Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:17 AM and sunset 8:28 PM, for 15h 10m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1981, Donkey Kong makes its American debut.
Recommended for reading in full —
John Schmid reports that Job creation slowed sharply in Wisconsin in 2016, raising questions and worries:
Wages and employment fell sharply in 2016 in Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector, the biggest piston in the state’s economy, in a year that also saw the state’s weakest overall job performance since the 2008-’09 recession.
The anemic jobs figures surprised economists at a time when the national economy evidently remains in expansion mode, and even have some beginning to wonder if a recession might be on the horizon.
The 2016 decline in manufacturing employment was all the more confounding after Madison lawmakers phased in a deep tax cut that took full effect last year and was designed as “a powerful incentive (that) will encourage manufacturers to expand in Wisconsin,” according to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the state’s biggest business lobbying group.
Some analysts postulate that Wisconsinites are working fewer hours and less overtime as automation increasingly replaces humans in manufacturing plants. Other workers, meanwhile, appear to be accepting pay cuts, while employers create jobs at lower pay levels.
David Filipov, Amy Brittain, Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger write that Explanations for Kushner’s meeting with head of Kremlin-linked bank don’t match up:
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia — The White House and a Russian state-owned bank have very different explanations for why the bank’s chief executive and Jared Kushner held a secret meeting during the presidential transition in December.
The bank maintained this week that the session was held as part of a new business strategy and was conducted with Kushner in his role as the head of his family’s real estate business. The White House says the meeting was unrelated to business and was one of many diplomatic encounters the soon-to-be presidential adviser was holding ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The contradiction is deepening confusion over Kushner’s interactions with the Russians as the president’s son-in-law emerges as a key figure in the FBI’s investigation into potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump team.
Josh Barro contends that Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris accord is performative isolationism:
The most tangible problem created by our withdrawal from the accord may be a decline in America’s global standing and leadership. But I tend to think that decline is largely a function of Trump’s presidency itself; America would hardly be seen as a leader on climate change under Trump if we had instead stayed in the accord and ignored our emissions targets.
To the extent our withdrawal alienates the world from us, that aligns with Trump’s intent in withdrawing, and does indeed make the US more isolated. But Trump has been reluctant to take more concrete and irrevocable isolating steps, for clear reasons.
(I think Barro’s on solid ground with his observation that “decline is largely a function of Trump’s presidency itself” – Trump’s own ignorance, mendacity, bigotry, and affection for dictators degrades America at home and abroad.)
In contrast to Barro, Uri Friedman, in Trump’s Most Drastic Statement Yet, sees Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement as more than performative:
Brentin Mock explains Why Jails Are Booming:
A new report from the Prison Policy Initiative examines the reasons behind this explosive growth. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s not driven by crime. Crime rates nationwide have dropped over the past few decades, as have conviction rates in court. So then why do jails keep swelling?
It basically comes down to two things, according to PPI: The number of people detained for pretrial purposes has been escalating, and federal and state authorities have been increasingly using local jails to house their inmates as well. These two sets of circumstances cover the bulk of people sitting in jail cells in the majority of states. Only a third of those jailed locally are there because they’ve actually been convicted of a crime, the report reads.
That local jail authorities have been farming out beds to wardens of the state and federal prison systems is particularly troubling, given that this system turns jailing into a side-hustle of sorts. Sheriffs and county jail directors can justify expanding these local detention centers, even if crime is dropping, by accounting for inmate traffic from state and federal partners.
A little magic for the end of the work week: