Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 7:19 AM and sunset 5:58 PM, for 10h 39m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 13.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}three hundred forty-eighth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission is scheduled to meet at 4:30 PM, and the Whitewater Unified School Board is scheduled to meet in-office at 7 PM.
On this day in 1941, Disney Productions and RKO Pictures release Dumbo. On this day in 1921, the Packers play their first NFL game: “[t]he Packers defeated the Minneapolis Marines 7-6, for a crowd of 6,000 fans and completed their inaugural season with 3 wins, 2 losses, and 2 ties.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Rosie Gray reports from Steve Bannon’s ‘Season of War’ Roadshow:
ANAHEIM, Calif.—Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon continued his campaign against the Republican establishment in a speech to the California Republican Party convention on Friday—while also calling for greater unity within the party. His targets included the current party leadership, but also the previous Republican president of the United States.
Bannon, who rarely spoke publicly during his time as White House chief strategist, has made a series of appearances in recent weeks promoting primary Republican senators in the 2018 election cycle. Boosted by former judge Roy Moore’s Alabama Senate primary win over the establishment’s (and President Trump’s) pick Luther Strange, Bannon is spearheading an intra-party war with the aim of removing Mitch McConnell as majority leader. He has said that he wants to challenge every Republican incumbent apart from Ted Cruz. He personally campaigned for Moore and for Kelli Ward, who is running a primary challenge to Jeff Flake in Arizona. Last week he promised a “season of war” against the establishment in a speech to the Values Voter Summit in Washington….
David Von Drehle contends The party is over:
With control of Congress, the White House and a majority of state governments, the Republican Party can claim to be stronger than at any time since 1928. On the other hand, many Democrats believe that their party’s edge among younger voters and growing nonwhite demographic groups has them on the brink of a new reign of power.
The truth is, both parties are in crisis — and may be headed for worse.
The Republican ascendancy is riddled with asterisks. The party’s control of Congress has only exposed deep and bitter divisions, as the pirates of Breitbart and talk radio turn their guns on House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). Too riven to redeem its oft-sworn pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare, the fractured majority is now struggling to unite around tax cuts, the golden calf of the GOP. As the saying goes, power is what power does — in this case, not much….
Jenna Johnson reports Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should:
….The divide in the Maddox household is one playing out across the country, as those who voted for the president debate how much support the federal government should give Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory without a voting member of Congress that is not allowed to vote in presidential elections.
Some supporters of the president, like Fred Maddox, agree with Trump that Puerto Rico’s infrastructure was frail before the storm; that the crisis was worsened by a lack of leadership there; and that the federal government should limit its involvement in the rebuilding effort, which will likely cost billions of dollars. But others, like Mary Maddox, are appalled by how the president talks about Puerto Rico and say the United States has a moral obligation to take care of its citizens.
A survey released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a majority of Americans believe that the federal government has been too slow to respond in Puerto Rico and that the island still isn’t getting the help it needs. But the results largely broke along party lines: While nearly three-quarters of Democrats said the federal government isn’t doing enough, almost three-quarters of Republicans said it is….
Lawrence Summers writes Trump’s top economist’s tax analysis isn’t just wrong, it’s dishonest:
Kevin Hassett, the White House’s chief economist, accused me of an ad-hominem attack against his analysis of the Trump administration’s tax plan. I am proudly guilty of asserting that it is some combination of dishonest, incompetent and absurd. Television does not provide space to spell out the reasons why, so I am happy to provide them here….
Hassett throws around the terms scientific and peer-reviewed, yet there is no peer-reviewed support for his central claim that cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent would raise wages by $4,000 per worker.
The claim is absurd on its face. The cut in corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 20 percent would cost slightly less than $200 billion a year. There is a legitimate debate among economists about how much the cut would benefit capital and how much it would benefit labor. Hassett’s “conservative” claim that the cut would raise wages by $4,000 in an economy with 150 million workers is a claim that workers would benefit by $600 billion — or 300 percent of the tax cut! To my knowledge, such a claim is unprecedented in analyses of tax incidence. Hassett doubles down by holding out the further possibility that wages might rise by $9,000.
Tech Insider reports Scientists predict an unusually warm winter this year in most of the US — here’s why:
The devolution of the WI Republican party appears to mirror the decay of the national party, in many ways. None other than Robin Vos, the popcorn king, has labeled Whitewater’s own Steve Nass, among others, as a terrorist for cutting a secret back-room line-item-veto deal with Walker on the budget. Other named terrorists are Duey Strobel and Kriss Kapenga. Are we to assume Walker was duped by the named terrorists, or is he a terrorist, too? In some ways, Vos might have a point, although it seems rather cheeky of him to be so forward about it. Particularly as they all are Republicans and none are Muslim, or even swarthy.
The terrorist act in dispute is that Walker cut a veto deal and then didn’t disclose it until after the budget was passed. It sounds a lot like the WEDC contract with Foxconn, which will only be disclosed to the WEDC Board and the public after they vote on it. Or perhaps the WEDC Kestrel fiasco, which had massive fail written all over it (as you have eloquently documented for years) from the start.
WEDC has been, is, and always will be, a cesspool of corruption and malfeasance.
Vos complaining about Wisconsin terrorists is odd (and as you cleverly say “[p]articularly as they all are Republicans and none are Muslim, or even swarthy”). So very funny.
I’d guess the Foxconn deal – in some form – will go forward. It’s not certain, but still probable. What is certain is that it will be thin, sickly, and in need of constant attention. WEDC is a fraud as policy, and even as a campaign contribution redistribution scheme (taxpayers to corporations then in part to someone’s PAC) it’s been middling. A truly effective pipeline wouldn’t have attracted such critical attention to its ostensible purpose.
One wouldn’t want these men to be subtler frauds, of course, yet is is notable that they’re such apparent ones.