop atomic weapons first, especially among scientists who were refugees from Nazi Germany and other fascist countries, were expressed in the Einstein-Szilard letter. This prompted preliminary research in the United States in late 1939.[54] Progress was slow until the arrival of the British MAUD Committee report in late 1941, which indicated that only 5 to 10 kilograms of isotopically enriched uranium-235 were needed for a bomb instead of tons of natural uranium and a neutron moderator like heavy water.[55]
The 1943 Quebec Agreement merged the nuclear weapons projects of the United Kingdom and Canada, Tube Alloys and the Montreal Laboratory, with the Manhattan Project,[56][57] under the direction of Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.[58] Groves appointed J. Robert Oppenheimer to organize and head the project’s Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, where bomb design work was carried out.[59] Two types of bombs were eventually developed, both named by Robert Serber. Little Boy was a gun-type fission weapon that used uranium-235, a rare isotope of uranium separated at the Clinton Engineer Works at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.[60] The other, known as a Fat Man device, was a more powerful and efficient, but more complicated, implosion-type nuclear weapon that used plutonium created in nuclear reactors at Hanford, Washington.[61]
WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Sunday that a Trump Tower meeting between top campaign aides and a Kremlin-connected lawyer was designed to “get information on an opponent” — the starkest acknowledgment yet that a statement he dictated last year about the encounter was misleading.
Mr. Trump made the comment in a tweet on Sunday morning that was intended to be a defense of the June 2016 meeting and the role his son Donald Trump Jr. played in hosting it. The president claimed that it was “totally legal” and of the sort “done all the time in politics.”
But the tweet also served as an admission that the Trump team had not been forthright when Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement in July 2017 saying that the meeting had been primarily about the adoption of Russian children.
The first is that Trump appears to have broken some new ground here when it comes to admitting the true purpose of the Trump Tower meeting with a Kremlin-aligned lawyer — and even further contradicted the initial statement he helped draft about it. At the time, Donald Trump Jr. issued a statement explaining that he and the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.” We have since discovered that the elder Trump actually dictated that statement.
Quickly, though, that explanation fell apart, and we learned that Trump Jr. had actually been promised harmful information about Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. The president himself seemed to shrug it off, saying in July 2017 that, “from a practical standpoint, most people would have taken that meeting.” He added: “It’s called opposition research or even research into your opponent.” (Trump also tweeted along these lines.) But at the same time, he still suggested that the meeting was, in large part, about adoption.
….
But here’s the thing: This is a tweet about how the Trump Tower meeting was totally fine — nothing illegal to see here. If you’ve got no real concern about legal exposure from the meeting, why distance yourself from it? Trump seems to be arguing against his own point by assuring us that he had nothing to do with this meeting, which — oh, by the way — was totally on the up-and-up. Trump might as well have just confirmed The Post’s report that he is worried about what the meeting portends for his son.
The reason we do not know much of anything regarding Trump’s receipt of foreign monies is because, unlike other modern presidents, Trump has refused to release his tax returns and the GOP House has refused to assume its constitutional power to determine whether the president can accept foreign emoluments. Right now litigation is trying to remedy this likely constitutional violation. However, after the midterms, a Democratic House on a simple up-or-down vote could determine that no, the president cannot accept any foreign emoluments from the Saudis or anyone else.
You see, the emoluments clause requires affirmative permission from Congress; by explicitly denying him that permission, Congress would put Trump squarely in violation of the Constitution. In other words, it would be telling Trump, “Your emoluments or your presidency.” And if Trump refuses to give up his emoluments while remaining president? Impeachment would be a remedy for a willful violation of the Constitution, but Congress might also obtain a court order (if it could survive standing issues and a host of other legal hurdles). Foreign funds, for example, might be impounded by court order at his properties. Like Iran sanctions, U.S. banks could be ordered to stop receipt of any overseas money from Trump properties.
In sum, Trump never thought he’d win the presidency and has had no intention of giving up any income. To the contrary, he’s using the presidency to hawk his properties and, in the case of Mar-a-Lago, ratchet up the price of membership and charge the Secret Service and other officials for their accommodations. Trump’s level of greed and indifference to legal and ethical norms is unsurpassed by any president. A Democratic House, however, might go a long way toward ending the grotesque corruption that characterizes his administration.
Although the press has routinely been blamed for some of the United States’s most controversial conflicts, the historical evidence demonstrates that the power to make wartime decisions rests in the Oval Office and on Capitol Hill—not in the newsroom. Yes, the news media has the power to influence public opinion and to focus attention on particular threats, but elected officials always have considerable leeway—outside of an immediate national-security crisis—to make decisions about how and when to use military force. Besides the fact that the “media” is rarely unified on any issue, the ultimate responsibility for war must be laid squarely on the shoulders of elected officials.
This was the case with the Spanish-American War in 1898, where the press is usually blamed for getting the nation into a conflict. According to the legend, the publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers loved to run sensational headlines and provocative stories, honed in on the Cuban revolt against Spain because the real-life drama attracted readers in an increasingly competitive newspaper market. When an accidental explosion blew up the USS Maine, the Hearst papers blamed Spain and drummed up patriotic sentiment. “Remember the Maine!” read the headline. Soon after, Congress declared war.
The myth vastly oversimplifies the reality. The U.S. fleet was already on its way toward Spanish territorial possessions when the explosion occurred. Joseph Campbell and other historians have effectively punctured most of the pillars of the conventional story. Numerous Republicans leaders had been moved by humanitarian concerns. Vermont Senator Redfield Proctor delivered a speech describing the condition of Cubans who had been detained in camps, “one half have died and one quarter of the living are so diseased that they cannot be saved.” A major diplomatic impasse with Spain set up the conditions for the conflict, and the growing imperial ambitions of numerous advisors who were working with President William McKinley also played a role. As the historian George Herring wrote in his book, From Colony to Superpower, the Republican platform in 1896 had “set forth a full-fledged expansionist agenda” and “the War of 1898 provided an opportunity to implement much of this agenda—and more.”
In Baltimore, sometimes called the heroin capital of the U.S., a group of teenagers have developed an app that can track bad batches of drugs and alert nearby users. This helps drug users know when potentially lethal combinations of heroin and fentanyl are being distributed in their community. The so-called Bad Batch Boys believe that giving the information to the people that need it most has the potential to save countless lives.
(One small, sincere effort may have the power to help at least a few avoid disaster.)
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-nine. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 18m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 41.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred thirtieth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
An electric traffic light was developed in 1912 by Lester Wire, a policeman in Salt Lake City, Utah, who also used red-green lights.[14] On 5 August 1914, the American Traffic Signal Company installed a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.[6]:27–28[15] It had two colours, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for colour changes. The design by James Hoge[16] allowed police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency. The first four-way, three-colour traffic light was created by police officer William Potts in Detroit, Michigan in 1920.[17] Ashville, Ohio claims to be the home of the oldest working traffic light in the United States, used at an intersection of public roads from 1932 to 1982 when it was moved to a local museum.[18][19]
Radchenko, Rastorguyev and Dzhema were focusing their report on the activities of Wagner, a private Russian military firm with links to the Kremlin and to the military intelligence agency known as the GRU. Its involvement in the Central African Republic is believed to have begun in January this year, when Russia began shipping arms to CAR along with five active duty military and 170 civilian instructors, many of whom presumably are ex-Russian military, to train two army battalions. It had won an exemption to a United Nations arms embargo in order to contribute small arms and ammunition to the country’s chronically weak military, which needed help to keep very determined rebel groups at bay.
But the Wagner Group is something special. Some have called it Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “private army.” The organization is led by Dmitry Utkin, who was once a member of the Russian special forces and is currently under U.S. sanctions for aiding Russian-backed separatists in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
(According to a CNN report, Utkin was once head of security for Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. Prigozhin was one of 13 Russians indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in February for interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign. He became famous as a restaurateur, and earned the nickname,“Putin’s chef.” Russian business outlet RBC reported a year ago that Utkin’s name appeared in a corporate database as the general director of one of Prigozhin’s companies.)
Even after warnings that tariffs would wreak havoc on the economy, Donald Trump has staked his presidency on a series of trade wars that are now coming home to roost. With economic ruin looming over American farmers — a key constituency — he refuses to change course. Instead, he’s mulling a policy of clientelism, a $12 billion cash handout to the victims of his own bad ideas.
It’s a surprising development for many, especially the conservatives who have long lamented bailouts and subsidies, but it’s hardly out of character. On the contrary, it’s a natural fit for a White House that encourages corruption, exploitation and fraud in exchange for loyalty. As with his cabinet officials, he expects that the allure of taxpayer-funded kickbacks will be enough to keep farmers from holding him accountable for his own corruption and failures. It’s not an accident, it’s a strategy: grease the wheels of government so heavily that they spin in place.
Far from draining the swamp, Trump and his coterie of grifters, fraudsters and co-conspirators have filled it in entirely, dividing the land into personal fiefdoms to exploit.
President Trump’s tariffs threaten to throw his “America First” vision into reverse, prompting manufacturers to ship production and jobs overseas to dodge new trade barriers.
That’s one takeaway from the Institute for Supply Management’s July survey, which tracks sentiment among industry executives. It reveals a rising tide of alarm among manufacturers about the direction of the administration’s trade offensive — even before the White House announced Wednesday that it is considering hiking proposed tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese imports from 10 percent to 25 percent.
“We’re seeing a lot of comments from the respondents about evaluating whether to manufacture something in the U.S. or make it in Canada or make it in Mexico,” Timothy Fiore, chairman of the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing survey, said Wednesday, per Bloomberg News. “If the end market is Europe or China … you’re going to want to move it outside the U.S. at this point.”
Chuck Rosenberg: There are enough pieces in the public record already for someone to be charged with a conspiracy to coordinate or receive assistance from a hostile power. pic.twitter.com/i3ggW9CrS2
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 20m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 52.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-ninth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this day in 1862, the 8th Wisconsin Light Artillery participates in a reconnaissance at Bay Springs, Mississippi.
[Commission member Maine Secretary of State Matthew] Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, adding that some of the documentation seemed to indicate that the commission was predicting it would find evidence of fraud, evincing “a troubling bias.”
In particular, Dunlap pointed to an outline for a report the commission was working on that circulated in November 2017. The outline included sections for “Improper voter registration practices,” and “Instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” though the sections themselves were blank as they awaited evidence, speaking to what Dunlap said indicated a push for preordained conclusions.
“After reading this,” Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”
After a career of more than 20 years that has included stints as a state representative and the chairmanship of a committee on fisheries and wildlife, Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.”
Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who was charged last month with working as an unregistered agent of the Kremlin, socialized in the weeks before the 2016 election with a former Trump campaign aide who anticipated joining the presidential transition team, emails show, putting her in closer contact with President Trump’s orbit than was previously known.
Butina sought out interactions with J.D. Gordon, who served for six months as the Trump campaign’s director of national security before leaving in August 2016 and being offered a role in the nascent Trump transition effort, according to documents and testimony provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee and described to The Washington Post.
The two exchanged several emails in September and October 2016, culminating in an invitation from Gordon to attend a concert by the rock band Styx in Washington. Gordon also invited Butina to attend his birthday party in late October of that year.
(Emphasis added. I’m not much for celebrating my own birthday, but even less for inviting Russian operatives. This fifty-year-old man took a twenty-nine-year-old woman to a Styx concert? YMBFKM.)
On May 7, the National Rifle Association released a curious press release declaring that Oliver North, the key player in the Iran-contra scandal and an NRA board member, was “poised to become” the group’s president. Earlier that day, Peter Brownell, then finishing his first term as NRA president, had announced that he would not seek a second annual term in order to devote more time to his family business, a firearms retail company.
This changing of the guard—and how it happened—was odd. For fifteen years, the NRA leadership had followed a specific pattern: an officer was elected by the board to serve two consecutive annual terms as second vice president, then two as first vice president, and, finally, two as president. But the Brownell-to-North transition broke this orderly process. North at the time was serving in neither vice president position. And his ascension was a surprise—even to North. The day of the move, North told NRATV, “I didn’t expect this to be happening…This was very sudden.” (North also remarked, “A coup is being worked against the president of the United States and every conservative organization on the planet.”)
…
What wasn’t publicly known at the time was that on April 25—two weeks before this seemingly hasty NRA leadership makeover—FBI agents in tactical gear raided the apartment of Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian who three months later would be charged by federal prosecutors for allegedly serving as a secret agent for the Russian government in the United States. For years, Butina and her mentor, Alexander Torshin, a Russian official tied to Vladimir Putin, had hooked up with the NRA and other conservative groups, allegedly as part of what the Justice Department called a covert influence operation. Butina, who ran a gun rights group in Russia, and Torshin, who has been accused of money laundering (a charge he denies), had attended NRA events and other right-wing get-togethers, and during the 2016 campaign used their NRA contacts to try to arrange a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump. (It didn’t happen.) During this operation, according to prosecutors, Butina relied upon the assistance of conservative consultant Paul Erickson, her romantic partner and an active NRA member.
At some point, scrolling through Facebook or Twitter, you’ve likely met Dale Hansen, the 70-year-old Texas sportscaster who goes “Unplugged” at moments of national distress, sitting the nation on his grandfatherly knee and trying to make sense of calamity after calamity.
“It was another shooting in America,” he said almost casually after the 2016 ambush that killed five police officers in downtown Dallas. “This is what I have become.”
“I’m not taking a side tonight, although I know you think I am,” he said discussing the “March for Our Lives” rally this spring after a massacre at a South Florida high school. “I’m just hoping the kids from Parkland don’t lose the passion they have now.”
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority represents a specific part of the Trump tax bill as beneficial to this city. (Seepress release 1, press release 2.)
For today, looking at the bill generally, it’s bad for America: it’s a sham reform instead of a beneficial restructuring, and it makes this country’s outlook worse.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 leaves many promises of tax reform unfulfilled. In this paper, we examine the plan’s prospects to boost future growth, and discuss fundamental reforms that would boost the stock of capital and generate sustained, long-term growth. After making the case that the current tax code is unsustainable and that reform will be revisited, we recommend a series of strategies for future Congresses, including limiting windfall tax breaks on already-committed capital, providing targeted tax cuts on wages to boost labor supply, reducing the most harmful tax distortions, and administering the tax code more effectively.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) leaves many promises of tax reform unfulfilled. The bill’s cost sets revenues far-below projected spending levels, and puts deficits and debt on an unsustainable trajectory. Many provisions are temporary and expire, require clarification in regulation, or may not survive court challenges from our trading partners—creating uncertainty for individuals and businesses and punting hard choices to future policymakers. While the bill provides temporary economic stimulus, it delivers only a meager boost to long-term economic growth, and even less for Americans’ future living standards. And it fails to achieve other goals of tax reform by making the tax system more complicated and more difficult to administer, and creating new opportunities for avoidance or noncompliance. These shortcomings, coupled with voters’ expressed dissatisfaction with the legislation, seem likely to drive efforts to repeal and replace it.
Fortunately, the tax system is fixable. In the 1980s, an ill-conceived deficit-burgeoning tax cut in 1981 was quickly revised in subsequent years, culminating in comprehensive reform in 1986. America would benefit if history repeated itself—and soon. When the time comes to revisit tax reform, policymakers will have the opportunity to install a tax code that is pro-growth, simpler, sustainable, and more equitable.
When Congress takes up another tax bill, a lasting and beneficial reform will include several ingredients. As a starting point, the most important function of the tax system is to raise revenue to pay for the spending Congress has authorized and that Americans expect. Hence, one objective of reform is to set federal tax revenues on a sustainable path. Given commitments to popular social programs and shifting demographics, and today’s strong economic situation, stabilizing the debt over the next 30 years would require revenues close to 21 percent of GDP (Auerbach, Gale, and Krupkin 2018).
(Emphasis added.)
The full paper is embedded at the bottom of this post. This isn’t a libertarian analysis, of course: setting revenues on a sustainable path would be easier if one set expenditures on a downward path. And yet, for it all, this is a reasonable and possible path (although not, to my mind, ideal).
By contrast, the Trump plan is junk economics. (Lightning would more probably strike the same place a hundred times than Trump would make his way through a white paper on tax policy even once.)
A consideration of particulars awaits, yet this much is now obvious to any reasonable person: a tax policy that hobbles America will never boost Whitewater.
According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the cougar (puma concolor) is one of three wild cats native to the state, along with the bobcat and Canada lynx. It is the largest wildcat north of Mexico, with males ranging from 116-160 pounds and females from 75-110 pounds.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 23m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-eighth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on 1 August and on 3 August, at 2315 (EDT) she became the first watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole.[16] The ability to navigate at extreme latitudes and without surfacing was enabled by the technology of the North American Aviation N6A-1 Inertial Navigation System, a naval modification of the N6A used in the Navaho cruise missile; it had been installed on Nautilus and Skate after initial sea trials on USS Compass Island in 1957.[17] From the North Pole, she continued on and after 96 hours and 1,590 nautical miles (2,940 km; 1,830 mi) under the ice, surfaced northeast of Greenland, having completed the first successful submerged voyage around the North Pole. The technical details of this mission were planned by scientists from the Naval Electronics Laboratory including Dr. Waldo Lyon who accompanied Nautilus as chief scientist and ice pilot.
Navigation beneath the arctic ice sheet was difficult. Above 85°N both magnetic compasses and normal gyrocompasses become inaccurate. A special gyrocompass built by Sperry Rand was installed shortly before the journey. There was a risk that the submarine would become disoriented beneath the ice and that the crew would have to play “longitude roulette”. Commander Anderson had considered using torpedoes to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface.[18]
The most difficult part of the journey was in the Bering Strait. The ice extended as much as 60 feet (18 m) below sea level. During the initial attempt to go through the Bering Strait, there was insufficient room between the ice and the sea bottom. During the second, successful attempt to pass through the Bering passage, the submarine passed through a known channel close to Alaska (this was not the first choice, as the submarine wanted to avoid detection).
Recommended for reading in full —
The Committee to Investigate Russia shares the trailer for the upcoming documentary ACTIVE MEASURES, about Russian covert actions against the United States:
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.
(The film will be in theaters on Friday, August 31st.)
Here’s the video. Sarah Sanders is asked multiple times if she believes the media is the enemy of the people. She refuses each time to respond. (via Yahoo) pic.twitter.com/q9jvKSzl3u
First, this is the behavior Trump incites and amplifies with his attacks on the free press. When he says the media is the “enemy of the people” or the worst people or the most dishonest people, his followers take it as license to treat members of the media as something less than human. Trump has defined the press as part of “the other,” and his cult responds with the kind of venom used to keep a foreign body at bay.
The Trump administration blocked a CNN correspondent from attending an open media event. That’s an assault on press freedom.(Erik Wemple, Danielle Kunitz/The Washington Post)
Second, let’s not be surprised when 35 percent or so of voters consistently tell pollsters that the president is the victim of a witch hunt or that they agree with every policy position and action he takes. Trump fans’ politics is not the politics of rationality, considered judgment or empirical observation. Blind hatred and unthinking boorishness are not moderated by new facts or observable phenomena. We should stop marveling as his “success” in holding his base as if this were a reflection of his political skill, let alone the efficacy of his policies. Rather, the unbreakable and unblinking devotion of his unhinged base is confirmation that he now must rely on support from people oblivious to reality.
Third, we should stop infantilizing Trump supporters, treating them as hapless victims of forces beyond their control. We’ve done them wrong. They come from “real America.” Bunk. Whatever one’s economic hardships, any threatening, unhinged conduct and crude insults shouldn’t be excused. Trump cultists claim to be injured by the disrespect of “elites”; the only ones showing disrespect in Tampa were those in the mob. (And anyway, what ever happened to personal responsibility for one’s life choices?)
(Our forefathers opposed Tories, Know Knothings, Confederates, Copperheads, Klan, and Bund – we in our time are called to face Trumpism. The proper focus is Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders and this focus necessarily extends to officials supportive of Trumpism Down to the Local Level, but Rubin correctly sees that Trump begets Trumpism, and Trumpism begets a threat to the democratic order.)
Republican governance has shown how much the party actually cares about the deficit: not one bit.
The party’s hypocrisy on the budget is not new.After Bill Clinton dramatically shrank both deficits and government spending as a share of the economy, George W. Bush took office and proceeded to dramatically increase both.
Yet the thoroughness of the Republicans’ insincerity is still remarkable.Through their actions, they have proven that they cared about the deficit primarily for its usefulness as a political cudgel, an easy way to curtail Democratic policy goals.
So it is hardly surprising that Democrats, driven by young progressives, would respond by moving toward an agenda that no longer treats those concerns as genuine. True, even Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has not entirely given up the pretense of caring about deficits. In a recent “The Daily Show” appearance, she was asked how she would pay for her agenda, and she responded by proposing a series of tax increases and a significant reduction in military spending.
….
One can perhaps imagine a Republican Party that could defend conventional notions of fiscal responsibility with some semblance of integrity, a conservative movement that governed according to its professed principles; even some deficit doves might find such a party useful as a pragmatic counterweight to progressive ambitions.
But although Republicans will surely attack the new class of Democratic Socialists and their policies as debt-increasing budget busters — that is, after all, what Republicans do — their own actions will ensure that those criticisms have no real authority. Their opposition to the socialist agenda will be hollow, because they helped make that agenda possible.
(It’s worth noting that although I do not – indeed cannot – support Ocasio-Cortez’s economic agenda, I don’t dislike her, so to speak. Her economics are, to me, misguided, but then Trumpism is far worse than misguided, on matters far beyond economics. A libertarian could sit with Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez and discuss economic policy, although a deal would likely be impossible. By contrast, there’s no reason even to sit with Trump and his ilk.
In the spring, Whitewater saw two Community Development Authority press releases touting a specific part of the Trump tax bill. (Seepress release 1, press release 2.)
(3) to remark on the CDA’s admission that – even after a generation of CDA public spending – the particular tax provision was for “lower income communities like ours” (seeA Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA).
They find that TCJA will stimulate the economy in the near term, but the long-term impact on gross domestic product (GDP) will be small. The impact will be smaller on gross national product (GNP) than on GDP because the law will generate net capital inflows from abroad that have to be repaid in the future.
The new law will reduce federal revenues by significant amounts, even after allowing for the impact on economic growth. It will make the distribution of after-tax income more unequal. If it is not financed with concurrent spending cuts or other tax increases, TCJA will raise federal debt and impose burdens on future generations. If it is financed with spending cuts or other tax increases, TCJA will, under the most plausible scenarios, end up making most households worse off than if it had not been enacted.
One has much more to write about the general and particular aspects of the Trump tax bill (including so-called opportunity zones).
There’s a more general consideration even than this, of course: Trumpism is wholly and particularly dangerous to our democratic tradition. It is, at its core, a rejection of the centuries of political and economic development on this continent, and thousands of years of political, economic, moral, and philosophical learning on which our tradition rests.
Even if, however, one were too ignorant to grasp this, it should be enough to know that federal officials Trump, Mnuchin, and Sensenbrenner have nothing good to offer Whitewater. Scampering off to thank Sensenbrenner, both as the act and as an account of it, shows how out of touch these development men are with the very town they seek to develop.
Indeed, the full application of Trumpism to this city would rend both its social and economic fabric.
Finally, as I made clear in an email to two city officials, no official in this city is owed a particular reply on this issue. That’s been my practice on smaller issues for these last eleven years, and it would be my practice on Trumpism even for the next eleven hundred, if it should take so long. The proper focus of one’s attention should be Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders and this focus necessarily extends to officials supportive of Trumpism Down to the Local Level.
There’s no discussion to be had, no deal to be made, and no possible understanding to be reached. Trumpism, as was true with a few similarly malevolent movements from our past, deserves only a diligent opposition until its end.
Thursday in Whitewater will see an occasional thunderstorm, with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 25m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-seventh day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM.
The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence occurred primarily on August 2, 1776 at the Pennsylvania State House, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress represented the 13 former colonies which had declared themselves the “United States of America,” and they endorsed the Declaration of Independence which the Congress had approved on July 4, 1776. The Declaration proclaimed that the former Thirteen Colonies then at war with Great Britain were now a sovereign, independent nation and thus no longer a part of the British Empire. The signers’ names are grouped by state, with the exception of President of the Continental Congress John Hancock; the states are arranged geographically from north to south.
“Twenty-one months after the 2016 election, and only three months before the 2018 elections, Russian-backed operatives continue to infiltrate and manipulate social media to hijack the national conversation and set Americans against each other,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said Wednesday at a hearing of Senate Intelligence Committee, of which he is vice chairman. “They were doing it in 2016; they are still doing it today.”
Experts say the lack of forceful administration leadership on the issue — with President Trump at times questioning the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community about Russia’s disinformation and hacking campaign — renders less effective the efforts of agencies to mount a coordinated government action.
“If you can’t talk about Russia around the president, I don’t see how you get out in front of this, given that they’re the ones doing most of the foreign influence,” said Clint Watts, a former FBI agent and disinformation expert for the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
(Trump would rather win dishonestly with Russia than lose honestly with America.)
In the face of active measures by our adversaries to widen our nation’s social gulfs, one might imagine a more responsible leader trying to bring us together, to ease our anxieties about each other and to stand against endless cycles of recrimination.
Instead, Trump is working in tandem with these outside trolls to aggravate resentment, stoke backlash and incite his opponents.
On the very day that Facebook revealed the new influence operation and announced it had deleted 32 pages and accounts connected to it, Trump went to Florida for a rally where he rehearsed some of his favorite incendiary themes.
Last winter, the Greater Whitewater Committee, a local 501(c)(6) business league, invited Matt Moroney (a longtime Walker operative) to speak to residents on Foxconn’s many supposed benefits. The Daily Union‘s longtime stenographer correspondent dutifully and uncritically reported on Moroney’s remarks. See A Sham News Story on Foxconn.
Over the years, key leaders of this business league have served on the Community Development Authority, where they’ve touted state public subsidies to chosen businesses via WEDC and other corporate welfare schemes.
(Indeed, they market these taxpayer-funded subsidies as though they were manna from God. Quick theological reminder: The governor is not God, WEDC is not the heavenly host, and corporate welfare is not manna. SeeFoxconn’s Shabby Workplace Conditions.)
Still, as a suggestion, why not make the next business league meeting something really special, and go all-out, in a costume affair?
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny, with a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 27m 46s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the six hundred twenty-sixth day.Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.
On this date the armed steamboat the Warrior reached the British Band on the Mississippi where they hoped to cross the river and escape the American troops. After being guided by a Sioux Indian, the ship which held an artillery piece, dropped anchor, making the Sauk escape virtually impossible. Black Hawk attempted to surrender to the Warrior, waving a white cloth, but the crew either did not understand or did not accept the message. The ship and its men opened fire, killing a number of unprepared Indians. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 140-141]
Just a sample of the sad scene we faced at the Trump rally in Tampa. I’m very worried that the hostility whipped up by Trump and some in conservative media will result in somebody getting hurt. We should not treat our fellow Americans this way. The press is not the enemy. pic.twitter.com/IhSRw5Ui3R
(The scientific case against the existence of a ‘master race’ is overwhelming, but even as anecdotal evidence this video is a powerful refutation of the ludicrous claim of white superiority.)
“The Republican college-educated woman is done,” Bannon replied. “They’re gone. They were going anyway at some point in time. Trump triggers them.”
I spend a decent amount of time looking at polls and data, and Bannon’s comments struck me as accurate. On Monday, I looked at how women broadly were lining up in opposition to Trump and the Republican Party at unusual levels; the idea that white, college-educated women might be out of play rings largely true.
(Bannon uses the condescending Trumpist term ‘triggered’ for how these women feel about Trump. They’re not triggered, they’re repulsed and infuriated, as any reasonable person would be by Trump’s bigoted, autocratic self-dealing.)
Rudy Giuliani can’t seem to get the law right. The president’s lawyer suggested Monday on CNN and Fox News that Donald Trump didn’t commit a crime even if he colluded with Russians during the 2016 campaign by encouraging them to hack Hillary Clinton’s email server. “I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians,” Giuliani put it. “You start analyzing the crime – the hacking is the crime. The president didn’t hack. He didn’t pay them for hacking.”
That’s just wrong. Although there is no formal charge known as “collusion,” federal criminal law covers anyone who “aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces or procures” a felony. The elements of the crime need to be broken down to see how they might potentially apply to Trump’s actions during the campaign. And to be sure, not all the facts that would bring Trump under the federal statute have been proved.
But the law definitely doesn’t require Trump to have hacked himself or to have paid the Russians to do the hacking, as Giuliani argued. And the First Amendment wouldn’t protect Trump if the facts showed that he counseled the Russians to commit a federal hacking crime.
It’s true there is no crime called “collusion.” It’s also irrelevant. What matters in criminal law is the facts, not the precise terms used to describe what happened. Saying the president is off the hook because there is no crime called “collusion” is akin to claiming the president could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and escape prosecution because the criminal statutes prohibit “homicide” not “shooting.”
Collusion is generally defined as a secret agreement to work together towards some illicit end. As I pointed out more than a year ago when this argument first surfaced, in criminal law this describes a potential conspiracy. A criminal conspiracy exists when two or more people form an agreement to pursue an unlawful goal and at least one of them takes some action in furtherance of that agreement. The federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. 371, prohibits conspiracies to defraud the United States and conspiracies to commit an offense against the United States. Both charges are potentially relevant here — and Mueller has already deployed both.
Conspiracy to defraud the United States includes an agreement to impair, obstruct, or defeat the lawful functions of the federal government. This could include, for example, an agreement with the Russians to interfere with the Federal Election Commission’s administration of federal election laws. Indeed, this type of conspiracy was the lead charge in February’s indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies for interfering with the election largely through social media. That indictment charges the defendants “intentionally conspired to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions” of the FEC, the State Department and the Justice Department by making illegal campaign contributions, obtaining visas under false pretenses and failing to register as foreign agents.
Written by Truman Capote, directed by John Huston, and bankrolled by Humphrey Bogart’s Santana Productions, this is a droll satire of The Maltese Falcon, and was Huston and Bogart’s sixth and last collaboration. On their way to Africa, a group of rogues and swindlers hope to get rich by outsmarting each other.
Filmed on location in Italy, this film quickly became a Bogart cult classic. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley.
Please note this film is being shown on Wednesday, August 1 as part of the Summer foreign/art film series.
Tony Evers, State Superintendent of Public Instruction and candidate for governor, has a new video about a political effort to redefine reality.
The video is about Scott Walker, but it might as easily have been about any number of local politicians in Whitewater or other small Wisconsin towns, with tax breaks for out-of-towners and cronies defined as community development, gerrymandered congressmen described as community benefactors, and private business leagues that stack public committees, etc.
This last decade in Wisconsin (for Whitewater the last generation) raises this question: are politicians ignorant enough to advocate this way, or do they think residents are ignorant enough to believe?
