Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty. Sunrise is 6:15 AM and sunset 7:35 PM, for 13h 20m 00s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 58.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred eighty-fifth day.
On this day in 1864, Wisconsinites fight at the Battle of Blair’s Landing, Louisiana:
This was the second and final day of the Battle of Blair’s Landing, in Red River Parish, Louisiana. During the fight, the 14th, 29th, 33rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments helped repulse Confederate troops who attacked Union transport ships headed upstream on the Red River Expedition.
Recommended for reading in full:
Andrew Kaczynski and Paul LeBlanc report Trump’s Fed pick Stephen Moore is a self-described ‘radical’ who said he’s not a ‘big believer in democracy’:
Stephen Moore, who President Donald Trump announced last month as his nominee for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, has a history of advocating self-described “radical” views on the economy and government.
In speeches and radio interviews reviewed by CNN’s KFile, Moore advocated for eliminating the corporate and federal income taxes entirely, calling the 16th Amendment that created the income tax the “most evil” law passed in the 20th century.
Moore’s economic worldview envisions a slimmed down government and a rolled back social safety net. He has called for eliminating the Departments of Labor, Energy and Commerce, along with the IRS and the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. He has questioned the need for both the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Education. He has said there’s no need for a federal minimum wage, called for privatizing the “Ponzi scheme” of Social Security and said those on government assistance lost their dignity and meaning.
In other interviews and appearances, Moore repeatedly said he believed capitalism was more important than democracy.
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Speaking on the Thom Hartmann Show in 2010, Moore reiterated this belief, saying Hitler was democratically elected and Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be better off as a democracy.
“I think capitalism, without free market capitalism, countries don’t get rich,” Moore said, when asked if capitalism was more important than democracy. “And so I would rather have a country that’s based on, you know, a free enterprise system of property rights and free exchange of free trade of low tax rates, than a country that state, there are a lot of democracies –.”
In a 2010 speech, Moore said he believed democracy meant that Democrats have an “intentional” plan to take voters off the income tax rolls and have them vote for expanding government.
(Moore’s a lightweight, jumping from claim to claim without thinking any of it through. Serious, voluminous work on free markets emphasizes the importance of democratic rule-of-law conditions as a predicate, or in some cases a rapidly following consequence. There just aren’t serious free-market thinkers who distinguish free-markets from a representative democratic order as an ongoing, desirable condition. Moore’s nomination is a bad joke. He doesn’t belong on the Federal Reserve; he belongs on the last barstool to the right.)