Caption from Down Beat: Probably no dance band ever has played to so many empty tables consistently as the Sam Donahue ork [orchestra] during the recent double booking with Lionel Hampton at the Aquarium.
The operators decreed that Sam should play afternoons, and the place isn’t open in the afternoon! A single customer, John Sorenson, who just got off a boat from Denmark, wandered in by mistake one day and was served by the entire skeleton staff of three waiters, a cashier, head waiter, cook and busboy. In one of these staff photos by got, Sam and the band are seen playing to an attentive audience, consisting of one cat, Hep.
Friday in Whitewater will see scattered morning showers on an otherwise partly sunny day with a high of seventy-five. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 19m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 91.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Resolved, That the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.”
A series of sweeping laws promoting the interests of landlords at the expense of renters, local governments and even public safety have been pushed through the state Capitol since 2011 by a group of lawmakers who moonlight as landlords.
Backed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos — a college-town landlord with 23 properties worth about $3.8 million — the Republican-controlled Legislature enacted five major bills largely benefiting landlords.
The measures speed up the eviction process, eliminate some tenant legal defenses, limit the power of cities to police landlords and cap fees tied to building code violations. They also allow landlords to toss renters’ belongings on the curb immediately after an eviction, instead of placing the property in storage.
In all, about one out of five of state lawmakers who voted on these bills owns or manages rental properties, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found in its review. At least five lawmakers who double as landlords sponsored the various measures, each of which passed on mostly party-line votes.
(This is a story about Wisconsin legislators, so it does not implicate local landlords who, for example, might have made a hash of development policy, leaving their communities in a low-income status, while promoting themselves at every turn.)
In the first episode of HBO’s miniseries “Chernobyl,” a Communist official suggests that the real danger isn’t the nuclear power plant that has just exploded, but the news of the tragedy. “It is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the state to the state,” says Zharkov (Donald Sumpter), a party member who seems to have been a young man during the Bolshevik Revolution. “We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation.” His suggestion is met not with horror, but with applause.
This speech might seem dramatic, but like the rest of “Chernobyl,” it represents a sincere attempt to convey the inhumanity, willful ignorance and lies that defined the Soviet Union in the 1980s. This quality has made “Chernobyl” a surprising must-watch summer hit in the United States. But in Russia, the series has run squarely into the historical revisionism favored by the Russian government and its amplifiers in the media, who treat critical explorations of the Russian and Soviet past as attacks on the country’s present.
While a fellow traveler – however detestable – is merely someone who sympathizes with an adversarial foreign power, a fifth columnist is someone who actively cooperates – colludes, one might say – with a hostile foreign state.
For all the talk of no collusion (styled as NO COLLUSION in a bigoted authoritarian’s tweets), Trump at last admits his willingness to collude with a foreign state against democratically-chosen American candidates:
Those who support Trump do so either despite of his desired collaboration with foreign (and dictatorial) powers, or because of it (hoping that they would benefit by the replacement of democracy with a herrenvolk). Either reason places their politics outside a traditional democratic order.
Trump isn’t merely another politician, and this isn’t merely another time. Towns, cities, states, and the country all face the same threat to the our democratic tradition.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:34 PM, for 15h 18m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission is scheduled to meet at 5 PM, and the Zoning Board of Appeals at 6 PM (update: the latter meeting was canceled).
On this day in 1966, the United States Supreme Court hands down its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), holding among other things that “[i]n the absence of other effective measures, the following procedures to safeguard the Fifth Amendment privilege must be observed: the person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent, and that anything he says will be used against him in court; he must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation, and that, if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him.”
Wisconsin has lost out on an opportunity to have a renowned nonprofit organization study its probation and parole system after Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declined to back it.
In a twist, top Republicans in the Senate sided with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers over the GOP speaker in trying to get the Pew Charitable Trusts to review the program that oversees more than 65,000 people on probation, parole and extended supervision.
Vos, of Rochester, refused to sign onto the request for help from Pew because he believed the state task force that would oversee the study was tipped in Democrats’ favor, according to staff emails obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Evers agreed to work with Vos on the makeup of the task force, but Vos wouldn’t sign onto a letter to Pew requesting the study, according to the emails between the chiefs of staff for Evers and Vos.
Evers and top Senate Republicans — Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald of Juneau and Senate President Roger Roth of Appleton — sent the letter in May.
(Fitzgerald, hardly a bipartisan guy, supported the Pew effort. When you’re farther out than Fitzgerald, you’ve fallen off the map.)
The Business Roundtable’s quarterly survey of top chief executives revealed a darkening mood about the country’s economic outlook. While still high, their sentiment registers at its lowest level since President Trump took office — a change participants chalked up to the chaos unleashed by his tariffs.
“They are going to do what they do. It’s not up to us,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who chairs the Business Roundtable, said of the White House on Wednesday.
If Trump were not delusional, he would be panicked by the [poll] results. He loses to not only former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), but also South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.). What’s more, in no instance does Trump get more than 42 percent of the vote. If Trump has a ceiling of 42 percent, not only could almost any of the top six or so Democrats win, but they could win by landslide proportions.
….
And that brings us to the “electability” fetish. The only one among the major candidates with a severe electability problem is the nearly 73-year-old, out-of-shape, unindicted co-conspirator currently residing in the White House. (And if he does lose by double digits, you can be sure a slew of Republicans will go down with him.) If electability is a non-factor for Democratic candidates, then primary voters should feel free to pick the brainiest one, the policy maven, the political veteran or anyone else they like. No one should strain to divine whom other Americans will and will not vote for. (“I’m fine with a woman, but all those other people won’t be.”)
Primary voters should pick the one who will unify their own party, drive turnout and govern effectively.
Rubin’s advice is sound – in the end, one should choose from one’s highest standards and best hopes. There’s more than enough strength among Trump’s opponents to send him to the political outer darkness to which he should be consigned.
There’s a local lesson in all this, too. The cautious, careful position these recent years would have been to ignore Trump as best one could, from a reluctance to alienate his most committed supporters. To take that position would have been a moral compromise both wrong and – one may be as certain – unnecessary.
Men and women, having as children graduated from crawling to walking, have no reason to resume their former means of locomotion.
Better still, those who spoken most forthrightly against Trump have fared better in conscience and in standing. By contrast, those who have chosen the supposedly sensible course of quiet accommodation have done themselves no favors: publications and officials who have sought appeasement have done nothing to arrest their long, slow decline.
There need be, and so there should and will be, no yielding.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy, with a few showers and a thunderstorm, and a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 18m 08s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 75.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1987, on a visit to West Berlin, Pres. Reagan challenges Soviet leader Gorbachev to “tear down this wall!”
IT IS obvious to all but the willfully ignorant that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. What is less obvious is what this country is going to do about it. So far, the signs have pointed to: not nearly enough. A report from scholars at Stanford University offers one road map — and shows how the nation remains shockingly near the beginning of the road.
The Stanford report includes 45 recommendations for protecting the U.S. democratic process. Some three years after Vladimir Putin’s government planted trolls and bots on social media sites to propagandize for Donald Trump, hacked into the emails of officials on Hillary Clinton’s campaign and probed election infrastructure for vulnerabilities, the president’s team has not pursued a single one of them. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) continues to block even the consideration of stand-alone legislation that would bolster election security.
The refusal to act is dangerous. Though Russia infiltrated voting networks in 2016, there is no evidence any machines were tampered with or votes changed. Next time, we might not be so fortunate.
In Tennessee, a draconian new law aims to penalize groups engaging in voter registration campaigns. Civil rights advocates have rightly compared the legislation to the racist voter suppression policies of the Jim Crow era and are contesting the law’s constitutionality. Having experienced the effects of similar legislation in the field, we can say with confidence that if the Tennessee law is allowed to stand, it will undermine voter registration efforts and keep eligible voters off the rolls.
In 2018, in Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio, our team conducted a randomized controlled trial of a new policy idea: offering voter registration to people when they file their income tax returns at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites. The experiment was a success: the program doubled voter registration rates among the initially unregistered.
A less encouraging finding was the sheer disparity between our two test states. Each year, millions of Americans register to vote or update their voter registration thanks to the tireless efforts of civil society organizations that run voter registration tables, go door-to-door with voter registration forms, or otherwise remind potential voters to get registered in time to vote. But running a voter registration campaign that would be uncontroversial in other states is extremely difficult in Texas, because Texas has some of the most severe limits on voter registration of any state in the nation. It takes a simple procedure and makes it needlessly bureaucratic and extremely intimidating to both voters and volunteers, while doing absolutely nothing to make voter registration more secure
There’s a price to pay in the ongoing trade war with China and Mexico. Economist Joshua Meltzer, a global trade expert at the Brookings Institution, explains how tariffs could hurt the U.S. economy.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 63.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Public Works Committee meets at 6 PM.
Colonel Joseph Bailey was honored with a “resolution of commendation,” by the United States Congress for his “distinguished services in the recent campaign on the Red River.” Bailey, a logger from Wisconsin, saved a Union fleet stuck in the Red River, Louisiana, due to a sudden drop in water level. Although his idea of damming the river to relieve the fleet was scorned by many of his peers and superiors (including many West Point graduates), his experience in logging on the Wisconsin River proved invaluable.
A real estate company part-owned byJared Kushnerhas received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump.
Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US, according to corporate filings and interviews. The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in theCayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.
Kushner, who is married to Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka, kept a stake in Cadre after joining the administration, while selling other assets. His holding is now valued at up to $50m, according to his financial disclosure documents.
The episode provides a couple of important lessons for governments (think: China, the European Union and Japan) still facing their own showdowns with the Trump administration.
For one, Trump’s willingness to threaten a top trading partner with stiff tariffs — even as his administration pushes ratification of a trade pact with Mexico and Canada as its top legislative priority — sends a clear message about the president’s respect for his own trade deals. That is,even a signed agreement offers no protection against Trump deciding, with no warning, to launch new hostilities.
What’s more, the warmed-over offers from Mexico that Trump is touting as a major victory, along with an unverified claim about new farm purchases, suggest the president cares less about substance than his ability to declare a win.As the New York Times’s Michael Shear and Maggie Habermandetailedover the weekend, the deal “consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.” And Bloomberg News foundno support for Trump’s assertion, via tweet, that Mexico has agreed to “immediately begin buying large quantities of agricultural product from our great patriot farmers.”
Monday in Whitewater will see a mix of sun and clouds with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 55s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1837, state capitol workers arrive in Madison: “workmen arrived in Madison to begin construction of the first state capitol building. A ceremony to lay the building’s cornerstone was to be held three weeks later, on July 4, 1837.”
A former pro football player who serves on the National Rifle Association board was paid $400,000 by the group in recent years for public outreach and firearms training. Another board member, a writer in New Mexico, collected more than $28,000 for articles in NRA publications. Yet another board member sold ammunition from his private company to the NRA for an undisclosed sum.
The NRA, which has been rocked by allegations of exorbitant spending by top executives, also directed money in recent years that went to board members — the very people tasked with overseeing the organization’s finances.
In all, 18 members of the NRA’s 76-member board, who are not paid as directors, collected money from the group during the past three years, according to tax filings, state charitable reports and NRA correspondence reviewed by The Washington Post.
The payments received by about one-quarter of board members, the extent of which has not previously been reported, deepen questions about the rigor of the board’s oversight as it steered the country’s largest and most powerful gun rights group, according to tax experts and some longtime members.
The NRA, founded in 1871 to promote gun safety and training, relies heavily on its 5 million members for dues. Some supporters are rebelling publicly and questioning its leadership.
“I will be the first person to get in your face about defending the Second Amendment, but I will not defend corruption and cronyism and fearmongering,” said Vanessa Ross, a Philadelphia-area bakery owner and lifetime NRA member who previously worked at the Virginia headquarters managing a program for disabled shooters.
Among the revelations that have burst into public view: CEO Wayne LaPierre racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in charges at a Beverly Hills clothing boutique and on foreign travel, invoices show. Oliver North, forced out as president after trying to oust LaPierre, was set to collect millions of dollars in a deal with the NRA’s now-estranged public relations agency, Ackerman McQueen, according to LaPierre. And the NRA’s outside attorney reaped “extraordinary” legal fees that totaled millions of dollars in the past year, according to North.
This Tuesday, June 11th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of What They Had @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
“What They Had” (Family/Drama)
Tuesday, June 11, 12:30 pm
Rated R (language) (2018)
Bridget (Hilary Swank) returns home to Chicago at her brother’s (Michael Shannon) urging to deal with her ailing mother (Blythe Danner), and her father’s (Robert Forster) reluctance to let go of their life together. Winner of AARP’s Movies for Grownups Best Grownup Love Story Award. AARP says “there is no better cinematic portrait of a marriage and a family stricken by Alzheimer’s, in one of the best dramas about Alzheimer’s ever filmed.”
One can find more information about What They Had at the Internet Movie Database.
Sunday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The deal to avert tariffs that President Trump announced with great fanfare on Friday night consists largely of actions that Mexico had already promised to take in prior discussions with the United States over the past several months, according to officials from both countries who are familiar with the negotiations.
Friday’s joint declaration says Mexico agreed to the “deployment of its National Guard throughout Mexico, giving priority to its southern border.” But the Mexican government had already pledged to do that in March during secret talks in Miami between Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of homeland security, and Olga Sanchez, the Mexican secretary of the interior, the officials said.
(Emphasis added. Trump’s dealmaking is impressive only to the dense or deluded.)
For the past year and a half, Dr. Eric Russell has been traveling from Houston to McAllen, Texas, every three months or so to volunteer at the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center, a first stop for many asylum-seeking migrants who’ve been released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the Rio Grande Valley.
During his most recent visit to the clinic in April, when he saw more than 150 migrants, he noted a troubling new trend: a number of people reported that their medication had been taken from them by U.S. border officials.
“I had a few adults that came who had high blood pressure, who had their blood pressure medications taken from them and, not surprisingly, their blood pressure was elevated,” Russell told Yahoo News. “There was a couple of adults that had diabetes that had their diabetes medicines taken from them, and wanted to come in because they were worried about their blood sugar. And, not surprisingly, their blood sugar was elevated.”
(Trump’s lumpen base delights in the denial of humanitarian aid in cases like this.)
Sixteen lawmakers on their own could impose fees of any amount to help pay for roads under a plan Republican legislators advanced late Thursday.
The proposal would allow the Joint Finance Committee to establish new fees based on how many miles vehicles drove, starting in 2023. The rest of the Legislature wouldn’t get a say in the matter under the plan.
Republicans on the committee included the provision in a massive transportation package they added to the state budget Thursday.
(And yet, and yet, the WISGOP keeps telling suckers & pigeons that it’s a small-government party.)
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:31 PM, for 15h 15m 26s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
June wasn’t a great month for the labor market. Economists blame President Donald Trump’s trade war — and warn that if he follows through with his protectionist agenda, he could lead America into a recession.
Friday’s announcement from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the economy added just 75,000 jobs, well below expectations, came two days after payroll processor ADP’s report on private sector employment reported that a mere 27,000 jobs were added in May.
….
Weakness in manufacturing jobs, which were flat in May, is one big clue, he [Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics] said. “Job growth in manufacturing last year was averaging 20,000 to 25,000 per month. This year, it’s barely positive.” May’s loss of retail and transportation jobs also reflects the impact of shrinking margins and a constriction in global trade, he added.
The point isn’t that things are as bad as the household survey has been saying, but rather that they aren’t as good as the business survey has. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle. Which is why we should have expected the business survey numbers to regress to about where they are now. Bond investors, for their part, certainly did. By pushing long-term borrowing costs below short-term ones, they’ve been signaling that they think the Federal Reserve is going to have cut interest rates soon to fight off what they fear might be an incipient slump.
The state Department of Natural Resources is alleging that Johnson Controls International failed to report the release of hazardous materials at a property in Marinette that resulted in some residents unknowingly drinking water for years that was contaminated.
The DNR has referred the matter to the state Department of Justice for civil prosecution, saying a unit of Johnson Controls failed to inform state officials it knew that so-called forever chemicals had been found at a fire training facility in northeastern Wisconsin and did not take steps to minimize their impact.
Glendale-based Johnson Controls said in a statement Friday that it believed it was not obligated to notify authorities when the chemicals were first detected because the company believed the contamination was confined to its property.
Walker’s fundamental claim was that he would be a jobs creator, with a horde of operatives, development men, business insiders, and political cronies insisting that billions in state funds would somehow trickle down to create jobs.
New “gold standard” job numbers released Wednesday show Wisconsin created a total of 233,101 private sector jobs during the eight years Scott Walker was governor, falling nearly 17,000 jobs short of the 250,000 job benchmark Walker promised for his first four-year term.
The numbers also show that over Walker’s eight years in office, private sector jobs grew in Wisconsin by 10.3 percent, which ranked 34th among all states and trailed the national growth rate of 17.1 percent.
The numbers released Wednesday come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages,” or the QCEW. As the name suggests, they’re a detailed count of nearly all employers, which is why they take several months to collect.
While typically only followed by economists, the numbers were watched more closely during Walker’s tenure because of his explicit promise to help the private sector create 250,000 jobs in his first term.
“I want every cabinet secretary to have branded across their head, ‘250,000 jobs,’” Walker told the Dairy Business Associationin December 2010, shortly before he took office.
Wisconsin added roughly 129,000 private sector jobs in Walker’s first term, falling short of his goal, and the numbers released Wednesday show the state never hit the 250,000 job benchmark while he was governor.
(Emphasis added.)
Even in twice the time he promised, and with billions in Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and other state funds, Walker fell short of the job creation of most states and the national average.
