Good morning.
Here in Whitewater, we’ll have a partly cloudy and windy day, with a high of forty-four. Sunrise is 6:56 AM and sunset 5:21 PM, for 10h 24m 06s of daytime. Today is the {tooltip}ninety-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1763, the Treaty of Paris leaves Britain with most of France’s New World possessions. On this day in 1950, Sen. McCarthy again claims, without revealing a single name, communist infiltration within the U.S. government.
Recommended for reading in full —
Despite official denials, Kylie Atwood and Brian Gottlieb report that Mexican foreign minister helped Jared Kushner re-write Trump border wall speech: “Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray personally made changes to President Donald Trump’s speech announcing an executive order calling for the construction of a border wall, according to Mexican officials. When Videgaray came to the White House in January, on the same day that Mr. Trump was to sign the executive order, Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and the president’s son-in-law, showed him the speech Mr. Trump planned to deliver that day at the Homeland Security Department. Videgaray was horrified, according to the Mexican officials, and deemed the speech a non-starter. If the remarks were not changed, they would likely drive the two countries, whose relationship Videgaray was there to try and redress, even further apart. Such a speech would also do little to help President Pena’s approval ratings in his own country. Kushner suggested they re-write the speech together to make it less damaging.”
James Pethokoukis believes that The US economy may be growing faster than we think — and has been for a long time: “Might we somehow be statistically mismeasuring economic growth? Might growth be faster than we think? (It’s a topic I’ve written frequently about.) And now there’s a new research paper on the subject. See, it’s widely known that measuring quality improvements in a product is tough. So perhaps traditional inflation measures like the consumer price index fail to fully capture the benefits of new or upgraded products. (This seems to be particularly true when it come to software.) In a San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank working paper, “Missing Growth from Creative Destruction,” researchers add to that argument:
We argue that there exists a subtler, overlooked bias in the case of creative destruction. When the producer of the outgoing item does not produce the incoming item (i.e., when there is creative destruction), the standard procedure at statistical offices is to resort to some form of imputation. Imputation inserts the average price growth among a set of surviving products that were not creatively destroyed. We think this misses some growth because inflation is likely to be below-average for items subject to creative destruction. … As some products disappear precisely because they are displaced by better products, inflation may be lower at these points than for surviving products. As a result, creative destruction may result in overstated inflation and understated growth.”
Tyler Kingkade reports that Campus Rape’s Toughest Young Attorney Is Ready For Trump And DeVos: “Lately, Laura Dunn has tried to avoid thinking about rape on the weekends, but it doesn’t come naturally for the meticulous lawyer. Her idea of unwinding includes binge-watching Law & Order: SVU, not exactly light entertainment for a woman whose weeks are spent fielding calls and emails about the very topic — sexual assault — that dominates the show. For Dunn, though, this world of virtuous detectives and prosecutors is an escape from the calls and emails she receives from people asking for help, from the start of her workday at 8 a.m. until she’s collapsing into bed around 11 p.m. People who’ve been raped, people whose children were raped, people whose reports of rape were ignored and who finally got fed up enough to do something about it.”
Molly Ball considers The Anti-Trump Resistance and the Lessons of the Tea Party: “It’s too soon to tell if the current resistance movement will follow the tea party’s pattern. But there are already many parallels. It has arisen spontaneously and en masse. Many Republicans believe it’s not real: The protests, they tell me, are Astroturf funded by George Soros; the opposition to Betsy DeVos as education secretary, which jammed Senate switchboards, was merely manufactured by the teachers’ unions. But the unions and Soros didn’t start this fire any more than the Kochs started the tea party—they’re merely riding the wave in hopes it will advance their goals. Second, Trump’s election appears to have galvanized a lot of people who weren’t previously Democratic activists or politically minded at all. They may have voted Democrat, they may consider themselves “progressive,” but they’re not the Democratic base that donated to politicians and knocked on doors in years past. Commentators on the right have seized on the violent sentiments expressed by some participants as proof the whole movement is composed of frightening extremists.”
One falcon pursues many starlings, but still comes away empty –