Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of eighty-six. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:23 PM, for 12h 59m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 33.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM, and along with the agenda the city has posted an Ehlers Financial Managment Plan for presentation at the council session.
Quick note on upcoming posts this week: By comment or mail, readers have asked me to review Rick Wilson’s Everything Trump Touches Dies, the new documentary Active Measures, and also to consider to Franklin Foer’s contention that Elizabeth Warren is a capitalist (‘Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism‘). The requests and the posts responding to them – happily received, happily written – will go up this week, Wednesday to Friday.
On this day in 1957, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus uses the state National Guard to prevent the lawful integration of Central High School in Little Rock:
After a series of legal proceedings the Federal District Court ordered the Little Rock School District to proceed with its integration plans when school opened on September 4, 1957. Governor Orval Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957, because he said he had evidence (although none was shown) that there was “…imminent danger of tumult, riot and breach of peace and the doing of violence to persons and property.”[2] The governor initially ordered to state duty the State Headquarters Detachment, the Base Detachment at Adams Field and any other units the Adjutant General felt necessary to “accomplish the mission of maintaining or restoring law and order and to preserve the peace, health, safety and security of the citizens of Pulaski County, Arkansas.”[3] On September 4, Elizabeth Eckford was the only student to enter the school due to lack of communication. It is commonly but mistakenly believed that she was taking this stand on her own, but rather it was because she was the only student who didn’t have a phone, so nobody could contact her to let her know the integration wasn’t happening until the next day.[4]
Major General Sherman T. Clinger, the Adjutant General of Arkansas, assembled a force of 289 soldiers under command of Lieutenant Colonel Marion Johnson.[5] On September 4, 1957, Johnson told nine black students who were attempting to enter Central High School to return home. The National Guard presence gradually decreased to a fifteen-man day and night shift. By court order,[6] the National Guard was replaced by the Little Rock City Police on Friday, September 20, 1957.[3]
Recommended for reading in full —
Catherine Rampell writes Trump promised farmers ‘smarter’ trade deals. Now he has to bail them out:“Trade, not aid.”
That’s what farmers, ranchers and their elected officials keep telling the Trump administration they want. They have worked hard over the years to grow their export opportunities, forging critical relationships in China, Mexico, the European Union, Canada and other markets. Customers around the world have gobbled up U.S.-produced pork, soybeans, fruits and other goods.
Yet in a matter of months, President Trump has managed to fray — and possibly sever — many of those ties.
For bogus “national security” reasons, among other rationales, he has provoked nearly every one of our major trading partners into slapping retaliatory tariffs on tens of billions of dollars’ worth of American-made agricultural products.
(Trump is a profoundly ignorant man, seemingly unaware – truly – of centuries of economic insight.)
Chuck Todd contends It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back:Tamara Keith reports President Trump’s Description of What’s ‘Fake’ Is Expanding:Bashing the media for political gain isn’t new, and neither is manipulating the media to support or oppose a cause. These practices are at least as old as the Gutenberg press. But antipathy toward the media right now has risen to a level I’ve never personally experienced before. The closest parallel in recent American history is the hostility to reporters in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s.
Then, as now, that hatred was artificially stoked by people who found that it could deliver them some combination of fame, wealth, and power.
Some of the wealthiest members of the media are not reporters from mainstream outlets. Figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, and the trio of Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham have attained wealth and power by exploiting the fears of older white people. They are thriving financially by exploiting the very same free-press umbrella they seem determined to undermine.
Consider merely the first four years of the WEDC:The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about “fake books,” “the fake dossier,” “fake CNN,” and he added a new claim – that Google search results are “RIGGED” to mostly show only negative stories about him. He also accused NBC News’ Lester Holt of “fudging” the tape of his May 2017 interview conducted shortly after Trump fired FBI director James Comey.
An NPR analysis found that in the month of August, Trump sent out 46 tweets containing the words “fake” or “phony,” far surpassing his previous record. (Two of the tweets were later deleted to fix typos).
The first four years after @ScottWalker‘s WEDC popped up $700 million in grants went Walker campaign donors. Sixty percent of all handouts went to Scott Walker donors. Our full report from 2015. https://t.co/KiSayMGTPG pic.twitter.com/mwSLnswQ6g
— One Wisconsin Now (@onewisconsinnow) August 30, 2018
Speaking of WEDC…Have you noticed the full-press campaign to convince the good folks of Wisco-World that Foxconn is going to float them to the top like boats at high tide?
There are billboards all over the state, saturation-commercials on the local TV media, and even ads on MSNBC, all trying to convince us that Walker is great to have cut the deal with Foxconn. Some shadow organization is bankrolling the campaign.
Meanwhile Foxconn will start acquiring properties that they have strategically located all over the state for “Innovation Centers” real soon, now. They have also pledged $100M (of the money we gave them) to sugaring the UW-Madison engineering departments.
This all has a whiff of payback to Walker for being so nice to them. It also has a certain musty stank of flop-sweat desperation about it. Walker has been giving every indication of running scared for some time. The recent cratering of the R-Team in the polls likely has gotten his attention.
One cannot say how the race will end, but “musty stank of flop-sweat desperation” is right. After all these years, Walker still needs to spend on ads to convince people of his (admittedly inferior) corporate welfare? After eight years’ time, he still hasn’t been able to seal the deal.
Today, on the radio, I heard Walker say that later this month he will reveal a plan to pay for road improvements. Again, after two terms in office, he still needs time to formulate a plan? Of course not – he needs time to propose a phony campaign proposal. A serious man or woman would have had a genuine plan long before now.
Walker’s approach is best expressed as a question and a dare: So, Wisconsinites, are a majority of you dense enough to believe what I tell you?