Ben Guarino reports Older, right-leaning Twitter users spread the most fake news in 2016, study finds: The notion that fake news exists in its own universe turns out to be doubly true: One universe is the realm outside truth. The other is its own seedy pocket of social media. In a new study published Thursday…
Mendacity
Babbittry, Bad Ideas, Mendacity, Newspapers, That Which Paved the Way
Quality Rests on Quality
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Never Trump conservative Tom Nichols, on Twitter, writes sensibly in reply to a question about which news sources one should read. He advises Start with a national newspaper every morning. Any of them. NYT, WaPo, WSJ, LAT, whatever. If you just read one newspaper a day, you’re light years ahead of anyone who’s staring at…
Bad Ideas, Business, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economics, Economy, Foxconn, Local Government, Mendacity, Politics, Scott Walker, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC, Wisconsin
Laughable Spin as Industrial Policy
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Alternative Title: Oh, no baby, of course I still love you… Josh Dzieza reports After a ‘personal conversation’ with Trump, Foxconn says it will build a factory in Wisconsin after all (At some point…): Days after Foxconn’s Louis Woo told Reuters that the company is no longer planning to build a factory in Wisconsin, Foxconn says the factory plan…
Bad Ideas, CDA, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Innovation Center/Tech Park, Local Government, Mendacity, Poverty, State Capitalism, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC
Nationally and Locally: The Big-Government Conservatives Are Economy-Wreckers
by JOHN ADAMS • • 2 Comments
Catherine Rampell, writing about the national GOP, accurately describes their economic policy under Trump in The GOP has become the Soviet party. This has been a building national problem for years, but a building local problem for about as long: a clique of slogan-rich but insight-poor local conservatives have wrecked economies like Whitewater’s economy with a steady diet of…
Babbittry, Mendacity, Newspapers, That Which Paved the Way
Roundup on Jefferson, Wisconsin’s ‘Warriors & Wizards’ Festival
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
There are four recent developments in the debacle that has been the October Warriors and Wizards (formerly Harry Potter) Festival in Jefferson, Wisconsin. Despite problems during its two years in Edgerton, Jefferson picked up the festival, and the Daily Jefferson County Union touted the shabby festival even as residents were screaming about the low quality…
Immigration, Mendacity, Trump
A Fact-Checking Cheat Sheet for Trump’s Immigration Address
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Salvador Rizzo, Glenn Kessler, and Meg Kelly have published Your fact-checking cheat sheet for Trump’s immigration address: President Trump will be speaking from the Oval Office tonight to make the case for $5.7 billion to start building a wall along the southern U.S. border — the crux of a funding impasse with Congress that has…
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way, WEDC, Wisconsin
Foxconn Roundup: Outside Work and Local Land
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Foxconn’s boosters each day inch closer to a corporate welfare version of Scientology: it doesn’t make any sense, but adherents keep to themselves and repeat a shared list of crackpot claims. The latest news to pierce the cultists’ bubble: Molly Beck and Rick Romell report Wisconsin taxpayers could pay Foxconn for work done outside of Wisconsin,…
Economy, Immigration, Mendacity, Trump
Entire Trump tweet on immigrant aid is wrong
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
The Associated Press reports an [e]ntire Trump tweet on immigrant aid is wrong: TRUMP’s retweet: “Illegals can get up to $3,874 a month under Federal Assistance program. Our social security checks are on average $1200 a month. RT (retweet) if you agree: If you weren’t born in the United States, you should receive $0 assistance.” THE FACTS:…
Babbittry, Bad Ideas, CDA, Conflicts of Interest, Corporate Welfare, Economy, Elections, Gov. Walker, Kakistocracy, Law, Laws/Regulations, Local Government, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, Tony Evers, WEDC, Wisconsin
Once a Gerrymanderer…
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Wisconsin, with a gerrymandered legislature and a crony capitalist, lame-duck governor, was never going to have an easy transition back to a tradition of democratically representative government and sound economic policy. The men who engineered years of the wrong approach were never going to go gently to the political outer darkness that, deservedly, awaits them.…
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way
Foxconn Roundup: Indiana Layoffs & Automation Everywhere
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
A sensible person would never have listened to a Walker Administration operative in Whitewater tout Foxconn without laughing or looking about for a nearby tomato. No sensible person would have made that operative a guest speaker at an annual dinner or written about the event without criticism. (See, about that Greater Whitewater Committee dinner and that…
Bad Ideas, CDA, City, Corporate Welfare, Development, Economy, Foxconn, Government Spending, Mendacity, State Capitalism, State Government, That Which Paved the Way
Foxconn Roundup: Desperately Ill Edition
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Before and after the recent election, solid assessments on Foxconn came to press, and they confirm how irrational and wasteful is that project. Earlier this year, the local business lobby (the Greater Whitewater Committee) invited the state capitalist stooge official overseeing the project to a dinner in Whitewater. I’ve no idea whether Matt Moroney will show…
Bad Ideas, Mendacity, New Media, Politics, That Which Paved the Way
A Site on Facebook: ‘Nothing on this page is real’
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Standards have fallen so low that, whether of right or left, trolls take advantage of gullible and ignorant people on Facebook each day. Eli Saslow reports how a liberal troll tricks impressionable conservatives. The people tricking, and the people being tricked, are evidence of (respectively) ethical or educational decline. First the unethical tricksters: He [forty-something Christopher Blair] had…
America, Mendacity, Propaganda, Putin, Russia, Trump
Operation InfeKtion: The Worldwide War on Truth (Part 3 of 3)
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
?? Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB…
America, Mendacity, Propaganda, Putin, Trump
Operation InfeKtion: The Seven Commandments of Fake News (Part 2 of 3)
by JOHN ADAMS • • Comments
Russia’s meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. “Operation InfeKtion” reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics — the promulgation of lies about America — continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies. Meet the KGB spies…