Daily Bread for 10.30.18

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 7:27 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 10h 21m 41s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 63.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the seven hundred twenty-first day.

Whitewater’s School Board will meet tonight (for an operational referendum listening session) at 6 PM.

On this day in 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Radio Theatre perform a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds:

“The War of the Worlds” is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode on Sunday, October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network, directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It became famous for causing panic among the audience; the scale of that panic is disputed, however, as the program had relatively few listeners.[2]

….

In the days after the adaptation, widespread outrage was expressed in the media. The program’s news-bulletin format was described as deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the broadcasters and calls for regulation by the Federal Communications Commission.^[2] Nevertheless, the episode secured Welles’s fame as a dramatist.

Recommended for reading in full —  New emails call into question Gov. Walker’s claims about the Lincoln Hills prison review, Trump’s new NAFTA is bad for dairy farmers, how the Trump family pushed a conspiracy theory, naming those responsible for bigotry, and video explaining how a vortex helps dandelions fly —

Matthew Simon reports New emails call into question Gov. Walker’s answer about canceling independent Lincoln Hills youth prison review:

New emails, obtained after months of records requests by 7 Investigates, call into further question the answer Gov. Scott Walker has given about the former head of a national prison organization saying the governor’s staff ordered former corrections secretary Ed Wall to stop an independent Lincoln Hills review as reports of inmate abuse and staff attacks were about to become public in 2015.

The emails, written two weeks before Gov. Walker said he was learning about the Lincoln Hills’ crisis for the first time, show then-Corrections Secretary Ed Wall telling state Justice Department leaders he was attempting to obtain the independent review.

“We are arranging to have an outside agency with experience in the operation of juvenile facilities come in to do an assessment of the institution, security operations, policies, training, report structures, complaints and staffing,” Wall wrote on Nov. 18, 2015.

As 7 Investigates first reported, the retired executive director of the national non-profit Association of State Correctional Administrators, George Camp, confirmed Wall had sent him a copy of the letter dated two days before Gov. Walker said he was first learning about the youth prison scandal on Dec. 2, 2015, and was ordering Wall to take “aggressive action.”

Reuters reports NAFTA deals leave US dairy farmers behind:

The dairy industry was a sticking point in the contentious renegotiations of the free trade deal between the U.S., Canada and Mexico that concluded last month.

U.S. President Donald Trump demanded concessions from the protected Canadian dairy industry and said on Twitter that Canada was hurting U.S. farmers with high tariffs. After Canada gave some ground, Trump claimed a big victory and said farmers would have more export options.

But Canada opened less than 4 percent of its dairy market to U.S. farmers – a concession unlikely to make much of a dent in U.S. oversupply or improve the lot of farmers like Fritsche, producers on both sides of the border say.

 Aaron Blake explains How the Trumps and conservative media helped mainstream a conspiracy theory now tied to tragedy:

What’s as notable is how concern about promoting theories that may touch on those things is no longer so taboo. The idea that Soros, a wealthy, liberal Jewish donor, was funding the caravan in fact dates to the last time a caravan was headed to the U.S.-Mexico border in April. But while it had a difficult time getting beyond the pages of Infowars back then, this time it had some Republican congressmen, cable-news talkers and a president’s son to push it.

The theory began proliferating in mid-October in the form of questions about who was funding the latest caravan — without invoking Soros specifically.

“I want to talk a little bit about who is funding the caravan,” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham said Oct. 16. She noted that the Honduran “foreign ministry spokesman cited political sectors as culpable — unidentified political influences. Somebody is funding these caravans.”

Jennifer Rubin writes Enough platitudes: Let’s name names:

Trump has eradicated red lines of civility, refused to condemn neo-Nazis and offered a steady diet of grotesque stereotypes of immigrants. He has demonized the press and raised fear of foreign terrorists embedded among refugees. His campaign and now his presidency fan the flames of white grievance; he has done more to mainstream nonfactual conspiracies than any president. To say he bears no moral or political responsibility when disturbed or fringe characters hear him, take him seriously, extrapolate from his remarks and engage in horrible acts is willful blindness. He is not solely responsible. He is not mainly responsible. But the guy with the biggest megaphone on the planet is partly responsible when unbalanced people are inspired by his toxic rhetoric and that of followers whom he refuses to repudiate.

The uptick in racial violence, anti-Semitic acts and hateful rhetoric that have become omnipresent in the Trump years did not arise out of thin air. (And for now, I’ll leave the absolute refusal to address any reasonable gun laws out of it; but in that, the National Rifle Association and its obedient minions are hardly blameless.) We must all be more specific in identifying names of those who share responsibility for the toxic fumes that violent, unstable people inhale. So here goes.

Rupert Murdoch, the executives, on-air talent and shareholders of Fox need to self-reflect. Fox is home to anti-immigrant cranks such as Lou Dobbs and Laura Ingraham. It’s where the caravan is attributed to Jewish billionaire George Soros, where Sean Hannity leads his audience to believe immigrants are especially prone to commit crimes and where Tucker Carlson has adopted the language of white nationalism, decrying diversity in America. Unless and until Fox cleans up its act — drop conspiracies made up out of whole cloth, end demonization and hysteria about immigrants, and stop invoking Soros to explain every political threat (real or imagined) — people of good will should not appear on Fox News, advertise on it or watch it.

How a Vortex Helps Dandelions Fly: