China’s post-Mao economic boom has occurred only to the extent that the country became capitalist. With “Made in China 2025,” Beijing’s 2015 anticapitalist plan for an industrial policy under which the state would pick “winners,” China has taken a step back from capitalism. (It recently dropped the “Made in China 2025” name, though the policy remains.)
It won’t work, but China’s new industrial policy has worked one marvel — namely, scaring many American conservatives into believing that the main driver of economic growth isn’t the market but bureaucrats invested with power to control the allocation of natural and financial resources.
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China’s economic future is bright, but only as long as it rejects large-scale industrial policy and instead recommits to competitive markets. We shouldn’t copy its recent command-and-control playbook. Rather, we should stick with the time-honored policies that have made the United States the titan to topple in the first place: free trade, competitive markets, reasonable regulations and the rule of law.
Market-based policies (policies that flourish in conditions of limited government and the rule of law) are superior solutions to the commands of government (and the predations of well-fed interests – found even in the smallest places – that selfishly manipulate government for their own aggrandizement).
Ash Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-four. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 5:50 PM, for 11h 30m 04s of daytime. The moon is new.
the 4th Wisconsin Cavalry (then an infantry unit) embarked to join the “Army of the Gulf.” It arrived below New Orleans on March 12, 1862, and landed in New Orleans on May 1. The 4th was at once assigned to active service and joined an expedition up the Mississippi River against Vicksburg in May. By June they occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The troops there were employed in several successful expeditions during that winter, and remained in the area through most of the war. In June of 1862, its commander was punished for refusing to return escaping slaves to their masters (more information on this event is at Turning Points in Wisconsin History). In 1863 the unit was equipped as a Cavalry Regiment; it returned to Wisconsin in 1866.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce won’t pour money into this year’s state Supreme Court race, creating new challenges for conservative candidate Brian Hagedorn.
The national organization often funnels money to Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce to help conservatives in court races but won’t do so this year, according to three sources familiar with the plans.
The move comes as other conservatives signal they’re staying on the sidelines after reports about Hagedorn founding a school that can ban teachers and students in gay relationships and giving paid speeches to a legal organization that has argued in favor of anti-sodomy laws.
The Wisconsin Realtors Association last month withdrew its endorsement of Hagedorn and asked him to return an $18,000 donation. Soon afterward, longtime Republican consultants R.J. Johnson and Deb Jordahl — who have run past independent efforts to help conservatives running for the Supreme Court — wrote a column defending the Realtors’ decision to stay out of the race.
It took just one day for President Trump to change course from saying he cooperates with everyone to attacking the House Judiciary Committee’s request for documents and information as it advances its investigation into potential obstruction of justice, corruption, and abuse of power.
“It’s a disgrace to our country. I’m not surprised that it’s happening. Basically, they’ve started the campaign. So the campaign begins,” Trump told reporters at the White House after signing an executive order on veterans’ suicide prevention.
“Instead of doing infrastructure, instead of doing health care, instead of doing so many things that they should be doing, they want to play games,” he continued.
(…)
The president’s remarks suggest the White House could invoke executive privilege or take other measures to shield internal documents or discussions from Democratic-led panels investigating Trump’s administration, campaign and businesses.
Who is the media’s middle-lane approach actually good for?
Not the public, certainly, since readers and viewers would benefit from strong viewpoints across the full spectrum of political thought, not just minor variations of the same old stuff.
The GWC is an action-oriented group committed to working with citizens, elected officials and policymakers to identify, craft and implement a pro-business agenda. The agenda advances the economic, education and social policies required to energize and secure the Whitewater area’s economic future, as well as protect Whitewater’s quality of life.
Honest to goodness that paragraph reads like a press release because it is, in fact, from a press release!
It’s also laughably grandiose: no normal person could believe that the agenda of a few local conservative businessmen fulfills the what’s required for the community’s economy, schools, and society to energize and secure Whitewater’s future and quality of life. Didn’t someone who wrote these lines think, for even a moment, that it was all a bit much?
One wonders – truly – whether anyone at the local paper (Welch the reporter, Spangler the editor) can tell the difference between a news story and a press release, or would even ponder the topic. This local paper’s default position isn’t reporting and thoughtful journalism: it’s whatever approximation of English words they can string together to fill the space between advertisements.
A central planning czar could order a new truck factory to be built, and a business league can divert public money for their favored projects, but without improvement in individual or household prosperity there is no meaningful community development.
What’s occupied the default or middle position in these communities is a relationship in which a small number of pro-government businessmen, pressuring a small number of officials (or acting as officials simultaneously), with the cheering of a few sycophantic publishers, direct public money to their own goals while receiving empty praise from those officials and publishers.
This leaves the middle position as the worst lane to travel: a dirt road to decay.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 5:49 PM, for 11h 27m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office will no longer offer information to immigration officials about people detained in the jail.
Sheriff Earnell Lucas, who took office Jan. 7, said he wants to avoid lawsuits other law enforcement agencies across the country have faced for holding inmates for up to 48 hours longer than they should have been detained so U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents could interview and possibly take custody of the inmate.
Lucas announced last week he had established a policy ensuring that absent a valid judicial warrant, information would no longer be shared with ICE.
Lucas’ policy is a shift from former Sheriff David Clarke’s administration, which not only fully cooperated with ICE, but also attempted to sign a 287(g) agreement to give deputies the authority to act as ICE representatives.
Milwaukee County was not approved for that type of an agreement after community protests. Though the neighboring Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department has signed a 287(g) agreement with the federal government.
The president averaged nearly 5.9 false or misleading claims a day in his first year in office. He hit nearly 16.5 a day in his second year. So far in 2019, he’s averaging nearly 22 claims a day.
As of the end of March 3, the 773rd day of his term in office, Trump accumulated 9,014 fishy claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president.
Trump’s performance at CPAC is emblematic of his version of the truth during his presidency — a potent mix of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasting and outright falsehoods. His speech helped push March 3 to his fourth-biggest day for false or misleading claims, totaling 104.
Some faculty members, such as women’s and gender studies professor JoEllen Burkholder, questioned the timing of Kopper’s resignation coming before the report’s release. Burkholder said she sees Kopper’s one-sentence resignation letter submitted to the UW System Board of Regents as an indication that she was likely pressured to resign, saying a “double standard” would exist if she was forced out based solely on someone else’s misbehavior.
There was an ample basis to dismiss Kopper – or ask her to resign – based on her own behavior: she concealed from the campus two separate investigations into her publicly-appointed spouse’s conduct. (The information only became public following a public-records request and a pending newspaper story. A third investigation has now been completed but not yet released.)
Burkholder’s double-standard argument, however, implies – indeed rests upon – the claim that if a male chancellor would not have been asked to resign, then Kopper should not have been asked to resign.
This argument rests on a claim of negative equality: that if one does not address misconduct in one instance, it should not be addressed in other instances (keeping negative experiences equal between genders, races, ages, etc.).
The opposite is how one typically – and rightly – thinks about equality: the extension of positive conditions to more people (of all genders, races, and ages).
One was reminded of Burkholder’s argument after reading Elizabeth Bruenig’s article addressing questions about Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s temperament:
There’s a reflexive kind of defensiveness that comes from the realization that women are judged more harshly than men for the same behavior. It tells us that fairness matters — and it does. But there are positive and negative forms of fairness. Negative fairness is a kind of fairness that reduces everyone to an equally bad position. Arguments that we ought to discount coverage of Klobuchar’s maltreatment of her staffers on gender-egalitarian grounds, for instance, really hold that because we wrongly accept male abuse of workers, we also ought to accept female abuse of workers. But the reality is actually the reverse: We rightly don’t accept female abuse of workers, and we shouldn’t accept male abuse of workers, either. This line of criticism is both gender-egalitarian and aimed at increasing the overall common good by creating a moral expectation that all workers be treated with dignity. That’s positive fairness.
(I’ve no idea about Sen. Klobuchar’s temperament; it’s Bruenig’s remarks on negative equality or negative fairness that caught my attention.)
The justification for Kopper’s departure isn’t impaired by unfairly retaining other failed leaders. On the contrary, other leaders’ lingering presence only stands in greater contrast (and that contrast demands action for their removal).
A better campus, a better city, and a better society will not come through an equal acceptance of misconduct, but instead through an equal redress of misconduct wherever one finds it.
Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of nine. Sunrise is 6:24 AM and sunset 5:48 PM, for 11h 24m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Downtown Whitewater, Inc.’s board meets tonight at 5 PM.
On this day in 1863, the 22nd Wisconsin Infantry fights in the Battle of Thompson’s Station, also known as the Battle of Spring Hill, about 30 miles south of Nashville, Tennessee.
In January, during the longest government shutdown in America’s history, President Donald Trump rode in a motorcade through Hidalgo County, Texas, eventually stopping on a grassy bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The White House wanted to dramatize what Trump was portraying as a national emergency: the need to build a wall along the Mexican border. The presence of armored vehicles, bales of confiscated marijuana, and federal agents in flak jackets underscored the message.
But the photo op dramatized something else about the Administration. After members of the press pool got out of vans and headed over to where the President was about to speak, they noticed that Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, was already on location. Unlike them, he hadn’t been confined by the Secret Service, and was mingling with Administration officials, at one point hugging Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security. The pool report noted that Hannity was seen “huddling” with the White House communications director, Bill Shine. After the photo op, Hannity had an exclusive on-air interview with Trump. Politico later reported that it was Hannity’s seventh interview with the President, and Fox’s forty-second. Since then, Trump has given Fox two more. He has granted only ten to the three other main television networks combined, and none to CNN, which he denounces as “fake news.”
Hannity was treated in Texas like a member of the Administration because he virtually is one. The same can be said of Fox’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch. Fox has long been a bane of liberals, but in the past two years many people who watch the network closely, including some Fox alumni, say that it has evolved into something that hasn’t existed before in the United States. Nicole Hemmer, an assistant professor of Presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and the author of “Messengers of the Right,” a history of the conservative media’s impact on American politics, says of Fox, “It’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV.”
Hemmer argues that Fox—which, as the most watched cable news network, generates about $2.7 billion a year for its parent company, 21st Century Fox—acts as a force multiplier for Trump, solidifying his hold over the Republican Party and intensifying his support.
Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 6:25 AM and sunset 5:47 PM, for 11h 21m 23s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 8.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1862, the Siege of New Madrid, Missouri begins: “Union General John Pope began the siege of New Madrid, Missouri. The 8th and 15th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 5th, 6th and 7th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries took part in this effort to open the Mississippi River to Union shipping.”
Recommended for reading in full:
Sarah Whites-Koditschek and Coburn Dukehart report Most nitrate, coliform in Kewaunee County wells tied to animal waste (“The latest findings from a study of drinking water wells and their surroundings finds manure from cows that is stored or spread on farm fields poses the highest risk for certain contaminants”):
Scientists are one step closer to understanding how dangerous contaminants from fecal matter are entering private wells in Kewaunee County. New research by U.S. Department of Agriculture microbiologist Mark Borchardt shows nitrate and coliform in the water mostly comes from agriculture — and not human waste.
“Where we see the strong relationships, the strong linkages, those are with agricultural factors. So that would suggest that agriculture is primarily responsible for those two contaminants,” he said in an interview.
Borchardt presented his updated findings on the risk factors associated with contamination in wells at the Midwest Manure Summit in Green Bay on Wednesday. In 2017, his research found over 60 percent of wells sampled in Kewaunee County were contaminated with fecal microbes, which can come from both septic systems or animal waste.
The new study aims to understand the precise sources of contamination and how certain factors can reduce or increase the risk of tainted drinking water. Borchardt used models to predict how those factors — like the distance of a well from a manure lagoon or agricultural field, weather and the quality of well construction — can impact contamination levels.
Borchardt’s study found that the No. 1 risk factor for contamination was the proximity of a well to a manure storage pit. Borchardt said the closest well in the study was 150 feet from a manure pit, but even wells three miles away still have some risk of being contaminated with coliform.
SpaceX had both a successful launch and docking of the Crew Dragon capsule (unmanned on this flight). The capsule is designed to take up to seven astronauts into low Earth orbit:
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 6:27 AM and sunset 5:46 PM, for 11h 18m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 14.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
You could see it coming from a mile away. To the north, the Third Ward had emerged from a long period of torpor to become one of hottest destinations in the state for nightlife, shopping and luxury living. The Third Ward’s wave of transforming energy was so powerful that it jumped the Milwaukee River and turned Walker’s Point, the city’s oldest neighborhood, into another showcase for 21st-century development.
To the south, Bay View, which began as a company town built around a long-gone iron mill, was experiencing a transformation of its own. Sleepy Kinnickinnic Ave. had awakened to become one of the city’s busiest restaurant rows, and homes built for mill workers were attracting scores of millennials.
Between these two poles — the resurrected Third Ward and the reinvented Bay View —lay a burned-out, post-industrial landscape that only a graffiti artist could have loved. Shuttered factories, scruffy nightspots, and weed-choked vacant lots marked both sides of Milwaukee’s inner harbor.
It was only a matter of time before the developers arrived. The ripples of energy spreading outward from the neighborhoods both north and south began to converge not even a decade ago, creating a new hot spot known as the Harbor District. It covers a thousand acres of waterfront east of S. First St. between Walker’s Point and Bay View, including Jones Island. Projects underway and on the way will change its landscape so radically that, in another decade or two, older Milwaukeeans won’t recognize the place.
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Progress since then has been so rapid than even the optimists are surprised. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences has transformed an old tile factory at the east end of Greenfield Ave. Michels Inc., a Wisconsin utility contractor, is hard at work on a mixed-use development at a bend of the Kinnickinnic River west of S. First St. Komatsu, the successor to the Harnischfeger line of mining equipment, is moving to the Solvay Coke site — lock, stock, and turret lathes. These projects will boost the inner harbor’s economy, while others — a gateway park, an expanded Riverwalk, a restored wetland, kayak and canoe launches — will ensure permanent public access to the waterfront.
Jessica Boddy reports These mice sing their little hearts out—and that’s good for neuroscience:
Some mice squeak out tunes to woo females, though they aren’t always audible to human ears. But Scotinomys teguina, more commonly known as Alston’s singing mouse, scurries through Central American cloud forests and breaks into audible song to communicate and find mates.
UW-Whitewater, a public university in Whitewater, Wisconsin, now seeks a new chancellor, and the selection committee recently held a community listening session to request suggestions about a new campus administrator.
(However useful an invitation to a community listening session might be, it’s worth noting that observation, reflection, and commentary answer to a different – and prior – invitation.)
The community leaders assembled on February 6, 2019 listed the challenges the campus faces, traits they’d like in a new chancellor, and what’s attractive about the campus.
There’s not a single isolated word they spoke that was objectionable. One would hope for these suggestions in any routine search for a new leader. In this, one can be genuinely grateful that February 2019 community session was more responsible than the last one. (A local newspaper’s account of the last chancellor search reads in both style and substance like a parody of sycophancy and boosterism. SeeThe Dark, Futile Dream and The Last Inside Accounts.)
Not long ago, UW-Whitewater’s chancellor resigned after concealing from her campus – for months – two separate investigations into multiple allegations of sexual harassment against her spouse, who held a public position as an associate to the chancellor.
Note well: one can readily presume that no one in the room wanted what’s happened over these last months and years.
And yet, and yet, it has happened, and so this is not a routine search.
UW-Whitewater now seeks a new, permanent chancellor after the last two presided over a campus with a high number of sexual assaults, administrative concealment of harassment, and multiple published accounts of failure to process complainants’ claims properly under federal law. See, a category at FREEWHITEWATER addressing the circumstances that brought this campus, and this community, to search for a new chancellor.
Mentioning this does not make Whitewater weaker – it is the necessary path to making Whitewater stronger (by being safer). The path to fewer controversies – where controversy means tragedy — runs through a place of candid discussion.
Truth and reconciliation, after all, begins with truth.
March in Whitewater begins with cloudy skies and a high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 5:44 PM, for 11h 15m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 22.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer, four people briefed on the matter said.
Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John F. Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.
The White House counsel at the time, Donald F. McGahn II, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.
The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told The New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.
Mr. Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe D. Lowell, also said that at the time the clearance was granted last year that his client went through a standard process. Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and Mr. Kushner’s wife, said the same thing three weeks ago.
Asked on Thursday about the memos contradicting the president’s account, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.”
House Republicans needed a trial lawyer—or even a moderately bright junior-high mock-trial participant—to tell them how to do anything. Cross-examination is hard. It’s not just barking at the witness. It takes meticulous planning and patience. Republicans could have marshaled Cohen’s many sins of the past to undermine his statements today. Instead, they returned repeatedly to lies and misdeeds he’s already admitted, wallowed in silly trivialities such as the “Women for Cohen” Twitter account, and yelled. The effect was to make an unsympathetic man modestly more sympathetic. Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse.
