Many small towns, looking for something to attract visitors and newcomers, probably dream about the possibility of a college campus. Whitewater has a public university campus, and the majority of the city’s residents are students at that school. Thousands of students in the city assure a steady stream of retail traffic we would not otherwise have. Some, if not most, merchants in town would wither or shut down without the demand the campus generates.
A thriving campus is an advantage for a city.
There is a way, however, that a campus – with the demand that it alone can generate – masks failings elsewhere in town. Because a campus necessarily draws visitors large numbers, failings of local municipal and other public officials are more easily ignored or overcome. Non-university officials don’t need to work as hard or as skillfully in an environment where a university’s demand compensates (as it by volume necessarily will) for their own mistakes and sloppiness.
Consider a recent story about policing in nearby Clinton, Wisconsin, where some residents are upset that local law enforcement’s supposedly heavy-handed conduct is driving away potential visitors who would otherwise shop in that town. (A story on this matter, behind a paywall, is poorly written and almost deliberately vague, offering little beyond a general claim.)
Whatever’s happening – or not – with local officials in Clinton, Wisconsin, this much is true: like most tiny towns, they’re on their own, with no campus to compensate for local political and administrative failings.
A municipal mistake in a place Clinton echos like a single pea in a tin can – there’s nothing else to muffle the rattling.
Whitewater, Wisconsin’s public campus gives local officials (here I mean some, not all) more leeway for error, shoddy thinking, and low-quality work, secure as they are in the knowledge that demand will remain higher than if their work alone were the city’s principal attraction.
This is one reason that, despite the talent of some, Whitewater’s Major Public Institutions Produce a Net Loss (And Why It Doesn’t Have to Be That Way). It’s also true that the university, itself, has generated demand even when its some of its leaders – Richard Telfer easily comes to mind – have been mediocre or worse (“There is one exception worth noting: the high-level leadership that former Chancellor Telfer gathered at UW-Whitewater is notably weak or troubled…”).
Whitewater has an advantage that towns like Clinton don’t have, but rather than use that advantage to its fullest – by producing to a higher level – some officials can batten on the demand that a public campus offers without having to provide the unassisted effort that most rural communities must.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:44 PM, for 13h 34m 51s of daytime. The moon is waxing crescent with just 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 3 PM, and there is a Fire Department Business Meeting at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1485, Richard III meets his end at the Battle of Bosworth Field. On this day in 1920, Milwaukee runner Arlie Schardt wins a gold medal in the 3,000-meter team race (with teammates Hal Brown and Ivan Dresser) at the Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium.
….The answer is different for different people. Young people who seek careers in the civil service, military, diplomatic corps, or intelligence services should do so— career people do not represent any particular administration; their seniors must stay in, because some of the most effective brakes on Trump’s excesses will come from officials stubbornly adhering to constitutional norms. This is not the Deep State of Stephen Bannon’s dark fantasies; it is the deep fidelity of public servants to the law.
Political appointees are another matter. Yes, they take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but they are representatives of the president, and are presumed to be committed to implementing his plans and his platform. If they cannot say as much openly, if they construct a distance between themselves and him on the most important issues, then they are lying to themselves and to others. It may not seem to present an immediate moral crisis for a deputy assistant secretary for warehouse maintenance, but challenges to one’s integrity in public service can crop up in the oddest places.
Those who are already at the center of government have a much tougher problem. Unless they had been living in an isolation chamber during all of 2016, they had to have gone in knowing that Trump was awful. The name Trump will be tattooed invisibly on their foreheads going forward; henceforth in the right light it will be brightly illuminated. They may, in later years, like to say, “I worked for Rex Tillerson” or “I served honorably at the Treasury.” Those around them, including those whose respect is worth having, will think, “No, you signed up for Trump and you know it”….
….The data connecting sanctuary city policies to crime is quite thin. We previously awarded Three Pinocchios to Sessions and to Trump when they claimed that sanctuary cities “breed crime” or that “criminals take notice” when cities make it known that they have sanctuary policies.
There is limited research on the effect of sanctuary policies on crime. The research that does exist found no statistically significant impact of sanctuary policies on crime or showed that immigrant-friendly policing strategies reduced crime in some jurisdictions. Sanctuary jurisdictions release inmates after their criminal case is complete, and extensive research shows noncitizens are not more prone to criminality than U.S.-born citizens. Moreover, some sanctuary jurisdictions do cooperate with the federal government if they believe the inmate is a public safety threat.
Despite Sessions’s assertion, there’s no evidence that sanctuary policies had anything to do with crime trends in Chicago and Miami, including over the 2017 Fourth of July weekend….
Trump apologists like Ken Abramowitz want to argue that Trump is unpopular with successful executives because there’s an illusion that Trump’s toxix; Jennifer Rubin sets him straight, that it’s no illusion and that apologists like Abramowitz are covering for bigotry and incompetency:
….After Trump’s initial comments transformed the disgrace in Charlottesville into a crisis for the White House, only a handful of CEOs on Trump’s business councils resigned unprompted. A few more followed when activists threatened boycotts, but it was only after Trump’s truly unhinged defense of neo-Nazis on Tuesday that the remaining participants responded en masse. Only, rather than resign in disgrace, they connived with Trump to dissolve the councils altogether, sparing themselves the personalized wrath Trump directed at Merck CEO Kenneth C. Frazier, who initiated the exodus, and protecting their access to regulatory favors in the future. Like Ryan, they are now free to criticize white supremacy as an abstraction, without having to cite Trump specifically.
Within the White House, the response has been even more craven. Trump’s closest advisers—at least, those who are not white nationalists personally—promote themselves, individually and collectively, as the country’s saviors. When they then fail to protect the country from Trump’s depredations, they distance themselves from his behavior through anonymous leaks to the press. Thus we learn that Trump’s Jewish aides, including chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, are supposedly “disgusted” with Trump. But Cohn returned to work dutifully on Wednesday, still angling, no doubt, for a plum appointment to the Federal Reserve chairmanship early next year.
Though the president who took America to war with Nazis was a Democrat, and conservatives fought the civil rights movement with billy clubs, Republicans have nevertheless fashioned themselves for decades as the true heirs to both righteous traditions. This rhetorical sorcery has paid off for them in many ways, but it will be put to the ultimate test now that Trump is appeasing neo-Nazis in the role of GOP Grand Wizard.
The man in the White House is reckless and unmanageable, a danger to the Constitution, a threat to our democratic institutions.
Last week some of his worst qualities were on display: his moral vacuity and his disregard for the truth, as well as his stubborn resistance to sensible advice. As ever, he lashed out at imaginary enemies and scapegoated others for his own failings. Most important, his reluctance to offer a simple and decisive condemnation of racism and Nazism astounded and appalled observers around the world.
With such a glaring failure of moral leadership at the top, it is desperately important that others stand up and speak out to defend American principles and values. This is no time for neutrality, equivocation or silence. Leaders across America — and especially those in the president’s own party — must summon their reserves of political courage to challenge President Trump publicly, loudly and unambiguously.
And yet, and yet, look around: how many officials in cities and towns – so quick to proclaim themselves proud Americans, influencers, notables, movers-and-shakers – now have nothing to say about the most important political question of our time?
Years of glad-handing, business cards, expectations of special treatment, self-promotion at every opportunity, lapping praise and ladling puffery, and in the end, each of them shown as nothing more than lions that meow.
This Tuesday, August 22nd at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Zookeeper’s Wife @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), based on a true story, is set in 1939, when during the Nazi conquest of Poland the couple who run the Warsaw Zoo turn the ground’s hiding places into a refuge for Jews and the persecuted seeking to escape the slaughter, while also trying to save the animals living there. The real-life couple saved over 300 people during the war.
Niki Caro directs the two hour, seven-minute film, starring Jessica Chastain. The film carries a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy, with a high of eighty-two, and a one-third chance of afternoon thunderstorms. Sunrise is 6:08 AM and sunset 7:46 PM, for 13h 37m 31s of daytime. We’ve a new moon. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Birge Fountain Committee is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and her Library Board at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas begin the first of seven debates during their United States Senate race. On this day in 1864, the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, near Petersburg, Virgina ends, with Wisconsinites distinguishing themselves: “On this day, the 7th Wisconsin Infantry repulsed a fierce attack. It then captured the 16th Mississippi Infantry and all its officers. This was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign.”
….His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic. Tuesday’s bonkers news conference in New York was Trump’s latest act of “whataboutism,” the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting moral equivalency between two things that aren’t necessarily comparable. In this case, the president wondered whether the removal of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville — where white supremacists clashed this weekend with counterprotesters — would lead to the teardown of others….
For a nanosecond, especially to an uncritical listener, this stab at logic might seem interesting, even thought-provoking, and that’s why it’s a useful political tool. Whataboutism appears to broaden context, to offer a counterpoint, when really it’s diverting blame, muddying the waters and confusing the hell out of rational listeners.
“Not only does it help to deflect your original argument but it also throws you off balance,” says Alexey Kovalev, an independent Russian journalist, on the phone from Moscow. “You’re expecting to be in a civilized argument that doesn’t use cheap tricks like that. You are playing chess and your opponent — while making a lousy move — he just punches you on the nose.”
….Bannon has media ambitions to compete with Fox News from the right. Last week in New York, he huddled with his billionaire benefactor, Robert Mercer, and discussed ways to expand Breitbart into TV, sources said. “Television is definitely on the table,” a Bannon adviser told me. A partnership with Sinclair remains a possibility. In recent days, Sinclair’s chief political analyst Boris Epshteyn has spoken with Breitbart editors about ways to form an alliance, one Breitbart staffer said. “All the Sinclair guys are super tight with Breitbart. Imagine if we got together Hannity and O’Reilly and started something?”
Meanwhile, the next phase has already begun. On Sunday, the website’s lead story was based on a Daily Mail report that said Ivanka was behind Bannon’s removal. “Trump’s daughter Ivanka pushed out Bannon because of his ‘far-right views’ clashing with her Jewish faith,” the article noted. Another piece was headlined: “6 TIMES JAVANKA’S DISPLEASURE WITH POTUS LEAKED TO PRESS.” In his feud with Kushner, Bannon may have a powerful ally: Reince Priebus, also recently departed from the White House with a quiver of grudges. Recently, according to several sources, Bannon has told friends he wants Priebus to give his account of the James Comey firing to special prosecutor Robert Mueller. According to a source close to Priebus, the former chief of staff believes that the decision was made during an early May weekend in Bedminster, where Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller were with the president. Trump returned to the Oval Office on Monday, May 8 and told other aides he intended to fire Comey….
….”Mathematicians are coming late to this problem,” said [Tufts University mathematics professor] Duchin, who started studying the shapes of electoral districts after teaching a course on voting during the presidential primary last year. “We think we can see underlying mathematical principles that weren’t visible before.”
Gerrymandering isn’t new, and it isn’t always illegal. States are given wide latitude to draw their own voting districts, and since at least the 1800s politicians have sought to cement their power by creating districts in which certain voting groups are spread thinly over many districts or clumped heavily into only a few. Either way, it dilutes their power.
Drawing districts along racial lines has been ruled unconstitutional, as in North Carolina, where a federal court struck down 28 districts last year because state Republicans relied too heavily on race when drawing them. Gerrymandering along partisan lines has survived legal challenges, but the Supreme Court will revisit the topic this year in a Wisconsin lawsuit that experts say could be a landmark case.
Mathematicians hope to help by offering new measurements to evaluate whether a district has been drawn unfairly. Until recently many courts have relied on relatively unscientific methods, experts say, often using the so-called “eyeball test” to see if a district’s shape looks reasonably compact and regular….
The white supremacists and right-wing extremists who came together over the weekend in Charlottesville, Va., are now headed home, many of them ready and energized, they said, to set their sights on bigger prizes.
Some were making arrangements to appear at future marches. Some were planning to run for public office. Others, taking a cue from the Charlottesville event — a protest, nominally, of the removal of a Confederate-era statue — were organizing efforts to preserve what they referred to as “white heritage” symbols in their home regions.
Calling it “an opportune time,” Preston Wiginton, a Texas-based white nationalist, declared on Saturday that he planned to hold a “White Lives Matter” march on Sept. 11 on the campus of Texas A&M — with a keynote speaker, Richard B. Spencer, who was featured at the Charlottesville event….
And yet, and yet, Boston was a disappointment for them:
This is the first video I’ve seen that really shows the disparity between the “free speech” rally and the thousands of counter-demonstrators pic.twitter.com/Lca2J3vhsc
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 6:07 AM and sunset 7:48 PM, for 13h 40m 11s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invade Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring liberalization of Alexander Dubcek’s regime. On this day in 1794, American troops under General “Mad” Anthony Wayne defeat a confederation of Indian forces led by Little Turtle of the Miamis and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees: “The crushing defeat of the British-allied Indians convinced the British to finally evacuate their posts in the American west (an accession explicitly given in the Jay Treaty signed some three months later), eliminating forever the English presence in the early American northwest and clearing the way for American expansion. The battle also resulted in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, in which the defeated Indians ceded to Wayne the right of Americans to settle in the Ohio Valley (although the northwestern area of that country was given to the Indians). Wayne’s victory opened the gates of widespread settlement of the Old Northwest, Wisconsin included.”
MOSCOW—For the first time in his two decades defending people accused of treason, Ivan Pavlov has come across a case he says he truly has trouble getting his head around. Everything about it is a guessing game for the defense lawyer, including the charges against his client, whose name he is not allowed to mention in public.
Speaking at his office in St. Petersburg, under a photograph of President Barack Obama shaking his hand, Pavlov, 46, explained to The Daily Beast that the arrest in Russia last December of accused cyber spies is heavy with high-profile politics….
To get a sense of just how fraught it may be, let us go back to January. By then, allegations by the American intelligence community about Russian meddling in the American elections had been building for several months. President Obama had warned Putin, eyeball to eyeball, to stop. Two reports had been issued publicly by the U.S. intelligence services in October and in December, but in guarded and less than explicit language as America’s spooks tried to protect the methods and especially the sources that had led them to their conclusions….
….We certainly hope [Kevin] Durant’s teammates, fellow basketball players and indeed all professional and college sports players make the same choice [not to visit Trump at the White House]. They are inarguably role models, and America could use some role models right about now. Durant and others can emphasize that their extraordinary action is required because of Trump’s deliberate effort to rewrite history and redefine the United States in ways that are antithetical to our founding creed.
We’ve urged public figures of all types — entertainers, civic leaders, public intellectuals, business leaders, scientists, etc. — to make the same decision. Those who publicly decline to attend events deserve praise; those who attend deserve our contempt. No one can honestly say that meeting with the president offers a chance to shape Trump’s views, influence his decisions or help our country. This week should have removed any doubt that Trump is immune to reason, indifferent to history and contemptuous of advice.
Charities are also making some public decisions. Both the American Cancer Society and the Cleveland Clinic have canceled events at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. The Post also reports, “The American Friends of Magen David Adom, which raises money for Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross, also said it would not hold its 2018 gala at the club ‘after considerable deliberation,’ though it did not give a reason. The charity had one of Mar-a-Lago’s biggest events last season, with about 600 people in attendance.” I cannot imagine why any charitable organization that wants the support of a wide array of Americans would think it was in its interest to stage an event under the Trump logo….
Russian President Vladimir Putin is enjoying rising popularity among Republicans according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.
The poll found that the share of Republicans expressing confidence in Putin doubled to 34 percent from 17 percent in 2015, when Donald Trump launched a campaign for the White House that was seen as friendly toward Moscow.
Though most Americans view Russia negatively, Moscow’s overall popularity in the United States has risen since 2014, when it plummeted after the country annexed Crimea. Twenty-nine percent of Americans now have a favorable view, compared with 19 percent in 2014, the poll found….
Dexter Roberts reports that This Is China’s Real Economic Problem (“A $600 billion stimulus program created corporate zombies and stinted on the private sector. The result: lower productivity”):
….one key indicator—total factor productivity—gives a more worrisome picture of China’s economic health. Total factor productivity is the extra output that the economy produces without additional labor or capital—it’s what creates prosperity. While productivity in the manufacturing industry grew an average of 2.6 percent a year from 1998 to 2007, growth has been almost zero since, according to Loren Brandt, a China specialist at the University of Toronto. In the U.S., by contrast, productivity growth fell from 1 percent to about 0.5 percent over the same period, he says.
It isn’t unusual for productivity to slow once the easy gains that come from industrialization, the development of supply chains, and the embrace of technologies such as computers are used up. “You would expect productivity to come down, but not as sharply as we’re seeing” in China, Brandt says.
So what explains the dramatic drop? There’s a pretty obvious culprit. To combat the effects of the global financial crisis, China unleashed a 4 trillion-yuan ($586 billion) stimulus program in 2008, much of it directed at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), to prop up growth and avoid mass layoffs. While the spending helped China avoid a deep slump, the focus on SOEs hurt the private sector. Today, state companies get almost 30 percent of all loans but contribute less than a tenth of GDP, according to Gavekal Dragonomics, a Beijing-based economic consulting firm. “The government’s repeated use of state-owned enterprises to stimulate short-term activity has weakened the private sector and lowered productivity growth,” Andrew Batson, research director at Dragonomics, wrote in a May report. As a result, China is “increasingly locked into a slower-growth future”….
A bald eagle is an exciting, rare sighting for most Americans. But on this Alaskan island, our national symbol is as common as a beachside seagull. You can find them everywhere—lurking above the post office, inspecting the trash, waiting patiently for the local fishing boats to return with the day’s catch, even hanging out in front of the town church. In Unalaska, Alaska, everyone has an eagle story.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 6:06 AM and sunset 7:49 PM, for 13h 42m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 6.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 2004, Google’s initial public offering (IPO) takes place: “the company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share.[27][28] Shares were sold in an online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal.[29][30] The sale of $1.67 bn (billion) gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23bn.[31] By January 2014, its market capitalization had grown to $397bn.[32] The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires.” On this day in 1812, the USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off Nova Scotia during the War of 1812, earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”
(As Trump lies with abandon, so do his surrogates. As an autocrat he assumes that no will challenge his lies, and his surrogates make the same arrogant mistake.)
David Graham observes that Bannon’s Exit Leaves Trump Untethered (“As the president cuts ties with establishment staffers, and forces out his populist firebrand, what’s left of Trumpism other than white identity politics?”):
….The one view that seems likely to persist, even without Bannon around, is Trump’s embrace of the politics of white resentment and racially divisive rhetoric. In a sense, Trump is right that Bannon was a newcomer: Trump has flirted with racism for decades. He first made headlines when the Justice Department prosecuted him for trying to keep black tenants out of Trump Organization apartments. He later called for the execution of the Central Park Five, who were eventually exonerated.
Trump’s peculiar statement on Tuesday, endorsing some forms of white identity politics and white pride, while trying to separate them from neo-Nazis and white nationalism, was among his clearest and most cogent statements so far. And while Bannon said he was “proud” of the comments, they came with Bannon already on the outs. Those comments from the president created a major split with the business establishment, which he had leaned on to deliver manufacturing jobs—along with white identity politics, the core of his pitch for the presidency. With Bannon gone, the GOP establishment out, and the business community treating Trump as toxic, white identity politics might be the only remaining strongly held view that Trump has.
Of course, it’s unclear whether that matters. Kelly has proven that he can help push out staffers he dislikes, but he has also had little luck in reining in the president, who has horrified advisers with comments on North Korea and Charlottesville in the last week alone. He is now left with a team of advisers with few ideological commitments and less political experience. Pushing Priebus out seems to have done little to arrest Trump’s slide into chaos. Will Bannon’s ouster really change things any more? Commentary about Trump has tended to obsess over who his staffers are, but the important fact remains who the president is. That hasn’t changed.
Maybe Bannon appealed to Trump’s worst instincts, but honestly, does the president have any good ones? It is said that Bannon’s pro-Russian views made for constant tension with hawkish advisers, but does anyone think Trump is not compromised in some fashion when it comes to Russian President Vladimir Putin? Bannon was the faux intellectual giving direction and form to Trump’s views, but Trump’s deeply warped views, glaring ignorance and defective character are the root of the problem. Trump will still talk to allies harboring the same worldview, will still tweet impulsively, will still repeat discredited hoaxes and will still be unfit for the presidency. And most ominously, the Russia investigation will still grind on, and Trump will no doubt lash out at both the special prosecutor and the media. This personnel move may buy him a brief pause in the chaos, but his presidency is living on borrowed time.
How will we know that Bannon’s departure is more than another staff shuffle? Look to see if Trump continues to campaign against Republican incumbents, obsess over news coverage, treat Russia with kid gloves, saber-rattle over North Korea and stoke racial tension.
Patrick Radden Keefe writes of Carl Icahn’s Failed Raid on Washington (“Was President Trump’s richest adviser focussed on helping the country—or his own bottom line?”):
….In the months after the election, the stock price of CVR, Icahn’s refiner, nearly doubled—a surge that is difficult to explain without acknowledging the appointment of the company’s lead shareholder to a White House position. The rally meant a personal benefit for Icahn, at least on paper, of half a billion dollars. There was an expectation in the market—an expectation created, in part, by Icahn’s own remarks—that, with Trump in the White House and Icahn playing consigliere, the rules were about to change, and not just at the E.P.A. Icahn’s empire ranges across many economic sectors, from energy to pharmaceuticals to auto supplies to mining, and all of them are governed by the types of regulations about which he would now potentially be advising Trump.
Janet McCabe, who left the E.P.A. in January, and now works at the Environmental Law and Policy Center, told me, “I’m not naïve. People in business try to influence the government. But the job of the government is to serve the American people, not the specific business interests of the President’s friends. To think that you have somebody with that kind of agenda bending the President’s ear is troubling.”
Conflicts of interest have been a defining trait of the Trump Administration. The President has not only refused to release his tax returns; he has declined to divest from his companies, instead putting them in a trust managed by his children. Questions have emerged about the ongoing business ties of his daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who, since Trump took office, have reaped nearly two hundred million dollars from the Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., and from other investments. Although Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he has assembled a Cabinet of ultra-rich Americans, including two billionaires: Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, and Wilbur Ross, the Secretary of Commerce….
Whitewater, a small town, sees occasional turnover from among her public officials, as would any town. Over these years, I’ve seen any number of officials arrive (meaning that any number of others have departed).
This is a beautiful town; I’d welcome all the world here.
No doubt, when someone arrives, he or she receives all sorts of advice, from all sorts of people.
I’ve neither declarations nor exclamations to offer.
Instead, I’ve a question, for each newcomer to ask of himself or herself:
If Whitewater were perfect – that is, complete and lacking nothing – would anyone have needed you?
How one interprets, and answers, this question provides counsel all its own.
As professional arborists, brothers-in-law Tom Otto and Shaun Sears are quite adept at climbing trees. The cats that they rescue are not. And with a plethora of trees—and cats—around Seattle, they decided to put their off hours to good use and return scared, stuck kitties to their worried owners. Working completely off donations, these two cat lovers are helping keep Seattle’s free-climbing felines grounded.
Friday in Whitewater will be increasingly cloudy with a high of seventy-nine. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:51 PM, for 13h 45m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 13.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1919, Tennessee ratifies the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution (“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation”), providing the necessary number of ratifying states to bring the amendment into law. On this day in 1864, the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad begins: “2nd, 6th, 7th, 37th, and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments [take] part in the Second Battle of Weldon Railroad, also known as the Battle of Globe Tavern, near Petersburg, Virginia. This was the first Union victory in the Richmond-Petersburg Campaign. By destroying the railway while under heavy attack, Union troops forced Confederates to carry their provision 30 miles by wagon around Union lines to supply the city.”
THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump often behaves, first and foremost, as if he is the president of the states and people who voted for him.
That’s at odds with the American tradition, and it’s problematic as a governing philosophy — especially in a moment of crisis. Trump’s initially tone-deaf response to Charlottesville underscores why.
Animated by grievance and congenitally disinclined to extend olive branches, Trump lashes out at his “enemies” — his 2020 reelection campaign even used that word in a commercial released on Sunday — while remaining reticent to explicitly call out his fans — no matter how odious, extreme or violent.
Channeling his inner-Richard Nixon, who kept an enemies list of his own, candidate Trump often claimed to speak for “a silent majority.” After failing to win the popular vote, President Trump has instead governed on behalf of an increasingly vocal but diminishing minority….
When Susan Kroger decided to help launch a political activism group for women in her largely rural, pro-Trump region, she expected a few dozen liberal neighbors to show up.
But when she opened the doors at the group’s first community meeting in Sioux Falls, S.D., 100 people flooded into the room. Now nine months later, Kroger says the group has quickly grown to 2,300 active members.
It’s a story emerging across Trump country, where left-leaning grass-roots groups have popped up in some of the reddest parts of the nation — a sign that “the resistance” has gone rural.
Most surprisingly, Kroger said, some of her newest members are disappointed Trump voters. The uncertainty over health-care policy has become a top issue driving first-time activists to join their ranks, Kroger and other grass-roots organizers said.
(Some have said that those who oppose Trump belong in blue states; on the contrary, there’s much benefit to being here, in a red state. Whitewater is beautiful, a citizen may freely choose where he wishes to live, and there is not the slightest reason to yield this space to others)….
Earlier this year, as Donald Trump, then the president-elect, was trying to counter news reports that Russia had hacked the 2016 election to help him win, the head of the American subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate owned by a Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir Putin made a huge donation to Trump.
On January 6—the day the US intelligence community reported that Putin had approved a covert operation to subvert the presidential campaign to assist Trump—Andrew Intrater donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Intrater is the CEO of Columbus Nova, the lone American subsidiary of Renova Group, a giant holding company owned by oligarch Viktor Vekselberg with interests in the metals, mining, chemical, construction, transport, energy, telecommunication, and financial sectors in Russia and abroad. Intrater, an American citizen, is Vekselberg’s cousin, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Intrater also made a $35,000 contribution to a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s reelection and the Republican National Committee.
Intrater has no public history as a major political funder; his Trump donations dwarf his previous contributions. According to Federal Election Commission records, his only past political donations were $2,600 in 2014 to a business associate running as a Republican for Congress, $1,200 to Democratic New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson’s 2008 presidential campaign, and $250 to the late Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts in 1995. Intrater’s hefty gift to the inauguration fund earned him special access to inaugural events, including a dinner billed as “an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,” according to a fundraising brochure obtained by the Center for Public Integrity….
….On one level, the officials said, he is something of a laughing stock among Europeans at international gatherings. One revealed that a small group of diplomats play a version of word bingo whenever the president speaks because they consider his vocabulary to be so limited. “Everything is ‘great’, ‘very, very great’, ‘amazing’,” the diplomat said.
But behind the mocking, there is growing fear among international governments that Trump is a serious threat to international peace and stability.
“He has no historical view. He is only dealing with these issues now, and seems to think the world started when he took office,” a diplomat told BuzzFeed News, pointing to Trump’s remarks and tweets about defence spending. “He thinks that NATO existed only to keep the communists out of Europe. He has a similar attitude in Asia-Pacific with Japan, ignoring that the US basically wrote their constitution.” During his presidential campaign, Trump called out Japan to pay more for the security US provides, including for hosting the US troops in the country. Japan’s constitution restricts its military options….
Below is a video and description of Life After Hate’s work. If you’d also like to make a contribution to Life After Hate (I just did), they’ve an easy-to-use donation link.
Life After Hate, Inc., a 501(c)(3) U.S. nonprofit, was created in 2011 by former members of the American violent far-right extremist movement. Through powerful stories of transformation and unique insight gleaned from decades of experience, we serve to inspire, educate, guide, and counsel.
Whether working with individuals who wish to leave a life of hate and violence or helping organizations (community, educational, civic, government, etc.) grappling with the causes of intolerance and racism, Life After Hate works to counter the seeds of hate we once planted. Through personal experience and highly unique skill sets, we have developed a sophisticated understanding about what draws individuals to extremist groups and, equally important, why they leave. Compassion is the opposite of judgment and we understand the roles compassion and empathy play in healing individuals and communities.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with an even chance of afternoon thundershowers, and a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:04 AM and sunset 7:52 PM, for 13h 48m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eighty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet at 7 AM, her Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission at 5:30 PM, and her Police & Fire Commission at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1864, soldiers of the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry bury Confederate war dead: “A soldier in the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry wrote home this day describing the aftermath of the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia. He criticizes Confederate officers for withdrawing under cover of darkness and forcing Union soldiers to inter their enemies: “Instead of burying his dead, we found the plains, the hills, the villages strewn with dead and dying rebels. Oh! the sight was sickening, and beggars description. Here an arm, there a leg, yonder half of what was once a man…”
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s personal lawyer on Wednesday forwarded an email to conservative journalists, government officials and friends that echoed secessionist Civil War propaganda and declared that the group Black Lives Matter “has been totally infiltrated by terrorist groups.”
The email forwarded by John Dowd, who is leading the president’s legal team, painted the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in glowing terms and equated the South’s rebellion to that of the American Revolution against England. Its subject line — “The Information that Validates President Trump on Charlottesville” — was a reference to comments Mr. Trump made earlier this week in the aftermath of protests in the Virginia college town.
Mr. Dowd received the email on Tuesday night and forwarded it on Wednesday morning to more than two dozen recipients, including a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and journalists at Fox News and The Washington Times. There is no evidence that any of the journalists used the contents of the email in their coverage. One of the recipients provided a copy to The New York Times.
“You’re sticking your nose in my personal email?” Mr. Dowd told The Times in a brief telephone interview. “People send me things. I forward them.” He then hung up.
….To make an equivalency between two of the Founding Fathers and Confederacy leaders is not only “absurd,” but also “unacceptable for the president of the United States,” said Jim Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.
“They accomplished something very important. Washington and Jefferson were central to the creation of a nation … Lee and Stonewall were not being honored for those types of accomplishment,” Grossman said. “They were being honored for creating and defending the Confederacy, which existed for one reason, and that was to protect the right of people to own other people.”
Trump has said that he’s a fan of history yet he does not seem to trust historians.
Douglas Blackmon, an author and senior fellow at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, said Trump either does not understand the history of the Confederacy or he’s sympathetic to white nationalist views….
KIEV, Ukraine — The hacker, known only by his online alias “Profexer,” kept a low profile. He wrote computer code alone in an apartment and quietly sold his handiwork on the anonymous portion of the internet known as the dark web. Last winter, he suddenly went dark entirely.
Profexer’s posts, already accessible only to a small band of fellow hackers and cybercriminals looking for software tips, blinked out in January — just days after American intelligence agencies publicly identified a program he had written as one tool used in Russian hacking in the United States. American intelligence agencies have determined Russian hackers were behind the electronic break-in of the Democratic National Committee.
But while Profexer’s online persona vanished, a flesh-and-blood person has emerged: a fearful man who the Ukrainian police said turned himself in early this year, and has now become a witness for the F.B.I.
Adam Davidson writes of Trump’s Business of Corruption (“What secrets will Mueller find when he investigates the President’s foreign deals?”):
President Donald Trump’s attorney Jay Sekulow recently told me that the investigation being led by Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, should focus on one question: whether there was “coördination between the Russian government and people on the Trump campaign.” Sekulow went on, “I want to be really specific. A real-estate deal would be outside the scope of legitimate inquiry.” If he senses “drift” in Mueller’s investigation, he said, he will warn the special counsel’s office that it is exceeding its mandate. The issue will first be raised “informally,” he noted. But if Mueller and his team persist, Sekulow said, he might lodge a formal objection with the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, who has the power to dismiss Mueller and end the inquiry. President Trump has been more blunt, hinting to the Times that he might fire Mueller if the investigation looks too closely at his business dealings.
Several news accounts have confirmed that Mueller has indeed begun to examine Trump’s real-estate deals and other business dealings, including some that have no obvious link to Russia. But this is hardly wayward. It would be impossible to gain a full understanding of the various points of contact between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign without scrutinizing many of the deals that Trump has made in the past decade. Trump-branded buildings in Toronto and the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan were developed in association with people who have connections to the Kremlin. Other real-estate partners of the Trump Organization—in Brazil, India, Indonesia, and elsewhere—are now caught up in corruption probes, and, collectively, they suggest that the company had a pattern of working with partners who exploited their proximity to political power.
One foreign deal, a stalled 2011 plan to build a Trump Tower in Batumi, a city on the Black Sea in the Republic of Georgia, has not received much journalistic attention. But the deal, for which Trump was reportedly paid a million dollars, involved unorthodox financial practices that several experts described to me as “red flags” for bank fraud and money laundering; moreover, it intertwined his company with a Kazakh oligarch who has direct links to Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin. As a result, Putin and his security services have access to information that could put them in a position to blackmail Trump. (Sekulow said that “the Georgia real-estate deal is something we would consider out of scope,” adding, “Georgia is not Russia.”)
(Neither subjects of criminal investigations nor their lawyers are entitled peremptorily to set the terms of an investigation.)
Wednesday in Whitewater will see a probability of evening thundershowers and a high of eighty-three. Sunrise is 6:03 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 13h 50m 43s of daytime. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred eightieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Parks and Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.
We should be clear on several points. First, it is morally reprehensible to serve in this White House, supporting a president so utterly unfit to lead a great country. Second, John F. Kelly has utterly failed as chief of staff; the past two weeks have been the worst of Trump’s presidency, many would agree. He can at this point only serve his country by resigning and warning the country that Trump is a cancer on the presidency, to borrow a phrase. Third, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner have no excuses and get no free passes. They are as responsible as anyone by continuing to enable the president. Finally, Trump apologists have run out of excuses and credibility. He was at the time plainly the more objectionable of the two main party candidates; in refusing to recognize that they did the country great harm. They can make amends by denouncing him and withdrawing all support. In short, Trump’s embrace and verbal defense of neo-Nazis and white nationalists should be disqualifying from public service. All true patriots must do their utmost to get him out of the Oval Office as fast as possible.
In fairness, the slippery slope argument is sometimes advanced by more intellectually serious advocates than Trump. It is wrong, even so. The argument fails because there are obviously relevant distinctions that can be made between Washington and Jefferson on the one hand and Confederate leaders on the other.
One crucial distinction it misses is that few if any monuments to Washington, Jefferson and other slaveowning Founders were erected for the specific purpose of honoring their slaveholding. By contrast, the vast majority of monuments to Confederate leaders were erected to honor their service to the Confederacy, whose main reason for existing was to protect and extend slavery. I noted another key distinction here:
Some try to justify continuing to honor Confederates because we honor many other historical figures who committed various moral wrongs. For example, many of the Founding Fathers also owned slaves, just like many leading Confederates did. But the Founders deserve commemoration because their complicity in slavery was outweighed by other, more positive achievements, such as establishing the Constitution. By contrast, leading a war in defense of slavery was by far the most important historical legacy of Davis, Robert E. Lee, and other Confederate leaders. If not for secession and Civil War, few would remember them today.
Endorsing the slippery slope case against removing Confederate monuments also creates a problematic slippery slope of its own. If we should not remove monuments to perpetrators of evil for fear that it might lead to the removal of monuments to more worthy honorees, that implies that eastern European nations were wrong to remove monuments to communist mass murderers like Lenin and Stalin, and Germany and Italy were wrong to remove monuments to Nazi and Fascist leaders. After all, there is no telling where such removals might lead! By Trump’s logic, taking down German monuments to Hitler and Goebbels might lead to the removal of monuments to Immanuel Kant, who expressed racist sentiments in some of his writings. Getting rid of monuments to Lenin and Stalin might lead people to take down monuments to Picasso, who was also a communist. Where will it all stop?
(Trump is a weak thinker, with an apparently stunted intellect, limited vocabulary, and general ignorance of historical distinctions: when he advances arguments, they’re scarcely arguments at all, but merely shallow attempts at such.)
White nationalist and alt-right activists are cheering President Trump for defending white-nationalist protesters and placing equal blame on counterprotesters for the violence that ensued in Charlottesville this past weekend at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon.
“Really proud of him,” the alt-right leader Richard Spencer said in a text message. “He bucked the narrative of Alt-Right violence, and made a statement that is fair and down to earth. C’ville could have hosted a peaceful rally — just like our event in May — if the police and mayor had done their jobs. Charlottesville needed to police the streets and police the antifa, whose organizations are dedicated to violence.”
Spencer said he didn’t necessarily view Trump’s remarks as an endorsement of the protesters’ goal; the Unite the Right rally was held to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “He was calling it like he saw it,” Spencer, who was one of the leaders of the protest, said. “He endorsed nothing. He was being honest.” Spencer held a press conference in his office and home in Alexandria on Monday in which he said he did not believe Trump had condemned white nationalists in his comments on Monday, in which the president said “racism is evil” and specifically called out white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan. Trump made those remarks after intense criticism for failing to specifically condemn white-nationalist groups in his initial response.
Many small towns, looking for something to attract visitors and newcomers, probably dream about the possibility of a college campus. Whitewater has a public university campus, and the majority of the city’s residents are students at that school. Thousands of students in the city assure a steady stream of retail traffic we would not otherwise have. Some, if not most, merchants in town would wither or shut down without the demand the campus generates.