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Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS

Boosterism, Daily Bread, Education, School District, Toxic Positivity

Daily Bread for 1.16.22: Wisconsin Educational Issues Over the Next Ten Months

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 23.  Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:48 PM for 9h 26m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1883, Congress enacts the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the United States Civil Service.

 At the Journal Sentinel, Alan Borsuk writes School choice, parent power, social issues: They’re all in play as the campaigns for Wisconsin governor begin: 

Republican Rebecca Kleefisch released the first television ad of her campaign for governor recently. All 30 seconds focused on education issues.

Consider it an early sign of two things: Nov. 8, the election day just under 10 months from now, will be the biggest date of the year (and probably of several years) for Wisconsin education. And school-related issues are going to be somewhere between hot and really, really hot.

I’ve read pre-election stories for many years that predicted education was going to be a pivotal issue in campaigns for major offices. I’ve written some myself. It almost always turns out to be not quite the case, as other things end up dominating attention.

This time for sure. (Or almost for sure – who takes anything as certain these days?)

Borsuk lists 8 educational issues he thinks will be part of gubernatorial campaigns this fall: school choice, spending, response to pandemic issues, parent power, Milwaukee Public Schools, teaching race-related content, reading reform, and hot-button social issues.

Some of these issues will be in play in school board races across the state this spring.  Arguing over them — notably about millions misallocated, concealment of fundamental actions and rationales behind personnel and student decisions, transparently self-serving claims of ‘privacy concerns’ as a way to dodge full explanations, disregard of open government, and threats to individual liberty from book-banning and closet-confining — well, these are fights worth fighting. See Educational Movements Destructive or Ineffectual. 

What Borsuk doesn’t list, and no serious person would advance, is advocacy for an educational policy of ‘positivity.’ However contentious the issues that spring and fall campaigns across the state will broach, there are likely to be few administrators or candidates frivolous enough to think that ‘keeping social media positive’ could possibily improve anyone’s education.

Perhaps one should see this as a good, if bittersweet, sign: at least other parts of the state know that educational policy is more than a greeting-card slogan.

See also Boosterism’s Cousin, Toxic Positivity, Tragic Optimism as an Alternative to Toxic Positivity, and Toxic Positivity Is Worse than Annoying as Public Policy.

 The Rise And Fall of BlackBerry: 

Daily Bread, Reasoning, Weird Tales

Daily Bread for 1.15.22: The Truth Behind Those Amazon Mystery Seed Packages from China

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will see clouds and sunshine with occasional flurries and a high of 23.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:47 PM for 9h 25m 04s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1967, the Packers defeat the Chiefs in the first Superbowl championship: “The game was held at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, with 61,946 sports fans in attendance. The final score was 35 to 10. For their victory, the Packers collected $15,000 per player and the Chiefs $7,500 per player – the largest single-game shares in the history of team sports at that time.”

 From 2021, Julia Longoria speaks with the writer Chris Heath about his investigation of mystery seeds for The Atlantic, the byzantine world of international e-commerce, and the dangers of panic (and limits of reason):

See also The Truth Behind The Amazon Mystery Seeds.

Not long ago, I saw a message on an Episcopal church’s sign that read: FAITH, REASON, and TRADITION. The church’s sign meant to remind that these three concepts should be in harmony and complementary to each other.

I worship with a different Episcopal congregation, but America finds herself beset with those who have a weak grasp of all three concepts: faith is often ill-formed and distorted, reason is often replaced with conspiracy theories, and tradition often tossed aside for vulgar nativist autocracy.

The conundrums of life cannot be accurately answered by reliance on theories of a non-existent Marxist/Socialist/Progressive/Gates/Soros/Jewish Space Laser/Hip Hop/Rastafarian cabal.

The truth behind the Amazon mystery seeds is one of those conundrums.

Daily Bread, Horde, Libertarians, Never Trump, Sen. Ron Johnson, Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 1.14.22: But He’s Like This Now…

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 29.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM for 9h 23m 23s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1952, NBC’s long-running morning news program Today debuts, with host Dave Garroway.

 Michelle Cottle writes that Ron Johnson Wasn’t Always Like This. The Trump Years Broke Him: 

Like so many citizen legislators before him, however, Mr. Johnson says he failed to anticipate just how desperately Wisconsin voters — nay, the entire nation — would need him at this moment.

“America is in peril,” he declared in an essay in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday. Out-of-control Democrats, aided by media and tech elites, are luring the nation down the path to “tyranny,” he warned. “Countless” concerned citizens implored him to keep up his “fight for freedom,” he noted, “to be their voice, to speak plain and obvious truths other elected leaders shirk from expressing.” What choice does he have but to soldier on?

Claims of national crisis and delusions of indispensability are standard among lawmakers looking to justify abandoning their term-limit pledges. But Mr. Johnson is correct that he has distinguished himself for his willingness to tread where many other officials dare not, at least in the Senate. He has becomeknown as perhaps the chamber’s foremost spreader of absurd yet dangerous conspiracy theories — especially in the areas of anti-vaccine insanity and the election-fraud delusions of a certain former president.

….

RonJon wasn’t always like this. He used to be a relatively straightforward pro-market, small-government, budget-conscious conservative. He seemed to have a more or less solid grip on reality. But the Trump years broke him, as they broke so many in the Republican Party.

….

Do the nation a solid, Wisconsin: Commit to helping Mr. Johnson stick by his original promise to serve only two terms. After everything it has been through lately, America shouldn’t have to suffer through another six years of his twisted take on truth and freedom.

Cottle is, needless to say, no admirer of Johnson. Her essay details the many ways he’s repulsive to reasonable people.

It may be true, however, that he was once different. I’ll not bother to speculate about why, if at all, the Trump years changed Johnson. So many others who were once better — too many libertarians, too many conservatives — are now worse. They bear the responsibility for embracing Trump, they are culpable for their own deviant decline, they made these choices.

Those of us who have held firm, those few of us who have not abandoned traditional libertarian teachings, for example, look on in contempt and opposition at a fanatical horde that redefines moral concepts to suit its own malevolent appetites.

Was Trump enough to change these men? If so, then these men were scarcely men at all. They were instead mere shells, empty husks vulnerable to drifting about one way or another.

What Johnson once might have been matters less than what he now is: detestable.

 Huge icefish colony of 60 million nests found on Antarctic seabed:

City, Daily Bread, Environment, Water, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 1.13.22: Lake Superior’s Forever Chemicals

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 33.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:44 PM for 9h 21m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1922, the call letters of experimental station 9XM in Madison were replaced by WHA. This station dates back to 1917, making it “the oldest station in the nation.” 

 Shantal Riley reports Lake Superior’s Forever Chemicals:

Early last year, the state of Wisconsin issued a fish consumption advisory that recommended eating no more than one meal a month of Lake Superior rainbow smelt, caught by tribes and local anglers during smelt runs in the spring. It was the first advisory for any of the Great Lakes warning of fish with elevated levels of PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a group of man-made chemicals linked to cancer that have shown up in drinking water systems around the country.

PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. After years of industrial use, the federal government recently took steps to regulate them. But will it be enough to assure the safety of the Indigenous people who have fished on the lake for thousands of years — and depend on the fish for survival?

….

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on Earth by surface area, spanning a vast 31,700 square miles. Surrounded by dense forests and relatively sparse populations, more than 80 species of fish live in its cold, remote waters. While the fish are abundant, they’re rife with contaminants: polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, the pesticide toxaphene — all linked to cancer — and mercury, left behind as a legacy of mining in a rugged region known as Copper Country. There are enough pollutants now circulating in the great lake that Michigan lists more than a dozen consumption advisories for its fish, and the pollution runs headlong into areas where tribes practice subsistence fishing.

Beautiful, but damaged. Advanced societies such as America’s, freed from immediate necessity, have an obligation of foresight. It’s not enough to do something; one should consider the consequences of what one does. It has been, after all, the foresight of many that has lifted us from mere subsistence.

In a small city like Whitewater, for example, the question about Cravath and Trippe Lakes has not been whether they would be refilled. Of course they were going to be refilled, sooner or later. The question has been how they would be refilled. Putting mere water back into the lakes is no environmental risk; proposing wide use of artificial herbicides (although not ‘forever chemicals’) on the surface area of the drained lakes was the risk. See Reporting About Artificial Herbicides in Whitewater, Wisconsin.

It was, needless to say, an unnecessary risk. Herbicide into the lakes — aquatic Roundup or some such — was a shortsighted and lazy way to accomplish an enduring restoration. Abandoning that aspect of the project was the very least Whitewater’s local government owed its residents.

‘The party’s over’: Keir Starmer derides Boris Johnson’s apology at question time:

The Labour leader has said the prime minister’s apology over for attending what he had thought was a ‘work event’ in the garden at No 10 in May 2020, when the country was in full lockdown, was ‘offensive to the British public’. Keir Starmer called for Boris Johnson to ‘do the decent thing’ and resign before either his party or the public drove him out of office.

Courts, Daily Bread, Legislature, Speaker Vos, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 1.12.22: Speaker and Deponent

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Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 34.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:43 PM for 9h 20m 10s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1969, the New York Jets of the American Football League defeat the Baltimore Colts of the National Football League to win Super Bowl III in what is considered to be one of the greatest upsets in sports history.

 Mitchell Schmidt reports Supreme Court denies Robin Vos’ request to block deposition over records request in election probe:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday denied Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’ request to block a Dane County judge’s order directing him to sit for a deposition as part of a liberal watchdog group’s lawsuit seeking public records surrounding the GOP-ordered review of the 2020 election.

The depositions were ordered last week by Circuit Judge Valerie Bailey-Rihn, who expressed confusion over how so few documents were produced from the first three months of former state Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s ongoing probe. Bailey-Rihn ordered Vos, R-Rochester, and his staff attorney Steve Fawcett to sit for depositions Wednesday.

The state’s high court issued a 4-3 decision Tuesday, with conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn joining liberal justices in finding that Vos’ request to prevent the depositions needed to be first filed as a petition for a supervisory writ in the court of appeals.

“This petition comes nowhere close to meeting these legal standards,” according to court documents. “Following the law here means the petition must be denied.”

Vos might have to sit for not merely this deposition, but others. It’s hard to be a deponent. The Speaker of the Assembly runs his show; a deponent answers questions, sometimes awkwardly and uncomfortably. (Vos may yet craft an excuse to postpone today’s deposition: he got lost, has the sniffles, or his dog ate his car keys.)

The order appears immediately below —

Growing Fears for the Future of American Democracy:

Daily Bread, Kleefisch, Republicans, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 1.11.22: Kleefisch’s Potential Challengers

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 27.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:42 PM for 9h 18m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater School District’s Policy Review Committee meets at 9 AM and the city’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM. 

 On this day in 1964, Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Luther Terry, M.D., publishes the landmark report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking national and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.

 Molly Beck reports Ron Johnson’s decision on Senate run sets up an expensive battle to be Wisconsin’s next governor:

With one announcement, Ron Johnson set the course for the highest-profile statewide races this year — securing the Republican field in his re-election bid for U.S. Senate and pushing a top Republican into the governor’s race.

Former U.S. Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson had been waiting for Johnson to announce his 2022 intentions before deciding which statewide race to join. Now, after Johnson’s launch of a re-election campaign, Nicholson is expected in the coming days to enter the GOP primary race to challenge incumbent Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

“After losing 11 of the last 12 statewide elections in Wisconsin, we also need a conservative candidate who can win a general election in 2022. The stakes are too serious to keep playing the same broken record,” Nicholson tweeted Sunday following Johnson’s announcement.

And Madison businessman Eric Hovde, who poured millions into a 2012 unsuccessful bid for U.S. Senate, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday that he is “seriously considering” joining the Republican primary, which former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch has had largely to herself until now.

Entrances by Hovde and Nicholson, who has the backing of GOP mega-donor Richard Uihlein, could put a race already drawing record-breaking fundraising on pace to be one of the most expensive battles for governor in the country.

“If the GOP primary becomes a three-way race, it will likely quickly become one of the most costly in the country,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center.

“The funding will need to emerge quickly because the primary is only seven months away and two of the prime candidates have not even officially entered the race.”

There wouldn’t be interest in a Republican gubernatorial primary if potential entrants thought former (eight-year) Lt. Gov. Kleefisch was a strong candidate. She’s running as Walker 2.0, but her problem is that Kleefisch 1.0 never really caught on. It was easy in 2021 to spend PAC money and sow school discord when she didn’t have any intra-party challengers.  Her 0-4 showing in the Mequon-Thiensville School District recall reveals a lack of both strategy (what issues?) and tactics (how to fight on those issues?).  See How Mequon-Thiensville Residents Saved Their Schools. She’ll find it harder to carry on if GOP donors, who’ll be able to spend as much as they’d like, line up behind a primary challenger.

Stunning Northern Lights Caught on Camera:

Daily Bread, Wisconsin

Daily Bread for 1.10.22: A Bikepacking Route

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 8.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:41 PM for 9h 17m 11s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1883, the Newhall House Fire in Milwaukee claims seventy lives: “the Newhall House burned at the northwest corner of Broadway and Michigan Streets in Milwaukee. Rescued from the fire were The P.T. Barnum Lilliputian Show performers Tom Thumb and Commodore Nutt.” 

 Chelsea Lewis writes New bikepacking route to Wisconsin waterfalls selected as best new route, helps put state on the map:

A Wisconsin bikepacking route has earned top honors from Bikepacking.com, a website that publishes routes and information on bikepacking, essentially backpacking with a bike.

The route, the Wisconsin Waterfalls Loop, was awarded the best new weeklong route by the website. It beat out routes in New Mexico and Switzerland to win the award, which was determined by editors of the website based on originality/intent, quality of documentation, and which route they would like to ride most.

The 382-mile route loops around northern Wisconsin, passing 28 waterfalls along the way and is estimated to take six to eight days to complete. About 85% of the route is on unpaved roads.

The route begins in Cable, travels east through the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, then turns north to the Wisconsin-Michigan border at Hurley. From there, it heads west to the Bayfield Peninsula, then south back to Cable.

In addition to waterfalls to see along the way, the route includes suggestions for restaurants, lodging (mainly campgrounds) and other points of interest, like old Civilian Conservation Corps camps.

Dave Schlabowske, who developed the route, said he always tries to include local restaurants, taverns, convenience stores and other unique stops in his routes because stopping at those places is part of what makes bikepacking in northern Wisconsin so great.

“It’s not just a backcountry experience,” he said.

Small fries only — McDonald’s Japan low on potatoes:

Daily Bread, Elections, Gerrymandering, Legislature, Politics, State Government

Daily Bread for 1.9.22: They’d Rather Stay Forever

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 19.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:40 PM for 9h 15m 47s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 49% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1992, the first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail. They discovered two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12.

 Kelly Meyerhofer reports GOP hasn’t confirmed most of Gov. Tony Evers’ picks to UW Regents, tech college board:

Most of Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ appointees to the boards overseeing Wisconsin’s higher education systems remain unconfirmed by the Republican-controlled state Senate, a move that could allow the GOP to quickly gain control of the boards if the party wins the governor’s race in November.

Five of Evers’ picks for the state technical college system board are unconfirmed, with three of them unable to serve because appointees of former Republican Gov. Scott Walker refuse to vacate their seats even though their terms expired last spring.

And while Evers’ seven unconfirmed appointees to the UW Board of Regents have been serving without the Senate’s stamp of approval, the Republican lawmaker chairing the committee charged with confirming them recently warned that some may be in trouble.

Evers, in a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal, said the individuals he appointed are doing everything that’s asked of them.

“The transfer of power is a part of our democracy, and it’s breathtaking, frankly, that Republicans have decided it’s more important to play politics than confirm appointments they know are qualified, dedicated people who want to serve our state,” he said. “It’s wrong-headed, it’s clearly political, and it’s affecting the work these boards are doing every day.”

Sen. Roger Roth, R-Appleton, who chairs the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges, said he plans to “start moving on some” of the appointees after wrapping up hearings on some bills this month. But he also entertained the possibility of continuing to deny some appointees a vote over the next year or even booting some from their posts. Senate leadership ultimately makes those decisions, he said.

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, told WisPolitics last week that Senate Republicans don’t plan to take up Evers’ remaining appointees to the boards overseeing the UW System and technical colleges.

….

Most recently, Fred Prehn, a Wausau dentist appointed by Walker to the Natural Resources Board, has refused to step down since his term expired May 1, denying Evers’ appointee Sandra Naas a seat and maintaining a 4-3 majority for Republican appointees.

Why leave, if a gerrymandered state Senate can defy the will of the voters as expressed in the last gubernatorial election?

They’d rather stay forever.

Can Diamonds Made In A Lab Replace Natural Ones?:

Daily Bread, Elections, Politics, Sen. Ron Johnson, US Senate Race 2022

Daily Bread for 1.8.22: 304 Days

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 27.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:39 PM for 9h 14m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 38.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1973, in the Watergate scandal, the trial of seven men accused of illegal entry into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate begins.

 Bill Glauber reports U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson poised to announce run for a third term as early as next week, according to sources:

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson appears poised to announce as early as next week that he’s running for reelection, according to two highly placed Republican sources.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has learned that in recent weeks Johnson reached out to potential staffers and advisers in preparation for the campaign.

High on Johnson’s to-do list: hiring a campaign manager and a general consultant.

Johnson has drawn out his decision-making for months even as a large field of Democrats assembled to take him on in the midterms. By running, the Oshkosh Republican will be breaking a past campaign pledge to serve only two terms.

“I’m not ready to say anything,” Johnson told CNN, which reported that Republicans were bullish about prospects that he would run again.

During an interview last fall with the Journal Sentinel, Johnson said he was best positioned to retain the seat for Republicans.

“Oh, it’s not just me, I think just about everybody I talk to. I mean the political pros believe that,” Johnson said.

Johnson was part of a tea party wave of candidates to reach the U.S. Senate, winning the 2010 race over Democratic U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold.

Six years later, Johnson won a rematch against Feingold and provided some coattails to help Donald Trump win the state and the presidency.

Concentrating on fiscal issues early in his tenure, Johnson has recently become a lightning rod for his controversial remarks on vaccinations and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

….

Johnson’s impending announcement is also likely to reverberate in the Republican race for governor, where former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch is the lone major candidate.

Former U.S. Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson has said he would run for governor if Johnson opted to go for another term.

Johnson will have all the campaign money in the world at his disposal, and he will fight tooth and nail to retain, as a  sitting senator, the District of Columbia lifestyle that he so much enjoys.

The November 8, 2022 election is 304 days away. There’s a category dedicated to Johnson here at FREE WHITEWATER.  Johnson will keep it well-supplied over the next ten months.

Seed-dropping drones can plant 40,000 trees a day:

City, Daily Bread, Economy

Daily Bread for 1.7.22: The Booming National Economy

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 11.  Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:38 PM for 9h 13m 08s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 27.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1901, Robert Marion “Fighting Bob” La Follette Sr. is inaugurated as governor after winning the November 6, 1900 election. La Follette was born in Dane County in 1855. A Wisconsin Law School graduate and three-term member of congress, La Follette was renowned for his oratorical style. He was the first Wisconsin-born individual to serve as governor.

 Whitewater’s struggling, long-stagnant local eonomy stands in contrast to a booming national economy. Matthew Winkler writes Biden’s Economic Performance Has Proved Unbeatable:

U.S. financial markets are outperforming the world by the biggest margin in the 21st century, and with good reason: America’s economy improved more in Joe Biden’s first 12 months than any president during the past 50 years notwithstanding the contrary media narrative contributing to dour public opinion.

Exceptional returns from dollar-denominated assets, especially the S&P 500 Index in both absolute terms and relative to its global counterparts, can be attributed to record-low debt ratios enabling companies to reap the biggest profit margins since 1950. Corporate America is booming because the Biden administration’s Covid-19 vaccination programs and $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan reduced the jobless rate to 4.2% in November from 6.2% in February, continuing an unprecedented rate of decline during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Consider that real, or inflation adjusted, gross domestic product surged at an average annual rate of 5.03% in each of the first three quarters of 2021, and is poised to expand 5.6% for the year based on the average estimate of more than 80 economists surveyed Bloomberg. If that forecast proves accurate, it would be more than 2.8 times the average between 2000 and 2019 and double the average since 1976.

All of which makes Biden’s first year in the White House the standout among the seven previous presidents, based on 10 market and economic indicators given equal weight. According to data compiled by Bloomberg, no one comes close to matching Biden’s combination of No. 1 and No. 2 rankings for each of the measures:

  • Gross domestic product (1)
  • Profit growth (1)
  • S&P 500 performance (2)
  • Consumer credit (1)
  • Non-farm payrolls (2)
  • Manufacturing jobs (2)
  • Business productivity (2)
  • Dollar appreciation (2)
  • S&P 500 relative performance (2)

Per capita disposable income, which rose 1.08% this year, is the only comparable weakness for Biden, trailing Donald Trump’s 2.17%, George W. Bush’s 2.01%, Jimmy Carter’s 1.80% and Ronald Reagan’s 1.42%.

GDP growth in every incoming administration during the past four decades never exceeded 2.74% until 2021. Biden is now positioned to surpass Carter (5.01%) as the GDP champion of presidents since 1976. Much of the credit goes to The American Rescue Plan, which poured $66 billion into 36 million households and reduced the child poverty rate by 50%, helping the U.S. recover faster from the pandemic than most other nations.

The level of disposable personal income is a notable and critical national deficiency in an otherwise strong performance.  Whitewater knows this well, as this city has been and remains a low-income community. There is no better measure of a society’s general prosperity than individual and household income.

While some of us have done well even through a Great Recession, opioid crisis, pandemic, and pandemic recession, it matters more that many of us are doing well than that a few of us have done well. (I have no personal concerns, so to speak; Whitewater has community concerns. Those community concerns cannot be met through boosterism or delusional positivity.)

The weird, wild world of CES 2022:

Crime, Daily Bread, Insurrection, Trump, Trumpism

Daily Bread for 1.6.22: The Trumpist Insurrection, One Year On

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Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 14.  Sunrise is 7:25 AM and sunset 4:37 PM for 9h 11m 55s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 18.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

 Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM, and the Whitewater Fire Department holds a board and membership meeting at 6:30 PM. 

 On this day in 1914, the Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and minimum daily wage of $5 in salary plus bonuses.

 Christina Lieffring reports Wisconsinites Charged in Jan. 6 Insurrection Quietly Take Plea Deals:

Four of six Wisconsin men charged in attack on nation’s Capitol have pleaded guilty to lesser charges, while two others’ cases are still moving through the court system.

One year after the attack on the US Capitol, four out of the six Wisconsinites charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection have taken plea deals, while the remaining two suspects’ cases are still underway.

Kevin Loftus of Eau Claire, Abram Markofski of La Crosse, David Charles Mish Jr. of West Allis, and Brandon Nelson of Madison had all faced charges of entering and remaining in a restricted building, disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds, and violent entry or disorderly conduct, but ended up pleading guilty to the lesser charge of parading, demonstrating, or picketing in a Capitol building.

Markofski and Nelson were each sentenced to 24 months of probation and $1,500 in fines and restitution. Charles received 30 days incarceration and a $500 restitution charge. Loftus’ sentencing hearing is scheduled for Jan. 31.

The two remaining suspects’—Michael Fitzgerald of Janesville and Joshua Munn of Melrose—cases are still underway.

Fitzgerald faces the more serious charge of obstructing a law enforcement officer during civil disorder, as well as knowingly entering or remaining in any restricted building without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds. He pleaded not guilty to all charges on May 5, 2021.

At the time, Wisconsin Republicans knew this was a violent assault against the constitutional order, but they’ve become tolerant, if not supportive, of insurrection in the year since:

All 10 of Wisconsin’s federal lawmakers condemned the assault on the Capitol when it happened, but with varying degrees of vehemence and outrage.

After the violence, two of the 10 (House Republicans Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald) sought to overturn the election outcome in Arizona and Pennsylvania and said they would have voted to overturn Wisconsin’s results if the question had come to the floor.

In the months since the attack, the overall divide in Congress between how Democrats and Republicans have responded to — and publicly remembered — these events has grown.

Every GOP lawmaker from Wisconsin opposed impeaching President Donald Trump over the events of Jan. 6, and every one opposed the creation of a bipartisan commission to look into the attack. Every Wisconsin Democrat supported both steps.

These Wisconsin men now join a line of domestic adversaries of America’s foundational principles: Tory sympathizers, Know Nothings, Confederates, Copperheads, Klansmen, and members of the Bund.

January 6 Insurrection: What’s Happened Since? (Full documentary):