All Mahler superfans will know that one of his Adagios can elicit a huge range of emotions.
But we’re happy to say there’s no need for a detailed analysis of the rates of harmonic change and cadential tension (though we have that too), because this feline sums it all up perfectly.
Choco belongs to Japanese pianist Yuriko Morota. The cat’s dramatic contortions to the slow, suspense-filled strings in the Adagio finale to Mahler’s final symphony are everything you could wish for. If indeed you wish for pets listening to Austro-Bohemian late-Romantic symphonies, and looking funny.
Friday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with snow falling in the late afternoon, and a high of twenty-seven. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 4:50 PM, for 9h 29m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, Pres. Jefferson requests funding for what would become the Lewis and Clark expedition.
President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.
Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.
And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project.
First, the criminality alleged in this story is—if true—unsubtle and unambiguous, directly related to the president’s conduct as president, and concerning matters of great import.
This story is the first direct allegation of a crime by Trump involving L’Affaire Russe for which the president cannot claim that his actions were authorized by the Article II powers of the presidency. Thereisanactivedebateabout the degree to which the obstruction statutes can or cannot be applied to facially valid exercises of presidential authority—like, for example, firing the FBI director or directing the conduct of an investigation. There is no debate, by contrast, about whether the president can obstruct justice in his conduct outside of his authorities as president.
Starting at around 7:34 p.m. PT or 10:34 p.m. ET Sunday, a partial eclipse will begin, with the full eclipse starting a little over an hour later. You can safely look at the blood moon from anywhere skies are clear enough, unlike solar eclipses that require special eye protection in most cases. The main event lasts about an hour.
There are four recent developments in the debacle that has been the October Warriors and Wizards (formerly Harry Potter) Festival in Jefferson, Wisconsin. Despite problems during its two years in Edgerton, Jefferson picked up the festival, and the Daily Jefferson County Union touted the shabby festival even as residents were screaming about the low quality of the event and dishonesty of the event organizer. SeeIceberg Aside, Titanic‘s Executive Pleased with Ship’s Voyage.
Now the DU has been playing catch up, reporting on the sad truth of the event after hundreds of people – some undoubtedly relying on prior false & absurdly laudatory DU coverage – attended the event.
(I did not lose any money on this event, and have no personal disappointment. The story here is how lying boosters pushed an obviously cheesy festival with no regard to ordinary patrons’ time or money. Far from representing and defending the community, the DU‘s then-publisher and current editor and reporter sold out their own neighbors. The DU’s reporting now has no choice but to concede what’s plain to every last sentient creature on the planet – and was plain to so many these last few years.)
Obvious point – I live in Whitewater. My concern is here. If something like this happened repeatedly in Whitewater (and I do not believe it would), neither the officials involved nor the reporters deceptively flacking it would deserve their jobs. Sometimes one writes of nearby mistakes as both a cautionary tale and a reminder that our small and beautiful city will always deserve better.
Here’s what’s happened after years of DU puff pieces:
Early November 2018. Jefferson City Council assesses the festival (something like assessing whether a tsunami is a destructive occurrence).
Mid-November 2018. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department opens a criminal investigating into accusations that the promoter wrote several bad checks to private vendors who supplied services for the festival.
Mid-November 2018. City of Jefferson officials admit that they were aware of the festival’s problems (that is, city administrator Tim Freitag admits lying about his previously stated ignorance of any financial problems with the event (heshould have been fired for his dishonesty).
Late November 2018. City of Jefferson decides to extend the time to decide whether to cancel the event (if you need to think it over…)
Early December 2018. Festival promoter Scott Cramer misses a payment deadline (of course he does).
Mid-January 2019. City of Jefferson sends collection notice to festival’s promoter (alternative headline: City of Jefferson Tries to Get Blood from a Turnip.)
Mid-January 2019. City of Jefferson terminates contract with the festival.
For it all, the city’s taxpayers and many vendors have not yet been paid.
Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:49 PM, for 9h 28m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Authority is scheduled to meet at 5:30 PM. (For a category at FREE WHITEWATER with posts describing the years-long failure of the Whitewater CDA’s approach, seeCDA.)
Republican legislators have taken the first step to hiring private attorneys at taxpayer expense to fight a lawsuit challenging lame-duck laws that limit the power of Democratic officials and curtail early voting.
Top lawmakers were asked Wednesday to sign off on hiring lawyers without knowing what it would cost. If approved, two GOP leaders — Assembly Speaker Robin Vos of Rochester and Senate President Roger Roth of Appleton — would be given the power to determine whom to hire and how much to pay them.
The effort comes at a time when Vos has refused to release a legal contract in another case that is expected to cost taxpayers at least $850,000.
Rudolph W. Giuliani claimed Wednesday night that he “never said there was no collusion” between President Trump’s campaign and Russia leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
In a remarkable, at times contentious, interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo, the president’s lawyer was accused of contradicting his own past statements about collusion as well as what Trump and his supporters have repeatedly asserted. On Twitter, Trump has used the phrase “no collusion” dozens of times, and a number of those instances were direct denials that his campaign was involved with the Russian government.
Giuliani’s shocking declarations — several of which Cuomo called out as being false — quickly sent the Internet into a tailspin as many wondered what could have prompted the former New York mayor to suddenly change course.
….
As recently as July, Giuliani was asked by Fox News contributor Guy Benson, “Regardless of whether collusion would be a crime, is it still the position of you and your client that there was no collusion with the Russians whatsoever on behalf of the Trump campaign?”
“Correct,” Giuliani responded at the time.
But on Wednesday, Giuliani appeared to amend his previous comments on the subject.
Prosecutors working for special counsel Robert S. Mueller III have intensively scrutinized Paul Manafort’s activities after President Trump’s election — including after Manafort was criminally charged — and indicated they have extensive details not yet made public about Manafort’s interactions with former Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik and others, a Tuesday court filing showed.
I’m a supporter of neither Scott Walker (an anti-market crony capitalist) nor Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (an anti-market socialist), but a Twitter exchange between them was notable for being so one-sided: Cortez engaged and out-played Walker. In this post, I’ll analyze the exchange. Wholly apart from their politics, it’s obvious that Ocasio-Cortez is a talented communicator, while Walker … isn’t.
Explaining tax rates before Reagan to 5th graders: “Imagine if you did chores for your grandma and she gave you $10. When you got home, your parents took $7 from you.” The students said: “That’s not fair!” Even 5th graders get it.
REALITY CHECK: When the federal government raised taxes on the “wealthy” in the 90s, revenues missed projections & people lost family-supporting jobs. Not very progressive…
A few remarks:
Marginal Rates. Ocasio-Cortez has a plan (to which I am opposed) to tax to a marginal rate of 70%. (A marginal rate of 70% does not mean one’s whole income is taxed at 70% – only the amount over a specified threshold would be taxed at 70%.) Walker either doesn’t understand the concept or deliberately distorts her proposal (or any marginal rate proposal) in his tweet.
Before Reagan. Walker links a better approach to a time before Reagan, presumably for ideological purposes. I doubt Reagan, himself, would describe arguments against high marginal rates that way. The better approach would be to speak historically: “across centuries, the experience of productive societies is that…” Walker’s too narrow.
Abuela. Walker writes of grandma, but Ocasio-Cortez replies with abuela. Very clever. Ocasio-Cortez turns the story from middle America to a constituency that’s working class and significantly Latino (she represents a congressional district covering the Bronx). Walker speaks one language, but Ocasio-Cortez reminds that she speaks (at least) two.
Shifting the Terrain. Ocasio-Cortez replies cleverly to Walker not with a debunking of his error (or lie) about how marginal rates work, but by focusing on her political point that “[i]magine if you did chores for abuela & she gave you $10. When you got home, you got to keep it, because it’s only $10.” She emphasizes lower taxes for low-wage earners, using the small dollar figures in his tweet to emphasize workers’ struggles.
But she’s not done with him – she hits him with a soak-the-rich argument that most people will find (sadly) convincing: “Then we taxed the billionaire in town because he’s making tons of money underpaying the townspeople.” (See what she did there? She implies that some private parties owe some of their money to other townspeople.)
Walker’s Counter-Reply. Walker thinks the problem with high marginal rates is that government lost revenue? No, the responsive counter-reply is that high rates (marginal or flat) drain money from the private economy. Even funnier, Walker later retweeted his own ghostwriter to come to his defense on marginal rates. That’s a failure, too, as Mark Theissen’s tweet doesn’t rehabilitate on the merits Walker’s misunderstanding (or lie) about how marginal rates work.
What a Mess. Walker is a dull writer, seemingly lacks the ability to expect (so pre-empt) counter-arguments, in his counter-reply drops a key argument in favor of a canned one, and unavailingly relies on retweeting his own ghostwriter to try to save himself.
Holy Cow, @ScottWalker was in office for *decades* and yet @AOC still shreds him. Don’t agree with her politics, but agree with him even less. Scott, buddy, time to (1) quit Twitter, (2) find a desperate college that will take you, and (3) learn something.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of twenty-nine. Sunrise is 7:21 AM and sunset 4:47 PM, for 9h 26m 20s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 73.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee is scheduled to meet at 8 AM.
The partial government shutdown is inflicting far greater damage on the United States economy than previously estimated, the White House acknowledged on Tuesday, as President Trump’s economists doubled projections of how much economic growth is being lost each week the standoff with Democrats continues.
The revised estimates from the Council of Economic Advisers show that the shutdown, now in its fourth week, is beginning to have real economic consequences. The analysis, and other projections from outside the White House, suggests that the shutdown has already weighed significantly on growth and could ultimately push the United States economy into a contraction.
….
Mr. Hassett [chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers] said on Tuesday that the administration now calculates that the shutdown reduces quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points for every week that it lasts — the cumulative effect of lost work from contractors and furloughed federal employees who are not getting paid and who are investing and spending less as a result. That means that the economy has already lost nearly half a percentage point of growth from the four-week shutdown. (Last year, economic growth for the first quarter totaled 2.2 percent.)
Wisconsin dairy and other farmers are no longer receiving special payments because of the loss of foreign markets. “States like Wisconsin, which lost at least 638 dairy farms last year, are particularly vulnerable” (New York Times). Wisconsin Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin had added programs to the farm bill to help alleviate the burden of low prices and resultant stress. The shutdown has put everything on hold. Baldwin said: “More uncertainty and more stress. We can’t afford to wait months. We need to get this moving now.”
The shutdown also threatens FDA inspection of Wisconsin food processing companies (vegetables). Similarly, EPA inspections of state Superfund sites, chemical and industrial factories and water treatment facilities, are on hold. And, Wisconsin Native Americans are in trouble. The Oneida Nation said: “the shutdown is putting the health and welfare of our community and our members at risk and impeding our economic development potential”.
There is a disarming innocence to the assumption that whether by impeachment, indictment or a cleansing electoral redo in 2020, President Trump will be exorcised from the White House and that thereby he and his base will largely revert to irrelevance.
Truthfully, there are few among the many millions in opposition and resistance who likely expect Trump to go quietly; there’s nothing quiet about him. Having spent these recent years in opposition, these millions have taken the measure of Trump. There are no uncertainties about what he is: authoritarian, bigot, confidence man, and foreign dictator’s fifth columnist.
A man like that will thrash and howl at the approach of political ruin.
Millions of his fellow Americans will deliver that political ruin to him and his nativist movement.
Loud in ruin will resound less forcefully than loud in power. (Indeed, loud in ruin then will sound like quiet now.)
This brings to mind my favorite political commercial of 2016, entitled simply Quiet, and embedded above.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
