Good morning.
This small city will see abundant sunshine and a high of thirty-six today. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 40m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Department meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
Worth reading in full —
Jennifer Rubin offers conservatives opposed to the incoming administration The independent center-right’s Trump survival guide: “First, tell the truth. Bret Stephens, a #NeverTrump journalist, explains:
What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it. …
Many things explain Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory, but not the least of them was the ability of his core supporters to shut out the inconvenient Trump facts: the precarious foundations of his wealth, the plasticity of his convictions, the astonishing frequency of his lying. Mr. Trump attracted millions of voters thirsty to believe. That thirst may hold its own truth, but it doesn’t lessen a columnist’s responsibility to note that it won’t be slaked by another hollow slogan of redemption.
This is the distinction between cheerleaders (e.g., Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity) and actual journalists. The former’s loyalty is to a person, the latter’s to intellectual integrity and accuracy. It will be more important than ever, as Stephens says, for the latter to remain stalwart, calling it as they see it. The instinct to “give him a chance” and “pick your fights” may apply to activists, lawmakers and interest groups as part of strategic calculations; there is no similar obligation for journalists to suspend judgment or be lenient on liars.”
Tyler Kingkade considers What A Trump Presidency Could Mean For Combating Campus Rape: “Now, many are bracing for Donald Trump’s administration to take a more conservative approach to addressing to sexual assault on college campuses, largely due to the people he’ll appoint to lead the US Department of Education. Policy wonks, higher education consultants, and rape victims’ advocates tell BuzzFeed News they are preparing for possible changes under Trump. Many expect the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — the agency investigating more than 200 colleges, and nearly 100 K-12 school districts for mishandled sexual assault cases — to be less active. Republicans will also likely try to roll back a consequential “Dear Colleague” letter issued to schools by the Obama administration in 2011. The letter detailed what the gender equity law Title IX requires schools to do about sexual assault reports, including what standard of evidence should be used in campus disciplinary cases.”
Andrew Flowers writes that Most Welfare Dollars Don’t Go Directly To Poor People Anymore: “The 1996 reform didn’t result in a reduction in total spending on welfare, now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Since 1998, the first year for which we have complete data, total TANF spending — both from federal block grants as well as required state matching funds — has remained essentially flat, after adjusting for inflation,1The monthly average of the Consumer Price Index was used to deflate the annual spending statistics. according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that is critical of welfare reform. Per-person spending has fallen, however: In 2014 there were about 12 million more people below the poverty level than in 1998, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. population has grown nearly 20 percent during that time….The result has been a dramatic shift of resources away from cash assistance and toward spending on other programs. In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.”
George Selgin’s started the countdown (3, 2, 1…) until Trump blames the Federal Reserve for Trump’s own ignorance & policy failures: “A newly-elected president Trump will quickly turn from making the Fed a scapegoat for his own campaigns’ tribulations to blaming it for his economic policy failures — starting with the equities market nose dive that’s likely to follow his surprise victory. But instead of continuing to rail against the Fed’s supposedly easy policy stance, you can bet that president-elect Trump would soon be blaming it for keeping money too tight. In any event, a newly-elected Trump administration, through its unveiled hostility toward the Fed, could not fail to make that already “political” institution even more so, for the Fed knows very well that, if it wants to preserve its vaunted independence, it had better heed the administrations’ wishes. That’s what former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, who understood the true nature of the Fed’s independence better than anyone, meant when he explained that the Fed was independent, not “from,” but “within,” the government.”
What if everything worked backwards? That would be Preposterous: