FREE WHITEWATER

Daily Bread for 5.16.19

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-nine.  Sunrise is 5:30 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 41m 57s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Today is the nine hundred nineteenth day.

 

On this day in 1933, the military is mobile against a ‘milk strike’:

seventy-five members of the Janesville-based 32nd Tank Company and 121st Field Artillery were mobilized to quell potential violence in the Wisconsin farmers’ statewide milk strike. The strike was called to protest low milk prices and protesters employed “milk dumping” as their main tactic.

Recommended for reading in full:

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board – usually pro-Trump – writes of Trump’s Dubious Hungarian Friend (‘Viktor Orban has done a tremendous job,’ the president says. What a disgrace):

“Respected all over Europe. Probably, like me, a little bit controversial, but that’s OK.” With these remarks, the U.S. president gave his seal of approval to Europe’s leading illiberal politician less than two weeks before elections for the European Parliament.

David Cornstein, the U.S. ambassador to Hungary and a personal friend of Mr. Trump, remarked in a recent interview: “I can tell you, knowing the president for a good 25 or 30 years, that he would love to have the situation that Viktor Orban has.”

This is easy to believe. The 2019 Freedom House survey demoted Hungary’s status from “free” to “partly free.” The report shows that Mr. Orban and his Fidesz party have mounted “sustained attacks on the country’s democratic institutions” by imposing restrictions on—or asserting control over—“the opposition, the media, religious groups, academia, NGOs, the courts, asylum seekers, and the private sector.”

According to the report, Mr. Orban’s administration has deployed government advertising, which represents a substantial share of Hungary’s media revenue, to bolster supportive media outlets and weaken his critics. This encouraged the formation of a massive pro-government media conglomerate, which the government then exempted from Hungary’s antitrust laws, which almost certainly would have prohibited it.

In Hungary, the press has been brought to heel. It is no longer the enemy of the people. No wonder Mr. Trump is envious.

….

Against this backdrop, Mr. Trump’s Oval Office meeting with Viktor Orban was a disgrace that no amount of White House realpolitik can justify.

(Again: Trump’s friends are democracy’s enemies.)

David J. Lynch writes China is paying Trump’s tariffs?:

The president’s continued insistence that China is bearing the cost of his import taxes has become a notable and unusual feature of his “America First” trade offensive. Many industry groups and most economists describe tariffs as a tax on Americans, paid by the American companies that bring foreign goods into the United States.

A pair of recent studies, by two teams of economists from institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as well as Princeton, Yale and Columbia universities, both concluded that Americans are bearing nearly the entire cost of Trump’s tariffs.

Why Uber Is Losing Money:

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