Those of us who are residents and citizens, who by birth or naturalization have a right to vote, should not have to run a governmental maze to exercise that right. On the contrary, government officials and their bureaucracies are mere instrumentalities of a popular sovereignty, and their officiousness and obstacles at best offend, and at worst truly transgress, the rights of free men and women.
I’d not require anyone to vote, as it would be an infringement on one’s free choice. It seems right, however, that government at all levels that takes millions or billions in taxes each year should devote a portion therefrom to assuring that citizens are properly registered to vote. Automatic registration – with an easy remedy to correct bureaucrats’ mistakes – seems among the least one might expect of government.
A citizen should not owe voter registration paperwork to government; government should provide registration to assure that citizens may vote with the minimum of effort or difficulty.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a mixture of clouds and sun with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 6:44 PM, for 11h 56m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Recommended for reading in full — Evers considers tax cuts for needy families, Walker’s former transportation secretary escalates criticism, members of the U.N. laugh at Trump, Russian propagandists try new tricks, and video of a bear catching fish underwater —
Tony Evers, the state superintendent of public schools and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, says he wants to help more than 860,000 of Wisconsin’s neediest families with a tax break. But how he would fund those cuts is a fluid process.
Speaking at a Milwaukee Rotary Club event Tuesday, Evers cited an August United Way of Wisconsin report that found almost 40 percent of Wisconsin families struggled to pay for basic needs like transportation and child care.
Evers said giving these families a tax cut would boost the state’s economy more evenly. Funding these cuts, he said, is a matter of priorities.
“You go to the budget, you get the best you can and you try to do it without any taxes and it happens,” Evers said. “It happens every single time.”
Evers maintains the state can find savings in parts of government, including the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., the state’s job creation agency, which Evers has vowed to eliminate and replace.
In a Tuesday interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Mark Gottlieb, a Republican who led the state Department of Transportation from 2011 to 2017, also said Walker is “fear-mongering” by claiming his campaign opponent, Democrat Tony Evers, could raise the gas tax by as much as a dollar per gallon.
Those comments came shortly before Walker appeared at a Milton Interstate rest stop Tuesday, touting his expedited plans for part of the Interstate 39-90 project in Dane and Rock counties.
How to pay for roads and bridges has been a longstanding political flashpoint for Walker. Gottlieb’s latest remarks are an indicator the issue will not abate as the general election nears.
President Trump has long argued that the United States has been taken advantage of by other nations — a “laughing stock to the entire World,” he said on Twitter in 2014 — and his political rise was based on the premise that he had the strength and resolve to change that.
But at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump got a comeuppance on the world’s biggest stage. Delivering a speech that aimed to establish U.S. “sovereignty” over the whims and needs of other nations, the president’s triumphant moment was marred in the first minute when he was met by laughter — at his expense.
The embarrassing exchange came when Trump boasted that his administration had accomplished more over two years than “almost any administration” in American history, eliciting audible guffaws in the cavernous chamber hall.
The ongoing cat-and-mouse game between Russia-linked propagandists and tech companies now includes a simple tactic the Russians are using to sidestep social media bans — changing web addresses.
Reddit users last week were able to trace links posted to a pro-Trump community back to a Russian propaganda website that shares web infrastructure with the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). The links appeared to have been custom-made to appeal to a particular community, /r/The_Donald, which is known to be the most fervent and active in support of the president.
The address-changing effort highlights how propagandists continue to push disinformation on digital media platforms, employing new strategies to hide their origins as companies begin to crack down on foreign influence campaigns.
Cosimo Mortola, an analyst who tracks Russian disinformation for security firm FireEye, said that propaganda operations that started years ago have learned new tricks.
“We’ve been tracking the IRA for several years and there’s no doubt that they’re getting more sophisticated,” Mortola said.
Noah Smith of Bloomberg recently published a thirteen-tweet thread in reply to Tucker Carlson’s dismissive questioning of diversity. The small town from which I write is a diverse place, of different ethnicities, occupations, and ages. Smith’s defense of diversity as a social strength was first published on 9.9.18, beginning at 10:02 AM. His full remarks appear below, from first to last.
Smith sees the underlying advantage, and necessity, of a diverse society: “to treat people as individuals and respect their individuality.”
1/ Tucker Carlson’s question – “How is diversity our strength?” was not asked in good faith, but for purposes of racist demagoguery.
But I will try to answer it in good faith, because it’s an important question in its own right.
2/ I have lived in a non-diverse country – Japan in the mid 2000s – and it was pretty nice. About as nice as America, on average. (Though I should mention that Osaka, where I lived, benefited from some immigrant influence that helped give it a unique attitude and culture).
3/ But America is different. It has special strengths – as a nation, and as a culture – that will always give it an advantage, assuming we choose to keep those strengths.
And diversity is central to those.
4/ Many people who defend diversity-for-diversity’s sake will point to either the ideas and products that people from diverse backgrounds offer (Taco trucks on every corner! Korean BBQ on every block! Etc.). And sure, that is certainly nice…
5/ Others point to the benefits of diversity for work teams. A diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds may lead to more creativity, force team members to sharepen their performance, etc. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter… That sounds plausible, and may in fact be true…
6/ But I believe that the benefit America draws from diversity is much, much more important than either of those things. The main benefit, I believe, comes from the nature of the institutions that are necessary to deal with diversity successfully.
7/ In order to make a diverse society function, you can’t expect people to follow the rules. You can’t expect everyone to have a deep-rooted knowledge of their proper place in society. To a greater extent, you have to treat people as individuals and respect their individuality.
8/ People from diverse backgrounds are constantly struggling to understand each other better, to take each other’s divergent family histories and cultural backgrounds into account, in order to get along at work, at school, in marriages, etc. That effort strengthens us.
9/ Our institutions, too — schools, companies, etc. – are forced to take more of an account of people’s backgrounds than they would if they could simply assume that everyone came from the same background. Diversity means we can’t expect or force people to fall in line.
10/ In other words, diversity strengthens America’s core values of individuality and freedom. Diversity provides a backstop defense against the natural tendencies of homogenization and conformity.
11/ In other words, America chooses to embrace diversity not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Because the payoff – a society that instinctively respects each individual’s irreplaceable, unique humanity – is worth it.
12/ I believe that there is a chance our experiment might fail. That building a free society from people of all races, religions, and national origins might in fact prove too hard a task. Tucker Carlson and his ilk are living proof that we might fail. They are the failure mode.
13/ But if we succeed – if we CONTINUE to succeed – then I believe the payoff will be unique and unmatched. A country with institutions strong enough not to have to rely on homogeneity will be the strongest country imaginable. The America experiment must continue.
Imagine a world where public officials appointed spouses to high-visibility positions in the very same workplace, over which they had supervisory authority, but then disclaimed any responsibility over those appointees when they committed acts of assault and harassment (“that wasn’t me, that was my spouse, brother, sister, or cousin,” etc.). They’ll rely on their own use of nepotism as a defense.
The relative’s familial connection would naturally concern and intimidate potential complainants, but at the same time allow the official to contend falsely that the relative’s conduct was merely and exclusively the relative’s fault despite the appointment, the supervisory responsibility, and the official’s obligation to keep a workplace same and free from coercion and intimidation.
Multiple allegations of harassment and assault at UW-Whitewater are more than simply a matter of a spouse‘s misconduct toward others (now numbering five complainants). They reveal the failure of the appointing official.
Pete Hill was no ordinary, unconnected spouse: he was 1) appointed publicly 2) by this chancellor, Beverly Kopper 3) to attend public events 4) present often in chancellor’s office and 5) about whom the chancellor kept investigations secret for months despite knowing of allegations against Hill.
Doubt not that public relations flacks and smarmy operatives will try to spin this in the press, trying to make the worse appear the better reason, to protect the high-level leader who made the appointment.
And yet, and yet — the actual conditions of these coercive acts – found to have merit after a state investigation – are public ones showing the failure of supervisory authority and workplace safety.
Tuesday in Whitewater will see afternoon thundershowers with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM, for 11h 59m 29s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council and Finance Committee will hold a joint meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1959, Little Rock High School in Little Rock, Arkansas is integrated under federal order: “Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order.”
Recommended for reading in full — Brad Schimel’s assault prosecutions, recovery from racism, Rosenstein and the Mueller investigation, and former Burnett County D.A. investigated for dating requests of women who were defendants in his cases —
Attorney General Brad Schimel did not recommend jail time in a pair of cases where 17-year-olds sexually assaulted younger victims when he was a county prosecutor in the early 2000s, court records show.
As an assistant district attorney in Waukesha County in 2003, Schimel prosecuted Dustin Yoss for attacking two 15-year-olds. In one incident, Yoss was alleged to have held down a girl and pulled down his pants before she escaped.
In another, Yoss allegedly badgered a different 15-year-old to have sex with him and offered her $500 to do so. She repeatedly refused but eventually relented. Afterward, he allegedly badgered her to have sex a second time until she agreed. During that second time, she told him to stop but he wouldn’t stop, according to the criminal complaint.
Schimel charged Yoss with five felonies and four misdemeanors. In 2004, he reached a deal in which Yoss pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault of a child. The other charges were dismissed, though some of them could be considered for sentencing purposes.
….
“Both victims consider their decisions they made that night to be very bad judgment to put themselves in the bedroom alone with Mr. Yoss,” Schimel told the judge.
As to the victim who eventually agreed to have sex, Schimel told the judge, “She said no, no, no, no, but then eventually gave in and then let the defendant do it out of fear. That’s a little tougher call to — or a lot tougher call to make the force allegation, and she knows that.”
As the son of agrand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Derek Black was once the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement.
Growing up, he made speeches, hosted a radio show and started the website KidsStormfront — which acted as a companion to Stormfront, the white nationalist website his father, Don Black, created.
“The fundamental belief that drove my dad, drove my parents and my family, over decades, was that race was the defining feature of humanity … and that people were only happy if they could live in a society that was only this one biologically defined racial group,” Black says.
It was only after he began attending New College of Florida that Black began to question his own point of view. Previously, he had been home-schooled, but suddenly he was was exposed to people who didn’t share his views, including a few Jewish students who became friends.
Black’s new friends invited him over for Shabbat dinner week after week. Gradually, he began to rethink his views. After much soul-searching, a 22-year-old Black wrote an article, published by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2013, renouncing white nationalism.
Derek Black’s “awakening” is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eli Saslow’s new book, Rising Out Of Hatred. Saslow also interviewed Black’s father and other leaders in the white nationalist movement.
But we have to remember that if one way or another Trump can find someone to fire Mueller, it would be a political crisis even more dramatic than most of the ones he has already created. Every newspaper and TV news program would be talking about impeachment. If his aides have succeeded in convincing him not to fire Sessions, they may well be able to convince him not to order Mueller’s firing.
And it’s probably too late anyway. If this were all happening a year ago when the Mueller investigation was still getting off the ground, firing the special counsel might have done the trick. But at this point, Mueller and his team have done an enormous amount of work — and gotten guilty pleas and cooperation from five of Trump’s former aides (though his personal attorney Michael Cohen is cooperating not with Mueller at the moment but with the U.S. attorney in New York). Mueller may not be quite done, but he is surely close.
And given how meticulous they’ve been, it would be a shock if Mueller and his team haven’t prepared for the eventuality of being shut down. Perhaps they’ve kept a running, frequently updated report outlining everything they’ve found, a report that would one way or another find its way to the public. I’m guessing that if Democrats take over the House in November as everyone expects, they’ll use their power to subpoena documents and witnesses to do everything they can to bring the information assembled by the Mueller team to light.
The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating a retired county prosecutor over date requests he allegedly made to women who had cases in his county.
KMSP-TV reports former Burnett County District Attorney William Norine reached out through Facebook to at least six women who were defendants in criminal cases.
One woman whose two children were in protective custody told the station Norine asked her out through Facebook Messenger. She says she had to respond because she didn’t want to jeopardize her freedom or her children “by ticking him off.”
Over these years of writing, I have sometimes referred to self-important political and community figures in Whitewater as notables, town squires, etc. It should be clear (at least one hopes!) that these descriptions rest not on the basis of others’ actual talent as elites but instead on their overweening (ludicrous, unjustified) sense of entitlement. (Most people – not merely a few – are very clever; society could not function otherwise.)
Still, Eliot A. Cohen’s description of national elites does convey the same selfishness one finds among many small-town ladder-climbers:
The stories of [Ed] Whelan and [Judith] Butler [recounted in Cohen’s full essay] have nothing to do with whether one thinks Kavanaugh and Ronell did nothing at all or behaved appallingly. They have everything to do with the current crisis of American elites in many fields, including the law and higher education. For the lawyer and the professor are exquisitely similar. Their academic pedigree is magnificent: Harvard Law School, Yale graduate school. Their position in their profession is eminent, if detached from the rest of the world. If you are a liberal, you probably do not know or care that Whelan writes often for National Review and is a leading figure in conservative legal circles; if you do not know, or care to know, much about critical theory, the writings of Butler are academic in the unflattering sense of that term. But in their world, they are, if not royalty, lords of the realm.
Their motives here are also similar: Eminent friends are being taken down at the peak of their professional career by someone who is, in their world, a nobody. It’s outrageous, and it has to be stopped. And if, by so doing, you defame a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, accusing him of attempted rape, or effectively threaten to obliterate a graduate student’s career by lending a mob of literature professors the imprimatur of the MLA [Modern Languages Association], so be it. That is the point and that is the sin: the willingness to stomp hard on a defenseless little guy in order to protect your highly privileged pal.
Of the many forms of cruelty, that directed against those who are weak or powerless is one of the worst. Of itself, it undermines whatever legitimacy a person can claim by virtue of intellectual or professional distinction. Societies and governments will have elites—that is simply inescapable, except perhaps in an ancient city-state, and probably not even then. But in a free society, for those elites to exercise their power—their very real power, as those subject to it well know—they have to do so with restraint and good judgment. The alternative is, sooner or later, revolt, which is why higher education often finds itself battered by angry citizens who, in a different setting, conclude that the legal system, too, is rigged.
The libertarian impulse is, and always will be, to contend and balance against those who use powerful institutions for themselves and their few friends. Those who have this tendency to climb so high as they can, into government in particular, and then kick down at any and all is not confined to major cities; small towns, too, have their share of this, albeit on a narrower scale.
That narrower scale, however, is not so much smaller that cliques, filled with a false sense of their own merit, cannot (and do not) torment anyone who interferes with their thin schemes and wide self-image.
After – and only after – the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story of repeated sexual harassment claims against Pete Hill – appointed to a public role as ‘associate of the chancellor’ (and chancellor Beverly Kopper’s husband) – did Kopper herself make a public statement of the matter.
Kopper’s statement is notable for its utter lack of mention – let alone sympathy – for the individual complainants’ conditions and equal membership in the university community. Indeed, it’s striking in that regard:
I want to share with you a difficult situation for me personally and professionally. The UW System completed, and has now released an independent investigation into sexual harassment allegations made against the Associate of the Chancellor, Pete Hill, who is my husband. Although we typically do not discuss personnel issues publicly, I feel it is important to make this one exception and I have UW System’s permission to do so.
I fully supported and cooperated with UW System’s investigation. It was determined that the allegations had merit. UW System has ended my husband’s unpaid appointment as Associate to the Chancellor and restricted him from attending UW-Whitewater events. I supported this decision and put it into effect immediately.
As Chancellor, my top priority has always been and will continue to be ensuring that UW-Whitewater is a welcoming campus for all and that students, faculty and staff have a positive and safe environment in which to learn, live and work.
As you can imagine, this is a challenging and unique set of circumstances for me as a wife, as a woman, and as your Chancellor. As your Chancellor, I have worked diligently to ensure each of you has the supportive environment you need and deserve in which to do your amazing work.
I remain deeply committed to serving you and continuing the work of our University to provide our students with an education that is truly transformational and to make a difference in our communities, the state, nation and the world.
(Needless to say, Kopper’s failed in achieving her stated top priority of a safe and welcoming campus for all, or she would not have admitted – after the matter was already public in a newspaper – that the complainants’ allegations had merit. There’s now a third investigation underway which may show how well Kopper actually cooperated with the prior investigations. One can see from the public records already released that she in fact disputed some of the investigative findings of fact.)
The statement begins with Kopper’s description of her own challenges but mentions nothing about complainants as individuals. While Kopper mentions herself in the first paragraph and in the first-person singular, there’s not even a collective, third-person plural for the complainants (not even a ‘they’ or ‘them.’)
It’s not that one would expect Kopper or UW-Whitewater to name those who were at that time unnamed; it’s that Kopper doesn’t mention them as people – as individuals – even through a pronoun.
Two-hundred fifty-one words, and yet not a single word of sympathy for any of the women whose allegations have, by Kopper’s own admission, genuine merit.
This Tuesday, September 25th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Tag @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
Tag (Comedy)
Tuesday, September 25, 12:30 pm
Rated R (language, sexual content) – 1 hour, 40 min (2018)
Tag, you’re it! Boys never grow up. Based on the true story of a group of men who have spent three decades tagging each other across the country in order to stay in touch with each other over the years. A rollicking comedy starring Jeremy Renner, Ed Helms, Jake Johnson and Jon Hamm.
Monday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:47 PM, for 12h 02m 22s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets today at 10:00 AM.
On this day in 1864, the 41st Wisconsin Infantry musters out: “The 41st Wisconsin Infantry mustered out after serving on garrison duty, railroad guard and picket duty at Memphis and in that vicinity for 90 days.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Jane Mayer reports How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump (“A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive”):
Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.
The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”
Indeed, when I met recently with Jamieson, in a book-lined conference room at the Annenberg Center, in Philadelphia, and asked her point-blank if she thought that Trump would be President without the aid of Russians, she didn’t equivocate. “No,” she said, her face unsmiling. Clearly cognizant of the gravity of her statement, she clarified, “If everything else is a constant? No, I do not.”
David Leonhardt contends The Supreme Court Is Coming Apart (“It’s not just the Kavanaugh mess. Over the long term, the court risks a crisis of legitimacy”):
There are two fundamental problems. The first is that the court has become an intensely partisan institution that pretends otherwise.
The founders envisioned the justices as legal sages, free from the political scrum. They receive lifetime appointments to protect their independence. The justices themselves cherish this image. John Roberts, the chief justice, has famously equated himself with an umpire who merely calls balls and strikes. The comparison is meant to suggest that justices don’t have their own opinions: They just follow the law.
But this is laughable. In almost every major decision last term — and many others over the past decade — the justices divided neatly along partisan lines. The five justices chosen by a Republican president voted one way, and the four chosen by a Democrat voted the other. If the justices are umpires, it sure is strange that Republican and Democratic umpires use vastly different strike zones.
….
The second major threat to the court comes from the radicalness of Republican-appointed justices.
It’s true that the Democratic-appointed justices are more reliably liberal than in the past. There are no more conservatives like Byron White (a John Kennedy appointee) or Felix Frankfurter (a Franklin Roosevelt appointee). But the court’s Democrats still range from moderate to progressive. Stephen Breyer is only somewhat to the left of White and well to the right of Sonia Sotomayor, academic analysis shows. Merrick Garland, Obama’s jilted nominee, was also a moderate.
There are no more Republican moderates. With Anthony Kennedy gone, every Republican justice is on the far end of the spectrum — among the most conservative since World War II. Kavanaugh would almost certainly join them, as would any other Trump nominee.
The U.S. Agriculture Department scientists who gave us the Bradford pear thought they were improving our world. Instead, they left an environmental time bomb that has now exploded.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, the callery pear was the urban planner’s gift from above. A seedling selection named Bradford was cloned by the gazillion to become the ubiquitous street tree of America’s postwar suburban expansion.
The Bradford pear seemed to leap from an architect’s idealized rendering. But in this case, reality outshone the artist’s vision. It was upright and symmetric in silhouette. It exploded with white flowers when we most needed it, in early spring. Its glossy green leaves shimmered coolly in the summer heat, and in the fall, its foliage turned crimson, maroon and orange — a perfect New England study in autumnal color almost everywhere it grew. And it grew everywhere. It flourished in poor soil, wet or dry, acidic or alkaline. It shrugged off pests and diseases, it didn’t drop messy fruit like mulberries or crab apples. Millions of Bradford pears would be planted from California to Massachusetts and would come to signal the dream and aspirations of postwar suburbia. Like the cookie-cutter suburbs themselves, the Bradford pear would embody that quintessentially American idea of the goodness of mass-produced uniformity.
But like a comic book supervillain who had started off good, the Bradford pear crossed over to something darker. It turned from thornless to spiky, limber to brittle, chaste to promiscuous, tame to feral. Most of all, it became invasive. It is now an ecological marauder destined to continue its spread for decades, long after those suburban tract houses have faded away. Generations yet to be born will come to know this tree and learn to hate it.
“I don’t know when we’re going to overthrow them,” Giuliani told the audience. “It could be in a few days, months, a couple of years. But it’s going to happen.”
Giuliani also said that sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration after the United States pulled out of a deal in which Iran agreed not to develop nuclear weapons “are working” by damaging Iran’s economy. “These are the conditions that lead to successful revolution,” he said.
This statement conflicts with official US policy. The State Department says the United States does not support regime change in Iran and announced last week that Giuliani “does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy.” During an appearance on CNN Sunday, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley also responded to the suggestion by the president’s lawyer. “The United States is not looking to do a regime change in Iran,” Haley said.
Giuliani was paid through his “firm” to deliver the speech, he toldTheDaily Beast last week. He declined to disclose his fee. Giuliani does not reveal all his clients, but he has recently worked for foreign entities including the government of Qatar, a member of Ukrainian political party that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort admitted he illegally lobbied for, and Turkish officials prosecuted in the United States for circumventing prior US sanctions on Iran.
Anura Wijewikrama fishes two hours each morning and two hours each evening. And like his grandfather and father before him, he does so on handmade stilts driven into the sand. He is one of the few still carrying on the practice, which is exclusively found in the stunning waters off Sri Lanka. What started as a World War II-era reaction to food and boat shortages is now done to keep tradition alive, with stilt fishermen like Anura taking on other jobs to make ends meet.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:44 AM and sunset 6:49 PM, for 12h 05m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
The sixth-annual Discover Whitewater Series, a local half marathon, 5K, and kids’ run, takes place today.
Shortly after 7 p.m. the Battle of Flamborough Head began. Serapis engaged Bonhomme Richard, and soon afterwards, Alliance fired, from a considerable distance, at Countess. Quickly recognizing that he could not win a battle of big guns, and with the wind dying, Jones made every effort to lock Richard and Serapis together (his famous, albeit possibly apocryphal, quotation “I have not yet begun to fight!” was uttered in reply to a demand to surrender in this phase of the battle), finally succeeding after about an hour, following which his deck guns and his Marine marksmen in the rigging began clearing the British decks.
….
[British] Captain Pearson of Serapis accepted that prolonging the battle could achieve nothing, so he surrendered. Most of Bonhomme Richard‘s crew immediately transferred to other vessels, and after a day and a half of frantic repair efforts, it was decided that the ship could not be saved, so it was allowed to sink, and Jones took command of Serapis for the trip to neutral (but American-sympathizing) Holland.
From bicycles to beans, Wisconsin and much of the nation are caught in the crossfires of President Donald Trump’s trade war.
Starting Monday, the Trump administration will begin taxing $200 billion more in Chinese goods. The tariffs will start at 10 percent and rise to 25 percent in 2019.
The product list is huge, and it includes goods from some of Wisconsin’s most well-known companies, such as Waterloo-based Trek Bicycle Corp.
If Trump delivers on the 25 percent tariff, Trek says it would pay an additional $30 million in tariffs each year on bikes imported from China.
(If Trek pays, then consumers will almost surely pay in higher costs.)
On June 3, 2016, Donald Trump Jr. received one of the most striking emails of the presidential campaign, offering dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government’s “support for Mr. Trump.”
Trump Jr. responded 17 minutes later: “if it’s what you say I love it.”
That email led to a meeting at Trump Tower that has become a central focus of the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign.
But the very day that email was sent, another exchange was taking place behind the scenes.
Documents reviewed by BuzzFeed News show that $3.3 million began moving on June 3 between two of the men who orchestrated the meeting: Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate developer close to both Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, a longtime Agalarov employee once investigated for money laundering.
That money is on top of the more than $20 million that was flagged as suspicious, BuzzFeed News revealed earlier this month, after the money ricocheted among the planners and participants of the Trump Tower meeting. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has been investigating whether any individuals colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election, is examining the suspicious transactions, four federal law enforcement officials said. A spokesperson for Mueller’s office declined to comment.
Although the documents do not directly link the $3.3 million to the meeting, they show that officials at three separate banks raised red flags about the funds. Many of the transfers seemed to have no legitimate purpose, bankers noted. Kaveladze quickly moved money to other accounts he controlled, and appeared to use some of it to make payments on Agalarov’s behalf — including more than $700,000 to pay off American Express charges.
One of the biggest stories in technology this year is the exploding popularity of Bird, Lime, Skip, Spin and Scoot. They’re all electric scooter-rental services, and their vehicles are suddenly buzzing along city streets and sidewalks around the world. These startups allow riders to locate and unlock scooters with an app. When they reach their destination, they just walk away. Some drivers and pedestrians see the scooters as dangerous contrivances that must be stopped, while some urban planners consider them, along with bikes, the future of city transport.
1. What accounts for the rise of scooters?
Cars often aren’t the quickest way to travel in dense, urban areas. Many cities looked to bicycle-sharing services and bike lanes as a better option for shorter trips and as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Electric scooters, which can cost less than $2 per ride, are an offshoot of that. Investors looking for the next Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc., the app-based car-hailing services, are adding to scooter-mania by pouring money into companies like Bird and Lime, touching off a city-by-city race to become the premier scooter brand. Not to be left behind, even Uber and Lyft are launching competing scooter businesses.
2. How prevalent are scooters?
Bird, started by a former executive of Lyft and Uber, operates scooter services in about 40 U.S. cities, while Lime is in 23. Bird kicked off the trend in late 2017 with its launch in Santa Monica, California, and suddenly it seemed scooters were everywhere. Scores of unattended vehicles on city sidewalks have resulted in pushback from people complaining of urban chaos, and some cities have started to cap the number of scooters they’ll allow. But in most U.S. cities with sharing services, the number of scooters barely exceeds 1,000. By comparison, 45,000 Uber and Lyft drivers worked in San Francisco in 2017, according to the city’s attorney.
(It’s more accurate to say scooters could reshape cities than to say they are doing so, but there’s a definite potential to them.)
Given Putin’s overall objective of sowing discord in the U.S. by driving an even deeper wedge in our already existent social and cultural divisions, the outcome of the election would have mattered little to him. A Clinton presidency could have still provided an environment that was ripe for exploitation. In fact, it might have been even easier to exploit, and Trump would have been a perfect post-election tool. Putin never wanted to use Trump because he respects or loves the man. Putin wanted to use Trump because Trump causes chaos.
It wouldn’t have taken a lot of foresight to have noticed a few years ago that Trump would make a great disruptor. While Trump has always been an outspoken provocateur, his potential for disruption became abundantly clear during the Obama administration. Even before Trump traveled to Russia to put on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, he began questioning the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It’s worth noting that Trump’s “birther” conspiracy echoed the Russian playbook in other elections – for example, the fake social media conspiracies that questioned the “authenticity” of Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko (who happens to be the longtime political rival of Paul Manafort’s previous top Ukrainian client: Victor Yanukovych) in 2014. The similarity in tactics might be coincidence, but Trump’s embrace of “birtherism” – and the traction it gained in mainstream American politics – demonstrated to Putin that Trump was willing to promote fringe conspiracies and polarize political discussion.
For Russia’s part, having Trump as a “useful idiot on the sidelines” might have been a better role for them in many ways than his actually being president. No one would have questioned his repeating Russian propaganda word for word – while it might have been provocative, he would have had no oath or public trust he was expected to uphold. Russia also wouldn’t need to worry that the foreign policy establishment might get to him or even change his mind on questions of U.S. policy toward Russia. And there would be no Mueller investigation (although presumably the FBI would still be investigating), which is as much a thorn in Putin’s side as it is in Trump’s, since it has galvanized Congress to pass more sanctions against his oligarch friends.
Anura Wijewikrama fishes two hours each morning and two hours each evening. And like his grandfather and father before him, he does so on handmade stilts driven into the sand. He is one of the few still carrying on the practice, which is exclusively found in the stunning waters off Sri Lanka. What started started as a World War II-era reaction to food and boat shortages is now done to keep tradition alive, with stilt fishermen like Anura taking on other jobs to make ends meet.
Saturday in Whitewater, the first day of fall, will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 6:51 PM, for 12h 08m 09s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 93.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary warning that he would order the emancipation of all slaves in any state that did not end its rebellion against the Union by January 1, 1863.[7] None of the Confederate states restored themselves to the Union, and Lincoln’s order was signed and took effect on January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation outraged white Southerners (and their sympathizers) who envisioned a race war. It angered some Northern Democrats, energized anti-slavery forces, and undermined elements in Europe that wanted to intervene to help the Confederacy.[8] The Proclamation lifted the spirits of African Americans both free and slave. It led many slaves to escape from their masters and get to Union lines to obtain their freedom, and to join the Union Army.
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In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation. In the battle, though the Union suffered heavier losses than the Confederates and General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland. On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam occurred, and while living at the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.[62] According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told Cabinet members that he had made a covenant with God, that if the Union drove the Confederacy out of Maryland, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.[63][64] Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin,[65] an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, “as a necessary war measure” as the basis of the proclamation, rather than the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment. Some days after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the “institution”; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand.”[66]
A top Milwaukee Health Department staffer scaled back efforts to clean up homes with lead-poisoned children living in them, newly released records say.
During the last two years — 2016 and 2017 — the city didn’t clean up a single house with lead-poisoned children living in it, the records also show.
Those were among the findings documented in hundreds of pages of records linked to personnel investigations into two former leaders of the city’s troubled lead poisoning prevention program. The documents were released by the city Friday following Journal Sentinel records requests.
The documents blame former health staffers Lisa Lien and Richard Gaeta for creating a toxic work environment full of bullying, intimidation and harassment. Following the personnel investigations, Lien resigned and Gaeta was fired.
Lien, then the city’s home environmental health manager, had previously gotten a 10-day suspension last year. Both Lien and Gaeta were placed on paid administrative leave in March.
Gaeta’s discharge notice accuses him of “insubordination” and “offensive conduct or language.” It also says he was “incompetent or inefficient” in doing his job as Milwaukee’s environmental field supervisor.
Gov. Scott Walker’s transportation secretary told business officials and others last week he had talked to a London financier about selling off Wisconsin’s highways but had rejected the idea.
Transportation Secretary Dave Ross told a group last week that Walker’s administration was adopting new ways of getting its work done and mentioned in passing his discussion about selling off roads, according to people familiar with the meeting.
He then said he was not pursuing the proposal because Wisconsin has good contractors to maintain the state’s roads.
It’s not just that the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is, in President Trump’s estimation, a biased partisan “witch hunt.” No, that’s just one small aspect of why Trump is frustrated by Mueller’s work.
There’s Trump’s worry that the probe “endangers our country,” as he told reporters on Air Force One last week. Why? Because it is “hard for us to deal with other countries” because of it.
And then there’s the cost. In June, he took issue with the cost as reported by Mueller’s team.
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But here’s the thing, pointed out by journalist Marcy Wheeler on her personal site: The Mueller probe may have just paid for itself.
Why? Because part of the plea agreement reached between Mueller and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort includes forfeiture of certain property to the government. While it’s not clear how much value will be extracted from that forfeiture, there’s reason to think that it could more than pay for what Mueller has incurred so far.
These are not the stories that candidates usually turn to the camera and open up about in ads.
One talked about her father’s violent temper and how she once watched him throw her mother through a plate glass door. Another recalled watching his brothers struggle to find steady work because of their criminal records. A third spoke of suffering a decade of sexual abuse as a child.
The wave of female, minority and outsider candidates that is breaking cultural barriers and toppling incumbents in the Democratic Party is also sweeping aside a longstanding norm in campaigns: That the public image of politicians — especially women — should be upbeat, uncontroversial and utterly conventional.
For many of these Democrats who were running against better-financed rivals, the breakthrough moment came after they got personal in relatively low-cost videos that went viral, reaching millions of people. Using documentary-style storytelling, which can last for several minutes, candidates have found a successful alternative to the traditional model of raising huge sums of money that get spent on expensive, 30-second television commercials.
The videos are chiefly intended as ads, but they also served a fund-raising purpose. For a fraction of the cost, these videos can help to spread a candidate’s story in a way that is easily shareable and can inspire donations.
On the cusp of our atmosphere live a thin group of seasonal electric blue clouds. Forming fifty miles above the poles in summer, these clouds are known as noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds — PMCs. A recent NASA long-duration balloon mission observed these clouds over the course of five days at their home in the mesosphere. The resulting photos, which scientists have just begun to analyze, will help us better understand turbulence in the atmosphere, as well as in oceans, lakes, and other planetary atmospheres, and may even improve weather forecasting.
It was a damp and dreary November nearly three years ago, when the London Metropolitan Police decided it was time to act. People kept calling with reports of grisly findings: mutilated cats, some with their heads and tails removed in and around the borough of Croydon.
On Thursday, Scotland Yard revealed the conclusion in a near-three-year-long investigation determined the likely culprit to be foxes and other wildlife.
“There is no direct evidence of human involvement,” police said. “There were no witnesses, no identifiable patterns and no forensic leads that pointed to human involvement.”
The foxes, however, were not so sly.
In at least three instances, the foxes were caught red-handed on security video. A check of the footage revealed the foxes scurrying away, cat parts in their mouths.
In other cases, humans did play a part — or at least, their cars did.
Police said some of the cats were roadkill, before likely falling prey to animal scavengers.
“Wildlife is known to scavenge on road-kill, often removing the heads and tails of dead animals,” police said.
Friday in Whitewater will see a mix of clouds and sunshine, with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:53 PM, for 12h 11m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Early in May 1779, Arnold met with Philadelphia merchant Joseph Stansbury[66] who then “went secretly to New York with a tender of [Arnold’s] services to Sir Henry Clinton”.[67] Stansbury ignored instructions from Arnold to involve no one else in the plot, and he crossed the British lines and went to see Jonathan Odell in New York. Odell was a Loyalist working with William Franklin, the last colonial governor of New Jersey and the son of Benjamin Franklin. On May 9, Franklin introduced Stansbury to Major André, who had just been named the British spy chief.[68] This was the beginning of a secret correspondence between Arnold and André, sometimes using his wife Peggy as a willing intermediary, that culminated more than a year later with Arnold’s change of sides.[52]
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Arnold and [British major John] André finally met on September 21 [1780] at the Joshua Hett Smith House. On the morning of September 22, the outpost at Verplanck’s Point under command of Col. James Livingston fired on HMS Vulture, the ship that was intended to carry André back to New York. This action did sufficient damage that she retreated downriver, forcing André to return to New York overland. Arnold wrote out passes for André so that he would be able to pass through the lines, and he also gave him plans for West Point.[90]
André was captured near Tarrytown, New York on Saturday, September 23 by three Westchester militiamen named John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams.[91] They found the papers exposing the plot to capture West Point and sent them to Washington, and Arnold’s intentions came to light after Washington examined them.[92] Meanwhile, André convinced the unsuspecting Colonel John Jameson, to whom he was delivered, to send him back to Arnold at West Point. However, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, a member of the Culper Ring established under Washington’s orders,[93] insisted that Jameson order the prisoner to be intercepted and brought back. Jameson reluctantly recalled the lieutenant who had been delivering André into Arnold’s custody, but then sent the same lieutenant as a messenger to notify Arnold of André’s arrest.[94]
Arnold learned of André’s capture the morning of September 24 when he received Jameson’s message, and he learned that Jameson had sent Washington the papers which André was carrying. He received the letter while waiting for Washington, with whom he had planned to have breakfast.[95] He immediately hastened to the shore and ordered bargemen to row him downriver to where HMS Vulture was anchored, which then took him to New York.[96] From the ship, he wrote a letter to Washington,[97] requesting that Peggy be given safe passage to her family in Philadelphia—a request that Washington granted.[98]
Washington remained calm when he was presented with evidence of Arnold’s activities. He did, however, investigate its extent, and suggested that he was willing to exchange André for Arnold during negotiations with General Clinton concerning André’s fate. Clinton refused this suggestion; after a military tribunal, André was hanged at Tappan, New York on October 2. Washington also infiltrated men into New York in an attempt to capture Arnold. This plan very nearly succeeded, but failed when Arnold changed living quarters prior to sailing for Virginia in December.[99]
Andre Phillips says he has no choice but to raise prices by as much as 10 percent.
Phillips, a manager at Wyckes Furniture Outlet in San Diego, says manufacturers began notifying him two weeks ago that they would begin charging him 5 percent to 10 percent more on everyday goods such as dining chairs and bookcases beginning Monday, as the Trump administration’s latest round of tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods goes into effect. And if he doesn’t pass on that increase to shoppers, he says he’ll lose money on each item he sells.
The furniture retailer, which has three stores in California, is already struggling to compete with giants such as Amazon and Wayfair, which often undercut the company’s prices on everything from coat racks to bedroom furniture. Now Phillips says tariff-related expenses will put him at an even bigger disadvantage against his largest competitors.
“To be told suddenly that you’re going to be hit with a 10 percent surcharge on items that you planned for and ordered six months ago — well, that’s very hard to recover from,” said Phillips, who says he’s expecting price increases on roughly $80,000 worth of furniture that is already en route from China. “Today’s customers want the best price they can get, and if we’re not cheaper than Amazon, there’s no reason anybody is going to buy from us.”
FEMA’s housing help was slow in arriving, plagued by bureaucratic delays and regulations that failed to take into account the hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico who had no clear title to their properties.
Time and again, people asked for help in getting the most basic kinds of repairs — for missing roofs, collapsed walls, dangerous mold, soaked belongings — then waited for months and often did not get enough to even start the process.
Of the 1.1 million people who requested help from FEMA, about 58 percent were denied. Among those who appealed, 75 percent were rejected again. The median grant given to repair homes was $1,800, compared with about $9,127 paid out to survivors of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, according to a Times analysis.
All told, FEMA spent nearly twice as much for housing repair grants in Texas as it did in Puerto Rico, though the money went to 51,000 fewer people.
The Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of nearly 1,500 migrant children who illegally entered the United States alone this year and were placed with sponsors after leaving federal shelters, according to congressional findings released on Tuesday.
The revelation echoes an admission in April by the Department of Health and Human Services that the government had similarly lost track of an additional 1,475 migrant children it had moved out of shelters last year.
In findings that lawmakers described as troubling, Senate investigators said the department could not determine with certainty the whereabouts of 1,488 out of 11,254 children the agency had placed with sponsors in 2018, based on follow-up calls from April 1 to June 30.
The inability to track the whereabouts of migrant children after they have been released to sponsors has raised concerns that they could end up with human traffickers or be used as laborers by people posing as relatives.
Fairness and accuracy are not served by pretending to have no point of view. They are served by acknowledging where you’re coming from and then being rigorous about following the facts where they lead.
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Because journalism couldn’t afford to make enemies, it gave up its moral compass.
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The truth is, the press is the enemy—of secrecy, corruption, and manipulation. And it should be the enemy of white supremacy and other anti-democratic lies.
