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Bigotry, Congress, Politics, Race, Trump

Congressman Steve King, But Not Only Steve King…

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Bigoted congressman Steve King has lost his committee assignments, should be censured, and truly should leave politics forever.

And yet, and yet, while King should go,  King shouldn’t head for the exit alone:

The condemnations of Mr. King stood in stark contrast to the lawmakers’ willingness to tolerate President Trump’s frequent offensive and insensitive remarks about migrants, black people, Native Americans and other minorities.

Just last week, the president used the Oval Office to unleash a blistering assault on undocumented immigrants, portraying them as criminals in a fashion that harked back to an earlier era of American politics but rarely heard from a president in modern times. And on Sunday night, Mr. Trump invoked the Wounded Knee massacre of hundreds of Native Americans as an attempt to joke about Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Via Steve King Removed From Committee Assignments Over White Supremacy Remark.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.15.19

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Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:46 PM, for 9h 24m 36s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 62.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1967, the Packers win the first Super Bowl (35-10 over the Chiefs).

Recommended for reading in full:

Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper report Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. From NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns Over Russia:

There are few things that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia desires more than the weakening of NATO, the military alliance among the United States, Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.

Last year, President Trump suggested a move tantamount to destroying NATO: the withdrawal of the United States.

Senior administration officials told The New York Times that several times over the course of 2018, Mr. Trump privately said he wanted to withdraw from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Current and former officials who support the alliance said they feared Mr. Trump could return to his threat as allied military spending continued to lag behind the goals the president had set.

(No greater gift to Vladimir Vladimirovich than the end of American participation in the NATO alliance.)

 Fred Kaplan considers Trump and Putin’s Cone of Seclusion (“It’s not just unusual that there are no notes from Trump’s meetings with Putin. It’s unprecedented”):

Whether his translator’s notes hold anything incriminating about Trump’s fealty to Putin, it is appalling that he would go into a one-on-one meeting with the Russian president without a note taker—especially given his shallow grasp of the issues and the very real possibility that he could have given away U.S. interests or disclosed vital secrets without understanding what he was doing. He also conducted his one-on-one with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, at their summit in Singapore, without a note taker present.

….

Quite aside from matters that may be of concern to special counsel Robert Mueller, who knows what concessions Trump may have made in these sessions? In the follow-on meetings that have since taken place between U.S. and North Korean negotiators, American diplomats have sometimes raised points that they consider vital—only to have their North Korean counterpart wave it away, saying, “Go talk with your president.” Did Trump concede these issues in his one-on-one without telling his subordinates? We may never know; some U.S. officials suspect he did.

Meg Jones reports USO Wisconsin collecting gift cards for Coast Guardsmen working without pay because of shutdown:

Like other federal workers working without pay, Coast Guard members and their families are facing hardship paying bills, buying groceries and filling gas tanks.

To help, USO Wisconsin has started a gift card collection for local Coast Guardsmen and their families.

How to help pollinators in cities:

America, City, Federal Government, Fellow Traveler, Fifth Columnist, Local Government, Never Trump, Russia, Trump, Trump-Russia, Unfit

Trump-Russia Roundup

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While the proper focus against Trumpism involves a zealous lawful effort against Trump and his leading operatives, there is also a problem of Trumpism down to the local level.

In both cases, officials advancing Trumpism ignore the overwhelming evidence of his betrayal of our own people to the benefit of a hostile foreign power. As with Trumpism’s other political sins, officials defending Trumpism are owed no deference – they deserve nothing beyond the minimum requirements of the law. 

Below are excerpts of recent reports:

Strobe Talbot writes It’s Already Collusion:

Under Putin as a revanchist, Russia has reinstated four key ingredients of Soviet politics and geopolitics: the Iron Fist, the Big Lie, the expansion beyond Russian borders and the subversion of Western societies. He is giving another chance to a system that ended up on the ash heap of history in the last century because of its internal failures.

….

Trumpism is a godsend to Putin and a nightmare for governments in his sights—including Trump’s. The U.S. commander-in-chief is out of sync with his own administration, not to mention the government as a whole. Note his stubborn yearning to lift sanctions on Putin’s pet oligarchs.

Isaac Chotiner reports How the Times Reported the F.B.I. Counterintelligence Investigation Into President Trump: An Interview with the Journalist Adam Goldman:

the F.B.I. had specifically started looking at Trump and whether he wittingly or unwittingly had been working with a hostile foreign power. I had to look at the mechanisms that went into place to trigger this aspect of the investigation. This comes after the Lester Holt interview. [On May 11th, 2017, two days after Trump fired Comey, the President gave an interview to NBC in which he said that, when he fired Comey, he was thinking, “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.”] And you talk to people who are familiar with this: once he got on Lester Holt and he said this, the F.B.I. is, like, “He is telling us why he did this? The President of the United States got up on television and said, ‘I did this because of Russia.’ ” They are, like, “What the fuck?,” right?

Tom Nichols contends All signs point the same way: Vladimir Putin has compromising information on Donald Trump:

While Trump is not an “agent” of the Russian Federation (too many people use this kind of language without knowing what it means to counterintelligence officials), it seems at this point beyond argument that the president personally fears Russian President Vladimir Putin for reasons that can only suggest the existence of compromising information.

Max Boot lists 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset [asset, not agent, by the way]:

we can look at the key, publicly available evidence that both supports and undercuts this explosive allegation.

Here is some of the evidence suggesting “Individual 1” could be a Russian “asset”:

(Full list follows in the article.)

Russia, Trump, Trump-Russia

The Room Where It Happens

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This weekend, Greg Miller reported on the lengths to which Donald Trump has gone to hide the contents of his discussions with Putin from his — Trump’s own — administration.  See Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration.

Normally – in a properly functioning federal administration – a meeting between the American president and the leader of a hostile foreign power would include many supporting American officials.

Photographs confirm this plain fact:

Obama Administration & Putin:

Reagan Administration & Gorbachev:

Nixon Administration & Mao:

By contrast, Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov & then-Ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office:

Babbittry, Newspapers, Press, That Which Paved the Way

Hedge Funds Have No Table Manners Whatever

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Brian Stelter writes Gannett journalists anxious amid report that Digital First Media is circling the company:

Cara Lombardo’s unsettling Sunday night scoop for the WSJ: “A hedge-fund-backed media group known for buying up struggling local papers and cutting costs is planning to make an offer for USA Today publisher Gannett, according to people familiar with the matter.”

The would-be buyer is Digital First Media, which in turn is controlled by Alden Global Capital. The operation already owns dozens of local papers. It is notorious for slash-and-burn tactics. Last year, employees at the Denver Post garnered national support when they rose up against the “vultures” at Alden.

Now Alden, through Digital First Media, is looking to acquire Gannett and its dozens of papers. Digital First will “offer to buy Gannett for $12 a share, they said, which would represent a 23% premium over Friday’s closing price of $9.75,” Lombardo reports. She says Gannett has rebuffed past approaches from the firm…

If Gannett has it bad – and they do – it’s worse for local newspapers: their stories are laughably fawning toward local officials, they have no digital strategy whatever, some are almost certainly deceiving advertisers about the actual reach of their respective publications (digital or print), and new reporters get no useful mentoring.

Note well – in print or digital, nothing matters more than the embrace of the highest standards of inquiry, and the rejection of the boosterism and weak reasoning that has paved the way to our present lamentable condition.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.14.19

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Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:22 AM and sunset 4:45 PM, for 9h 22m 56s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 52.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6:30 PM.

On January 14, 1863, the 23rd Wisconsin Infantry leads an expedition to South Bend, Arkansas. On this day in 1865, the 12th, 16th, 17th, 25th, and 32nd Wisconsin Infantry regiments seize Pocotaligo, South Carolina.

Recommended for reading in full:

 Tory Newmyer writes Government shutdown threatens to take real bite out of economic growth:

The longest shutdown is on track to turn a month old this coming weekend, and the economic damage is starting to pile up. 

Given that there’s no end in sight, the damage may need to get significantly worse to break the stalemate.

Economists disagree on what the shutdown has done to broader economic growth so far. The rough standard is that every week or two the government is shuttered trims a tenth of a percent from GDP growth. 

But the knock-on effects — when government contractors or others who rely on federal workers as customers get stiffed, then fail to pay employees or creditors and, potentially, see their businesses fail — are hard to measure, Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson argued in a research note over the weekend. “Even a one-month shutdown would seriously hit growth, to say nothing of the misery caused,” he wrote. And if the situation drags on for the duration of the first quarter, “we would look for an outright decline in first quarter GDP.”

(Emphasis in original.)

Vanda Felbab-Brown surveys Trump’s bogus justifications for the border wall:

President Trump’s speech this week did not change the fact that a border wall won’t make the United States safer or more prosperous. Despite the president’s spin and pretend newly-found humanitarianism, a wall—whether a steel barrier or concrete—remains a waste of money. No matter how tall, deep, or thick a barrier, illicit flows will find a way around. Instead, the wall would undermine the rights of Native Americans and critically damage U.S. biodiversity.

A wall can’t stop smuggling. Drug smugglers have been using tunnels to get drugs into the United States since 1989. Between 1990 and 2016, 224 tunnels have been discovered underneath the U.S.–Mexico border. With no great difficulty, tunnels can be built under any wall. Drugs are also smuggled through drainage systems between border towns and by drones. People and contraband can be smuggled by boats, landing far north on U.S. coasts. Ports such as Miami and Boston are key drug-trafficking hubs.

Contraband and migrants can be hidden within the legal cargo entering through the 52 ports of entry between the United States and Mexico. Most high-value drugs are smuggled across the land border that way. Checking every car, truck, and train compartment that crosses the border is simply infeasible because of time and costs. It would paralyze legal trade and travel.

Dolphins join surfer for amazing ride off California coast:

Fellow Traveler, Fifth Columnist, Putin, Trump, Trump-Russia

Trump as Fifth Columnist

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A fellow traveler is someone who sympathizes with a foreign adversary, but a fifth columnist is far worse: the fifth columnist takes active steps in support of his or her disloyal sympathies.  Trump has spoken favorably of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on many occasions, yet he has done far worse: he has acted in ways that actively support Putin – murderer, militarist, and tyrant – against the interests of our own people.

Greg Miller reports Trump has concealed details of his face-to-face encounters with Putin from senior officials in administration:

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump did so after a meeting with Putin in 2017 in Hamburg that was also attended by then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. U.S. officials learned of Trump’s actions when a White House adviser and a senior State Department official sought information from the interpreter beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.

The constraints that Trump imposed are part of a broader pattern by the president of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.

As a result, U.S. officials said there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years. Such a gap would be unusual in any presidency, let alone one that Russia sought to install through what U.S. intelligence agencies have described as an unprecedented campaign of election interference.

Here is Trump, seen clearly: the ignorant, bigoted, and corrupt tool of a foreign dictator. A monkey, dancing to an organ grinder’s tune, is pitiable: the tiny primate merely does what it does by its primitive nature. A man or woman living as Trump, while no less human under the law, descends from principle to the behavior of a lesser creature.

See also (as linked yesterday about an earlier story of FBI investigation into Trump’s conduct) Benjamin Wittes’s What if the Obstruction Was the Collusion? On the New York Times’s Latest Bombshell.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.13.19

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Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:44 PM, for 9h 21m 19s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 42.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1922, WHA radio station is founded. (The station dates back to 1917, making it “the oldest station in the nation.”)

Recommended for reading in full:

 Mitch Smith reports Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’:

STEVENS POINT, Wis. — Chancellor Bernie Patterson’s message to his campus was blunt: To remain solvent and relevant, his 125-year-old university needed to reinvent itself.

Some longstanding liberal arts degrees, including those in history, French and German, would be eliminated. Career-focused programs would become a key investment. Tenured faculty members could lose their jobs. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Dr. Patterson explained in a memo, could “no longer be all things to all people.”

….

But critics say that in trying to carve out a sustainable path for Stevens Point — and build a model for other struggling, regionally focused universities — administrators are risking the very essence of a four-year college experience.

Adam Harris worries The Liberal Arts May Not Survive the 21st Century:

Many people attribute the Wisconsin Idea, as it is known, to Charles Van Hise, the president of the University of Wisconsin from 1903 to 1918. “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the University reaches every family of the state,” Hise said in an address in 1905. “If our beloved institution reaches this ideal it will be the first perfect state university.” His idea was written into the mission of the state’s university system, and over time that system became a model for what public higher education could be.

But the backbone of the idea almost went away in 2015, when Governor Scott Walker released his administration’s budget proposal, which included a change to the university’s mission. The Wisconsin Idea would be tweaked. The “search for truth” would be cut in favor of a charge to “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

To those outside Wisconsin, the proposed change might have seemed small. After all, what’s so bad about an educational system that propels people into a high-tech economy? But to many Wisconsinites, the change struck at the heart of the state’s identity. They argued that the idea—with its core tenets of truth, public service, and “improving the human condition”—is what makes Wisconsin, Wisconsin.

Walker ultimately scrapped his attempt to alter the Wisconsin Idea, claiming that his administration hadn’t meant to change it, that it was just a “drafting error.” And so the Wisconsin Idea was preserved—at least in an official sense. But though the words survived intact, many Wisconsinites believe that in the years since, the change Walker had proposed has taken place nevertheless. And one of the state’s institutions, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, is the epicenter of that change.

How One Man Circumnavigated the World … By Car:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.12.19

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Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-four.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:43 PM, for 9h 19m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 33.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1904, Henry Ford sets a land speed record:

Henry Ford personally drove the rechristened 999 with his mechanic Ed “Spider” Huff at the throttle. A new land speed record was achieved of 91.37 mph (147.05 km/h) on an ice track carved into Lake St. Clair’s Anchor Bay.  (Photo shows Ford and Barney Oldenfield in 1902 with a model 999.)

Recommended for reading in full:

Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt, and Nicholas Fandos report F.B.I. Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia:

WASHINGTON — In the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.

The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security. Agents also sought to determine whether Mr. Trump was knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.

The investigation the F.B.I. opened into Mr. Trump also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether his firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.

Agents and senior F.B.I. officials had grown suspicious of Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign but held off on opening an investigation into him, the people said, in part because they were uncertain how to proceed with an inquiry of such sensitivity and magnitude. But the president’s activities before and after Mr. Comey’s firing in May 2017, particularly two instances in which Mr. Trump tied the Comey dismissal to the Russia investigation, helped prompt the counterintelligence aspect of the inquiry, the people said.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, took over the inquiry into Mr. Trump when he was appointed, days after F.B.I. officials opened it. That inquiry is part of Mr. Mueller’s broader examination of how Russian operatives interfered in the 2016 election and whether any Trump associates conspired with them.

….

F.B.I. officials viewed their decision to move quickly as validated when a comment the president made to visiting Russian officials in the Oval Office shortly after he fired Mr. Comey was revealed days later.

“I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job,” Mr. Trump said, according to a document summarizing the meeting. “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”

 Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare summarizes this news:

It was about Russia. Full stop. It was always about Russia.

See from Wittes What if the Obstruction Was the Collusion? On the New York Times’s Latest Bombshell.

 Why is Duct Tape So Strong?:

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 1.11.19

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Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of thirty-three.  Sunrise is 7:23 AM and sunset 4:42 PM, for 9h 18m 14s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 

On this day in 1887, noted conservationist Aldo Leopold is born.

 

Recommended for reading in full:

Michael Tackett and Julie Hirschfeld Davis report White House Considers Using Storm Aid Funds as a Way to Pay for the Border Wall:

President Trump traveled to the border on Thursday to warn of crime and chaos on the frontier, as White House officials considered diverting emergency aid from storm- and fire-ravaged Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas and California to build a border barrier, perhaps under an emergency declaration.

….

The administration appeared to be looking into just such a solution: using extraordinary emergency powers to get around Congress in funding the wall. Among the options, the White House has directed the Army Corps of Engineers to determine whether it can divert for wall construction $13.9 billion allocated last year after devastating hurricanes and wildfires, according to congressional and Defense Department officials with knowledge of the matter, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the possibility.

Administration officials are debating whether they could make such a move without the president declaring a national emergency, an action the White House counsel’s office has explored.

 Nomaan Merchant reports As Trump visits border, Texas landowners prepare wall fight:

HIDALGO, Texas (AP) — As President Donald Trump traveled to the border in Texas to make the case for his $5.7 billion wall , landowner Eloisa Cavazos says she knows firsthand how the project will play out if the White House gets its way.

The federal government has started surveying land along the border in Texas and announced plans to start construction next month. Rather than surrender their land, some property owners are digging in, vowing to reject buyout offers and preparing to fight the administration in court.

“You could give me a trillion dollars and I wouldn’t take it,” said Cavazos, whose land sits along the Rio Grande, the river separating the U.S. and Mexico in Texas. “It’s not about money.”

….

Many have hired lawyers who are preparing to fight the government if, as expected, it moves to seize their land through eminent domain.

The opposition will intensify if Democrats accede to the Trump administration’s demand to build more than 215 new miles of wall, including 104 miles in the Rio Grande Valley and 55 miles near Laredo. Even a compromise solution to build “steel slats,” as Trump has suggested, or more fencing of the kind that Democrats have previously supported would likely trigger more court cases and pushback in Texas.

Legal experts say Trump likely cannot waive eminent domain — which requires the government to demonstrate a public use for the land and provide landowners with compensation — by declaring a national emergency.

How Combat Jets Refuel In Midair:

Bad Ideas, City, Congress, Culture, Demographics, Development, Diversity, Economics, Economy, Federal Government, Immigration, Trump

‘Our Guy’ Isn’t Our Guy

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Some months ago, in a radio interview to tout part of the Trump tax bill, the Whitewater Community Development Authority’s executive director Dave Carlson referred to Congressman F. James Sensenbrenner as ‘our guy.’

Sensenbrenner, a pro-Trump septuagenarian multimillionaire from a gerrymandered district, is – literally – Whitewater’s federal representative.

Sensenbrenner has never been – and never will be our guy (in a familiar sense). It’s a measure of how poorly Carlson understands Whitewater that he could look around this diverse city and still describe Sensenbrenner in any positive terms

Some prior remarks are still germane:

(Sensenbrenner votes in line with Trump’s positions 88.2% of the time; Sensenbrenner on 7.5.18, asking for support for Trump after an executive order reducing the effects of Trump’s own family separation policy: “I am waiting to hear any of my friends from the left stand up and say Trump did the right thing when he signed that executive order.” Sensenbrenner might as well ask for support for an arsonist who burns down house after house but then splashes a cup of water on the collapsing homes and expects praise for that meager effort.)

No bad empty economic deal (see About that Trump Tax Plan) will compensate for an even worse policy of authoritarianism and ethnic favoritism.

One now reads (thank you, Joe) that Sensenbrenner has reintroduced to Congress his BUILD WALL Act (‘Build Up Illegal Line Defenses With Assets Lawfully Lifted’).  Sensenbrenner’s wall-building legislation is both bigoted and a futile waste.

F. James Sensenbrenner’s wall-building politics represent a threat to centuries of evolving American legal, political, and economic development – and they are a particular nativist threat to many residents of this city.

There should be – and so will be – no yielding on this point.

As for the Whitewater Community Development Authority, one can say that it’s been an ineffectual and wasteful failure for many years.  Development without broad & meaningful improvement in household and personal income isn’t community development at all.  See A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA.

Previously: About that Trump Tax Plan, On the Whitewater CDA’s Press Release (A Picture Reply Is Worth a Thousand Words, A Candid Admission from the Whitewater CDA, More About that Trump Tax Bill, The Trump Tax Bill: That’s Not Reform, The Trump Tax Bill: The Wrong Incentives, The Trump Tax Bill: Massive Federal Deficits, The Trump Tax Bill: The Illusory Pay Bump, and Reported Family Poverty in Whitewater Increased Over the Last Decade.