Good morning.
Midweek in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with afternoon thunderstorms, and a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset is 8:21 PM, for 14h 40m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 12.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1865, after successful service in defense of the Union, the 37th and 38th Wisconsin Infantry regiments muster out: “The 37th had spent its 14-month-long term of service in and around Washington D.C. It participated in the Siege of Petersburg and the Appomattox Campaign in pursuit of General Lee’s army. It lost 247 men during service. The 38th served in the same campaigns as the 37th but was also on duty at Arsenal, Washington, during trial and execution of President Lincoln’s assassins. It lost 113 men during service.”
Recommended for reading in full —
Patrick Marley,Rick Romell and Lee Bergquist report that a Wisconsin Foxconn deal could include $1 billion to $3 billion in taxpayer-backed incentives:
MADISON – A plan to bring a massive Foxconn Technology Group plant to Wisconsin could cost $1 billion to $3 billion in local, state and federal incentives over coming years — a stunning sum for a project that backers say could transform the state’s economy.
Foxconn’s plans are to be announced Wednesday at the White House, with a follow-up event Thursday at the Milwaukee Art Museum, according to one source. Tuesday night, the White House listed a 5 p.m. Wednesday “jobs announcement” in the East Room on President Donald Trump’s schedule.
An incentive package that reaches into the billions would be unlike anything Wisconsin has offered in the past and would require approval from state lawmakers. Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) has said he hoped to get bipartisan support for the package.
Sandhya Somashekhar and David A. Fahrenthold report that Trump’s speech to Boy Scouts irks some in ‘nonpartisan’ organization:
Lavinia Falck had spent six days at the National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia, getting to know teenagers from around the world. Then, she and her friends gathered on the grass to hear from a special guest: the president of the United States.
“By the way, just a question, did President Obama ever come to a Jamboree?” President Trump said during a rambling speech Monday in which he used harsh language, recounted election-night victories and New York cocktail parties, and attacked his political opponents.
“Everyone around me was booing,” said Falck, 17, a member of the co-ed Venture Scout program run by the Boy Scouts. She remembered looking at her new friends and wishing she’d been allowed to stay at her bunk, noting that the booing for Obama was particularly upsetting because attendees had been directed not to jeer Trump. “Scouts are supposed to be courteous and friendly and all these things, and it was really un-Scoutlike for everyone around me to boo.”
(Trump’s a crude, ignorant man, so a speech like this should have been no surprise. It’s all he has.)
Steve Vladeck describes The Three Sessions Succession Scenarios:
President Trump took to Twitter this morning [Tuesday] ostensibly to defend his “beleaguered” Attorney General, even though at least some of that beleaguerment is, thanks to last week’s New York Times interview (and, potentially other behind-the-scenes machinations), his own doing. If, as a result, Jeff Sessions’s days as Attorney General are indeed numbered, it might be worth gaming out the three very different scenarios for his succession atop the Justice Department—given their obvious potential implications for the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III [Vladeck offers detail for each]….
Scenario I: The DOJ Succession Statute and Executive Order….
Scenario II: The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998….
Scenario III: The Recess Appointment Elephant in the Room….
Peter Beinart considers Why Trump Might Fire Robert Mueller:
Partly, it’s simple rage. Mueller threatens Trump. And when Trump sees someone as a threat, he tries to discredit and destroy them—conventional norms of propriety, decency and legality be damned.
But there’s another, more calculated, reason. Trump and his advisors may genuinely believe that firing Mueller is a smart move. And if you put morality aside, and see the question in nakedly political terms, they may be right.
The chances that Mueller will uncover something damning seem very high. Trump has already admitted to firing former FBI Director James Comey over the Russia investigation. Donald Trump Jr. has already admitted to welcoming the opportunity to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from people he believed were representatives of the Russian government. Even if Mueller doesn’t accuse anyone of a crime, he’s likely to paint a brutal picture. And that’s just on the question of election collusion and obstruction of justice. If Mueller uses Russia to segue into Trump’s business dealings, who knows what he might find. An all-star team of legal and financial sleuths, with unlimited time and money, and the ability to subpoena documents and people, have been let loose on the affairs of a man whose own autobiographer called him a “sociopath.” No wonder Trump is scared.
What would One Year of Flying the Airbus A320 Around Europe look like? It would look like this —
It will be interesting to see how much this Foxconn plan will be lauded by Conservative (those advocates for Smaller Gov’t) WI politicians… $1.0 bil divided by 10,000 Foxconn jobs = $100,000 from WI taxpayers per job across 15 years… And the funding for the transportation bill is being stalled/questioned/harrangued. Hypocrisy? If it brings along sub-component Foxconn suppliers, how many/ who/ when and how much $$$.
Agreed. There are questions about how much this will truly generate for Wisconsin, the true cost of it, and whether there are better, alternative uses. Those are all open questions, and until they are settled favorably, there’s no sound reasan to back this project. (About conservatives, there’s reason to doubt principle: they criticized Obama for a stimulus program, but were mostly silent when Trump campaigned on a larger – but hopelessly vague – program.) My best, Adams.
Foxconn would be nice, but spending 1-3 million bux per worker seems like a pretty low ROI for the state. That amounts to taxpayer funding of all Foxconn worker wages for 10-30 years, assuming $100K/worker/annum and 1K workers. Such a deal, eh?
I’m pretty sure that the 1200 worker number is pure smoke, in any account. Nobody builds a ground-up high-tech factory without the latest and greatest factory automation, especially in the US. The electronic assembly biz is amongst the most automated in the world. (n.b: as an Electrical Engineer for the last half century+, this is not speculation). Regardless of how many workers they start with, the number will only go down with time as more robots run the place. Meat-based workers have a bleak future in the Contract Manufacturing sector of electronic assembly.
This sounds like a really bad deal for Wisco-World.
I’m doubtful on gain to the state and cost to produce that gain. Agree on automation – the scenario you describe is playing out with manufactuers in the Midwest in beyond. It’s hard to believe that a plant in America, with a higher per-worker wage than any plant Foxconn has in Asia, will hire and continue to employ a huge workforce. Seems so unlikely.
Unlikely is not impossible, but in this case they seem very similar. My best, Adams.