Retired UW-Whitewater professor Brian Kevin Beck contends that Kopper shouldn’t leave [the] Chancellor post. (Candidly, there’s a chance that his defense is so bad that it’s an intentional parody of a defense. It’s hard to believe anyone who served on a worthy faculty could reason so poorly.)
Beck argues that (1) misconduct involving Kopper’s public appointee (and spouse) is not relevant to her work, (2) that she failed in no part of her job, and that – by analogy – (3) Kopper should no more resign from her role than should an avowed and repeated racist.
These contentions are easily addressed —
Relevancy and responsibility:
Multiple allegations of harassment and assault at UW-Whitewater are more than simply a matter of a spouse‘s misconduct toward others (now numbering five complainants). They reveal the failure of the appointing official.
Pete Hill was no ordinary, unconnected spouse: he was 1) appointed publicly 2) by this chancellor, Beverly Kopper 3) to attend public events 4) present often in chancellor’s office and 5) about whom the chancellor kept investigations secret for months despite knowing of allegations against Hill, and (6) in an office where other appointees who are alleged to have known of Hill’s misconduct have been the points of contact for public records releases about that very misconduct.
Beck Tries to Defend Kopper by Comparing Her to Racists: Beck believes that Kopper should linger as avowed racists Earl Butz of the Nixon Administration and baseball player John Rocker should have stayed around. He writes that
Former Secretary of the Department of Agriculture Earl Butz, who served in the Nixon Administration, allegedly told a racist joke. For this, he had to step down. But wasn’t he doing a difficult job well? Was the ensuing disorganization worth it?
Retired baseball star John Rocker allegedly talked trash about NYC subway riders (“a queer with AIDS…welfare mothers…foreigners”). But did this spewing disqualify his undoubted social contribution? Can he play ball and thus entertain thousands?
There’s your vulgar act utilitarianism – balancing unjust injury to some against a supposed gain for others. Beck thinks that these men had a positive social contribution – and to that the answer is – no and never. Reliance on these supposed ‘contributions’ is nothing more than reliance on anti-social bigotry.
Of federal bureaucrats and athletes, one expects both skill and decency, and there is no acceptable balancing of one against the other.
On Social Disruption: Beck contends that replacing Kopper will cause “social upset and waste.”
On the contrary, her failures as a supervisory official have caused social upset; doing the right thing – and only by doing the right thing – will UW-Whitewater find itself on the right path (of social harmony).
Americans have developed – on the basis of individual rights and individual dignity – the most extraordinary society in human history. Those few who stand against this tradition are often the very cause of individual hardship and social disruption. A few scheming leaders who place themselves over the individuals to whom they owe service and humility may be assured that thousands of years of moral and philosophical teaching stand against their selfish way.
Kopper’s obstinacy has exacerbated injuries to individuals and to the professionalism that places individuals first.
Beyond all this, Hyer Hall should consider how weak its position is: a supposed champion who offers a defense that relies on the careers of misfits and bigots to argue for Kopper.
It’s a strange – and ethically perverse – defense not worth having.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 7:20 AM and sunset 5:57 PM, for 10h 37m 33s of daytime. The moon is full today.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board is scheduled to meet at 8 AM.
UN Day marks the anniversary of the entry into force in 1945 of the UN Charter. With the ratification of this founding document by the majority of its signatories, including the five permanent members of the Security Council, the United Nations officially came into being.”
Recommended for reading in full — Why Trump’s supporters will believe any lie he tells, Trump’s closing argument for 2018 elections is dark and divisive, how Russian runs its disinformation against American elections, Georgia Republican bemoans opponent’s supporters exercising their right to vote, and video of the amateur astronomer who found a lost NASA satellite —
Part of Trump’s defense against his various investigatory pursuers is to persuade his followers that all politicians are corrupt liars, which is one reason the “Lock her up” chant has been so devastating. If people believe all politicians are corrupt, going after Trump becomes political persecution, or a “witch hunt.”
Trump’s final aim isn’t simply to escape accountability for his crimes. The final aim is to replace democracy itself with a form of autocracy, under which he and his cronies are forever unaccountable for criminal actions. Normalizing lies and flooding the zone shatters the public sphere upon which democracy depends. Without that shared reality, Mueller poses no threat to Trump. Similarly, without a shared public sphere, Trump doesn’t have to worry about resistance. As Yale professor Jason Stanley says, without truth it is impossible to speak truth to power, so there is only power.
The United States is on a steep learning curve. Because truth, factuality, and our very public sphere are under attack, our democracy (and republic) is in danger. The attack is devastatingly effective, partly because we have never experienced anything like this and thus are largely unprepared. Our task now is to save our public sphere. The way to do this was demonstrated by how the Chileans got out of the far more extreme Pinochet regime and reinstated democracy: All sides opposed to authoritarianism and committed to democracy worked together. That means they started actually talking, and listening, to one another. In the United States, this would mean that all groups that claim to be committed to continuing our democratic republic, from supporters of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Never Trump Republicans, would need to join forces. We will likely soon find out if the nation is up to the task.
With the election just 14 days away, Trump is campaigning hard. He has four rallies scheduled this week alone—his other stops are central Wisconsin, Charlotte, and southern Illinois. His closing argument is a familiar one. Following the blueprint that brought him to victory in 2016, he’s relying on the power of immigration fears, enhanced by blatantly false rhetoric.
For example, Trump claimed he had begun constructing his border wall; he has not. He claimed Democrats are for open borders; for the most part, they are not, nor is Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, against whom Trump was campaigning. He claimed Democrats were to blame for asylum seekers traveling to the United States; the migrants are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries. Trump also claimed—without evidence—that Democrats started the “caravan” of refugees currently wending its way northward through Mexico.
If that were true, and there’s no evidence for it, it would be a colossal blunder. The specter of a column of Hispanics marching northward in the closing weeks of the election has provided Trump just the talking point he wants to whip up his supporters, and on Monday night he showed how he intends to use it.
Trump covered lots of other ground in the speech, of course. There was a strange, and coolly received, riff about Hurricane Harvey. (The president continues to believe, for some reason, that people went out in pleasure craft to enjoy the storm; he also complained that the storm was expensive, and “I’m paying for it.”) There was also an apparently bogus promise to cut taxes 10 percent in the coming week.
But that’s a reminder that almost a year ago, when Trump rammed a tax cut through Congress, it was supposed to be the heart of the GOP’s pitch to voters in 2018. Instead, it’s been a total flop, which is why Trump was out beating the immigration drum once more.
The branch of active measures the Russians call “Project Lakhta” has been running since “mid-2014,” and works through some dozen Russian entities, of which the best-known probably was the “Internet Research Agency.” It, quasi-“news” and other organizations employed hundreds of people, with a global budget of the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars, U.S. officials say.
Who pays for it?
The money comes through a company called Concord, which is controlled by a billionaire ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to the Justice Department’s allegations.
“Our fifth anniversary is coming up next May … and I am hoping we can make it to then,” he said.
….
How does it work?
Worker bees within Project Lakhta disguise themselves as Americans and insert themselves into conversations on social media. They create Facebook and Twitter identities, for example, that make them appear to be Americans. They use technical means to disguise the fact that they are logging in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Court documents unsealed in February described how influence-mongers within the Internet Research Agency set up virtual private networks and used American email accounts, along with some stolen identities of Americans, to plausibly pose as Americans, disguising the fact that they were using workstations in St. Petersburg.
Other people working in the disinformation project bought display ads, in some cases, through “third-party intermediaries,” according to court documents. So disinformation practitioners could get into an American user’s Facebook feed at least those two ways: by pretending to be real users or by having paid for ads.
Facebook and Twitter have vowed to clamp down on fake accounts and they say they’ll mandate more disclosure about who pays for political ads.
Brian Kemp, Georgia Secretary of State and the Republican nominee for Georgia governor, expressed at a ticketed campaign event that his Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams’ voter turnout operation “continues to concern us, especially if everybody uses and exercises their right to vote,” according to audio obtained by Rolling Stone.
An attendee of the “Georgia Professionals for Kemp” event says they recorded 21 minutes and 12 seconds of the evening, held last Friday at the Blind Pig Parlour Bar near Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. As proof of their attendance, the source shared with Rolling Stone a receipt of their donation, which granted access to the gathering.
….
On Tuesday morning, a member of the Kemp campaign confirmed that the event took place, but the campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the specific remarks. On Monday evening, a Facebook page for the event was removed from public view. Candice Broce, the press secretary for the Georgia Secretary of State, told Rolling Stone that she does not respond to campaign-related inquiries because she represents the office.
It is fairly typical for a political candidate expressing confidence in his campaign to lament his opponent’s efforts to increase turnout. But Kemp’s position as Georgia’s Secretary of State clouds his statements. While it is not uncommon for someone in such a position to be on a ballot during an election that he or she oversees — they do have to run for re-election, after all — the state’s top elections official speaking of “concern” about increased early and absentee voting raises further questions about a conflict of interest.
A Chinese-owned pork producer is eligible for federal payments under President Trump’s $12 billion farm bailout, a program established to help U.S. farmers hurt by Trump’s trade war with China.
Smithfield Foods, a Virginia-based pork producer acquired in 2013 by a Chinese conglomerate now named WH Group, can apply for federal money under the bailout program created this summer, said Agriculture Department spokesman Carl E. Purvis.
Across America, newspapers and television stations often have stories on consumer protection, where readers or viewers can have consumer problems addressed. These stories are popular because they reassure readers that the paper or station is on the side of ordinary readers and viewers.
Imagine the opposite posture: where a newspaper lies to ordinary readers to boost an event that’s overwhelmingly disappointing. Dishonesty not merely over an event, mind you, but dishonesty over an event that’s right in front of readers.
That kind of gaslighting is an audacious, extreme dishonesty: lying about the truth that others see immediately in front of them.
If a newspaper would lie about that, then what else would it lie about?
If one has no reason to believe newspaper stories even about a simple festival, then why would one believe, for example, readership numbers or claims the publisher made to its employees about the newspaper’s financial condition?
For every senseless lie easily refuted, how many more self-interested lies might await discovery?
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 7:18 AM and sunset 5:59 PM, for 10h 40m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
The 9th Wisconsin Light Artillery fought in the Battle of Westport, at present-day Kansas City, Missouri. Sometimes called the “Gettysburg of the West,” this battle ended the last significant Confederate operation west of the Mississippi River. It was one of the largest battles fought west of the Mississippi River, with over 30,000 men engaged.
Recommended for reading in full — Trump’s trade war hits Wisconsin’s small businesses, DNA crime-testing backlog grows under Brad Schimel, Trump lies about ‘Middle Easterners’ in migrant caravan, former attorney for Trump admits Robert Mueller is an American hero & his investigation is not a witch hunt, and video on the evolution of Stephen King —
Across America’s heartland, small and midsize manufacturers are reeling from higher costs and lost business attributed to a breakdown in foreign trade.
While some have benefited, others have been hammered by rising tariffs — a tax on imported or exported goods — on products including boats, electronics, sporting goods, bourbon and baby cribs, to name a few.
The “handshake deals” Trump made with Canada and Mexico may have saved thousands of automaker jobs. Yet smaller companies, [president and CEO of Marquis-Larson Boat Group Rob] Parmentier said, haven’t seen much relief.
“The rest of us little guys are just getting crushed,” he said.
The tariffs that China recently placed on American ginseng and bourbon, for example, have clobbered Great Northern Distilling, in Plover, Wisconsin, which makes ginseng-infused bourbon.
It’s cost the company 25 percent of its sales.
“All of the buyers have cold feet now. They’ve said until this gets resolved, they’re not placing an order,” said Brian Cummins, co-founder of the distillery, which has 11 employees.
“Our fifth anniversary is coming up next May … and I am hoping we can make it to then,” he said.
State crime lab workers have sped up drug tests in the past year, but a backlog of months-old DNA evidence has continued to grow to nearly 800 cases.
Attorney General Brad Schimel, who oversees the state crime labs, released new figures Friday about the tests, about four weeks after USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin requested them under open records laws.
Schimel is campaigning for re-election Nov. 6 and has faced criticism from his opponent, Democrat Josh Kaul, over crime lab delays. When the Republican entered office in 2015, DNA evidence rarely took more than two months to test.
Now, about half of all DNA tests take at least two months and hundreds of cases typically take more than three months — potentially slowing police investigations or court cases that rely on DNA.
TAPACHULA, Mexico — As the migrant caravan advanced through Mexico en route to the US on Monday, 15 days before midterm elections, President Donald Trump attempted to stoke new fears, tweeting that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in.”
“I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy [sic],” he added.
In Tapachula, the southern Mexico town where the caravan spent the night before starting the next leg of their journey, more than a dozen people asked by BuzzFeed News hadn’t heard about the accusation. When they were informed, though, they were baffled.
“What?” Melvin Gómez, 32, exclaimed in English. “Most of us come from Honduras. It’s small, we all know each other. We would know.”
The criminals “must be the children, the women. The diapers must be the bombs,” said Irineo Mujica, director of Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the organization that coordinated a smaller caravan in April, during a press conference Monday.
“It’s a shame that such a powerful president utilizes this caravan for political means,” he added.
For four years, either Edgerton or Jefferson, Wisconsin has hosted a costume festival (originally a Harry Potter Festival, this year a Warriors and Wizards festival). Despite three years of disappointment, Jefferson held the festival again this year (after having – astonishingly – signed a five-year deal).
Tens of thousands in public money went into the event, along with additional private contributions from residents sucked into the publicity whirlpool. Visitors to Jefferson were asked to spend money for wristbands and parking (with no refunds, thank you very much.)
What a sad spectacle awaited me as I visited on Saturday: few people in attendance, on mostly empty streets, the small number of vendors and exhibitors looking variously bored, puzzled, or embarrassed, shuttle buses with no one to transport, carnival food that only a risk-taker would eat, cheap signs and promotional material awkwardly affixed to construction equipment, and a ‘festival village’ that was nothing more than a tiny mini-mall (about which one of the full-time merchants in town had only a vague awareness, kindly trying to recall the possible location).
Saddest of all: while eating at a brick and mortar cafe in town, I overheard a family, disenchanted with the flimsy festival, discussing with resignation the two-hour drive back to home.
Now I would not be troubled by the price of a wristband here or there, but one knows and can feel that the cost does matter to other people. The scheming men of Jefferson thought nothing taking more than they should and giving less than visiting families deserved.
Worth considering: (1) how officials calculated last year’s attendance at a ludicrously high 50,000, (2) how an academic at UW-Whitewater possibly calculated last year’s festival value at $33 million (dollars), and (3) why last year and this year publisher Brian Knox, editor Chris Spangler, and reporter Ryan Whisner have continued to boost this event.
(Commenters on the Daily Union Facebook page can see that photos of the Friday evening parade have been framed or cropped in a way that conceals evidence of low attendance. That’s a brazen dishonesty: not merely lying, but lying about events that residents in the area themselves know to be false. )
How to make this much better: Don’t over-publicize, make it a community event rather than an out-of-town attraction, don’t charge for attendance, use little or no public money, let it grow slowly from the ground-up, and sever all ties to the arrant buffoons who’ve been running this.
This Tuesday, October 23rd at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of The Rider @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building:
The Rider (Drama/Western)
Tuesday, October 23 12:30 pm
Rated R (language). 1 hour, 44 min. (2017)
After suffering a near-fatal head injury, a young cowboy/rodeo rider undertakes a search for a new life, identity and what it means to be a man in today’s Western cowboy culture. A beautiful, thoughtful film with profound imagery of the modern West and horses.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty. Sunrise is 7:17 AM and sunset 6:00 PM, for 10h 42m 59s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.
Recommended for reading in full — The gender gap in Wisconsin, AG Schimel’s out-of-state filings, an election that goes far beyond policy issues, attack ads on immigration, and video on the origin of the bigfoot legend —
Barack Obama was a popular guy in Wisconsin, winning here twice with ease.
But he was never, ever as popular with male voters in Wisconsin as Donald Trump is today.
At the same time, even at the lowest points of his presidency, Obama was far more popular with female voters in Wisconsin than Trump has ever been.
Both presidents have faced a gender gap.
But Trump’s gender gap looks nothing like Obama’s, and the differences are illuminating.
With roughly two weeks to go in the campaign, the gender gap over President Trump and the two parties is shaping this election.
Trump has terrible numbers with women (34 percent approval), according to the most recent Wisconsin poll conducted by the Marquette Law School. But he enjoys his highest approval ever with men (59 percent). The size of that gap is unprecedented in Marquette’s polling.
Trump’s gains among men and his unpopularity with women are potent, competing forces in the 2018 mid-terms.
Over the last three years, a group of Wisconsin lawyers has been filing briefs in federal courts across the country, taking the side of private interests in cases involving the environment, employment and gun laws.
These lawyers aren’t from a private law firm or the Chamber of Commerce. They are taxpayer-funded, state employees who work at the Wisconsin Department of Justice under Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel.
Historically, the attorney general has exercised limited authority in Wisconsin. But under Schimel, the Department of Justice has expanded its practice of filing amicus curiae or “friend of the court” briefs in courts across the country, even in cases where Wisconsin residents do not have a direct or remote interest.
In one recent case in New York, Schimel signed onto a brief siding with Exxon Mobil against two other states’ attorneys general. Exxon Mobil had filed a lawsuit to block investigations into whether it had concealed information about climate change from consumers and investors.
Schimel’s brief claimed that the company was being unfairly investigated by New York and Massachusetts for taking a position on a “public policy debate.” The brief also claimed “the debate remains unsettled” about climate change.
(How many of these out-of-state interests were – or became – Schimel donors?)
With about two weeks to go before the midterms that could strip President Trump of the protection a Republican House and Senate afford him, Trump has returned to his favorite hits — mocking women’s looks (“Horseface,” he called the adult-film actress to whom he paid hush money), fanning hysteria about a caravan of immigrants from Central America and cheering on violence against the press. He seems convinced that if he can turn up the venom, resentment and fear high enough among his male, white, rural voters he’ll save himself and the party from disaster. He appears unaware or unconcerned that he is thereby lighting a fire under women voters, college-educated voters, young voters and nonwhite voters who are now running in record numbers to the polls in early voting and into the arms of Democrats.
Americans cannot tell whether Trump is so corrupted and compromised that he’s running Middle East policy to secure his own finances. The reason we do not know for certain is that Republicans refuse to look for answers. Even during Watergate we did not experience such profound and unchecked corruption, such utter disregard for elected officials’ constitutional oaths to serve the people’s interests, not their own.
The corruption eating away at the presidency is not merely financial, of course. Conservative Trump critic and former adviser to President George W. Bush, Peter Wehner, in recent days eloquently addressed the moral dimension of the Saudi situation. “I think the fundamental interpretative fact of the Trump presidency – and I think that this Saudi example is only one manifestation of it – is this is a person [Trump] who is fundamentally amoral and immoral,” he said during an MSNBC appearance. “He is a man without human empathy or without human sympathy, and in many respects a man without conscience; and I think what you’ve seen over the last several days is a person who’s reacting that way.” Wehner continued, “And I think that we’ve seen that lack of human empathy and conscience in almost every arena of the Trump presidency. It explains the cruelty, it explains the policy at the border, separating kids from [parents], it explains the pathological lies, it explains the fact that he’s a man without loyalty — and I think this is just the latest arena in which we’re seeing this ugly drama play itself out.”
In short, the country is convulsed by a president whose personal corruption and moral vacuity offend our deepest-held convictions and our self-image as a citizens of the world’s leading democracy. His devoted cult and his cynical apologists are content to be lied to and receive trinkets (e.g., a tax cut that really doesn’t benefit most of them). The rest of us are not. The energy, the anger and the sense of urgency we see in the run up to the midterm elections reflects voters’ disgust and dismay over a president and a party who sully our democracy.
The outline of a child skips across the sidewalk as the narrator of a political ad targeting Matt Cartwright, a Democratic congressman in Pennsylvania, ominously declares: “A young girl, raped by an illegal given sanctuary in Philadelphia.”
“She was five years old. Her life will never be the same,” the voice concludes.
In another spot, aimed at Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, a Democrat from Arizona, a white woman locks the doors and windows of her home as police lights flicker outside. “They talk about solving illegal immigration, but nothing happens,” she opines. “We who live here are forgotten.”
Other attack ads flash images of tattooed gang members behind prison bars while accusing Democratic incumbents of failing to secure America’s borders.
The stark imagery embodies much of the Republican messaging on immigration ahead of the November midterm elections. Donald Trump, while stumping for Republican candidates across the country, has railed against illegal immigration and sounded the alarm over MS-13, a transnational criminal organization that represents less than 1% of gangs in the United States.
Four cabinet secretaries of the Walker Administration have come forward to criticize the governor, and three of them have co-written an open letter against Walker’s relentless emphasis on political gain over sound policies.
One of the signatories of the letter is Paul Jadin, who was Walker’s first Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation leader. It says all one needs to know that even someone Walker picked to advance a scheme of corporate welfare has come to see the error of that policy. Good for Jadin – truly – for speaking against a state policy of scheming. Most of these officials – state and local – will live all their lives defending error upon error.
I’ve for years criticized the WEDC as state capitalism (where government competes against private businesses or picks winners among businesses) and crony capitalism (where the picking favors politicians’ friends and donors).
Whitewater’s ‘development’ men at the city’s Community Development Authority have been crazy for years for the WEDC. Their failed policies have saddled the city and state with debt, wasted money, screwball startup schemes, and for it all — a stagnant local economy.
(Many of the once-touted startups this city has funded over the years have, by the way, already skipped town or gone belly up.)
This approach has been wrong in substance.
The sustaining fruits of community development come from free markets in capital, labor, and goods – from those free markets a community sees genuine gains in individual and household income as the true measure of community development.
These former cabinet secretaries write, in part (with the full letter immediately following):
At some time in the past eight years each of us was asked by Scott Walker to serve as a Cabinet Secretary in his Administration. Individually, we arrived at our constitutional duties with an intense desire to serve the people of Wisconsin and a fervent belief that Scott Walker had that same desire.
….
We were proud to lead the way on some of his bold initiatives in our state agencies. That pride evaporated at various times for each of us as we found ourselves disagreeing with both policy and practices within the administration that lacked integrity. It became clear that his focus was not on meeting his obligations to the public but to advancing his own political career at a tremendous cost to taxpayers and families.
….
Internally, Governor Walker has consistently eschewed sound management practices in favor of schemes or coverup and has routinely put his future ahead of the state. The result is micromanagement, manipulation and mischief. We have all been witness to more than our share of this. It’s time to build a more open and transparent government to ensure the integrity of our public agencies and institutions.
We have served our state and local governments in many capacities over our careers and have voted for and supported Republicans. Therefore, we come to this next statement only after a great deal of reflection and discernment. On November 6, 2018 please vote with us for Tony Evers.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:02 PM, for 10h 45m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1867, Plains Indian tribes and the United States government sign the first of three treaties now known collectively as the Medicine Lodge Treaty: “The Medicine Lodge Treaty is the overall name for three treaties signed between the Federal government of the United States and southern Plains Indian tribes in October 1867, intended to bring peace to the area by relocating the Native Americans to reservations in Indian Territory and away from European-American settlement. The treaty was negotiated after investigation by the Indian Peace Commission, which in its final report in 1868 concluded that the wars had been preventable. They determined that the United States government and its representatives, including the United States Congress, had contributed to the warfare on the Great Plains by failing to fulfill their legal obligations and to treat the Native Americans with honesty.”
Recommended for reading in full — Another former cabinet secretary criticizes Scott Walker, Rep. Jason Lewis once mocked women who felt traumatized by unwanted touching, Commerce Secretary Ross lied to Congress about a plot to rig the census, Trumpists build their own media ghettos, and video of bears putting household items to the test —
A fourth former secretary for Gov. Scott Walker has come forward to criticize the Republican governor after resigning from his job leading Madison’s economic development agency in order to speak more freely.
Paul Jadin, the first CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., informed the board of the Madison Region Economic Partnership on Wednesday that he was resigning from his $208,000-a-year job. He said the resignation was necessary to avoid entangling the agency with his political activity.
On Thursday, Jadin released to the Wisconsin State Journal an open letter, co-signed by former Corrections Secretary Ed Wall and former Financial Institutions Secretary Peter Bildsten, slamming Walker and endorsing Walker’s Democratic opponent State Superintendent Tony Evers. Both Wall and Bildsten have recorded videos for Evers’ campaign.
Another ex-cabinet official, former Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb, has also come out against Walker in recent months, saying the governor hasn’t been telling the truth about road funding. Gottlieb didn’t sign the letter.
In their letter, the three former secretaries say they joined his administration with a “fervent belief” that Walker shared their desire to improve the state. But over time, they said, “it became clear that his focus was not on meeting his obligations to the public but to advancing his own political career at a tremendous cost to taxpayers and families.”
“Governor Walker has consistently eschewed sound management practices in favor of schemes or coverup and has routinely put his future ahead of the state.” the letter states. “The result is micromanagement, manipulation and mischief. We have all been witness to more than our share of this.”
Republican Rep. Jason Lewis once mocked women who were traumatized by unwanted sexual advances, including those inappropriately kissed or who had their thighs touched, a CNN KFile review of his former radio show reveals.
The Minnesota congressman made his comment during a November 2011 broadcast of “The Jason Lewis Show,” a syndicated radio program that aired from 2009 until 2014 before he was elected to the House in 2016. Lewis was discussing sexual harassment allegations leveled against then-Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain from his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.
Cain had been accused of sexually harassing employees and having a 13-year affair. Two women who were at the National Restaurant Association while Cain was president received settlements after accusing him of sexual harassment. He denied the allegations at the time and was never criminally charged.
“I don’t want to be callous here, but how traumatizing was it?” Lewis said. “How many women at some point in their life have a man come on to them, place their hand on their shoulder or maybe even their thigh, kiss them, and they would rather not have it happen, but is that really something that’s going to be seared in your memory that you’ll need therapy for?”
“You’ll never get over? It was the most traumatizing experience? Come on! She wasn’t raped,” Lewis added, using a voice mocking an emotionally distraught woman.
Lewis and his campaign did not return a request for comment.
(We’re a culture beset by unacculturated men like Lewis, ones who are malevolently perverse. Whether he was born or developed this way, he now finds himself here: a life worse than wasted, a man unfit for the company of others.)
The reason is a single question that the administration has sought to add to the census: whether the respondent is an American citizen. On the surface, this may seem innocuous, but based on several studies, it will almost certainly lead to under-participation by communities of color, especially Latinos. As a result, some states will have less representation in the House of Representatives than they otherwise should and will get less money from the federal government. “Blue states” like California and New York would be hardest hit, as would Texas, which is increasingly Democratic.
In other words, the citizenship question is another tactic of voter suppression.
Secretary Ross approved the question on March 26, but there are now six lawsuits over the change. One of them is headed to the Supreme Court, in what will likely be Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s first politically contentious case.
From the start, the proposal was controversial, and opposed by nearly every expert on the census who voiced an opinion about it. Independent experts all agreed it would deter Latinos from answering the census for fear of exposing themselves or family members to deportation or investigation. But whose idea was it?
In March, Secretary Ross testified under oath that the Department of Justice asked him to make the change in a December 2017 letter, so that they could better enforce the Voting Rights Act.
But emails uncovered in one of the lawsuits revealed that that was a lie. In fact, Ross had requested that DOJ send the letter to justify the policy change that he’d already decided to make. So if not the Justice Department, then who?
Amid a chorus of conservative complaints that Facebook and YouTube have become hostile to right-leaning views — and as those social media giants take steps to limit what they see as abusive or misleading viral content — a few Republican consultants have begun building a parallel digital universe where their political clients set the rules.
One start-up has built an app for the lobbying arm of the National Rifle Association that has been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Supporters of President Trump can download an app from Great America, a big-spending pro-Trump political action committee, or America First, Mr. Trump’s official 2016 campaign app, which has some features that remain active. Many backers of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas use Cruz Crew, an app built for his re-election campaign.
The apps deliver curated partisan news feeds on what are effectively private social media platforms, free from the strictures and content guidelines imposed by Silicon Valley giants. Some allow supporters to comment on posts or contribute their own, with less risk that their posts will be flagged as offensive or abusive.
(These Trumpists are – and should be – free to build their own media ghettos, where they will enjoy the less-competitive fellowship of their own ilk. They can’t take the heart, so they abandon the kitchen.)
Elena Khusyaynova, 44, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors said she managed the finances of “Project Lakhta,” a foreign influence operation they said was designed “to sow discord in the U.S. political system” by pushing arguments and misinformation online about a host of divisive political issues, including immigration, the Confederate flag, gun control and National Football League protests during the national anthem.
Prosecutors said the sophisticated campaign Khusyaynova was a part of “did not exclusively adopt one ideological viewpoint” but instead tried to push incendiary positions on various political controversies on social media platforms. The Russians involved, prosecutors said, created fake personas and spread their divisive messages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The group attempted to sow conflict along racial lines and sometimes advocated positions that directly opposed each other, apparently agnostic to whom they supported as long as it turned Americans against one another, prosecutors said.
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The messages spread widely on the platforms; prosecutors say one Facebook page reached over 1.3 million people, while several of the Twitter accounts had tens of thousands of followers.
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Court papers say Khusyaynova’s operation was funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin who is known as “Putin’s chef,” and two companies he controls: Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering. A federal judge in Washington this week expressed reservations about the special-counsel office’s prosecution of one of Prigozhin’s companies and directed Mueller’s prosecutors to provide a more detailed response to the company’s bid to dismiss the central charge.
A criminal complaint filed against Khusyaynova charges that she managed the finances of Project Lakhta, including detailed expenses for activities in the United States.
Between 2016 and 2018, Project Lakhta’s proposed operating budget exceeded $35 million, although only a portion of that money targeted the United States, prosecutors said.
Saturday in Whitewater will see occasional rain with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 7:15 AM and sunset 6:03 PM, for 10h 48m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 83.0% of its visible disk illuminated.
Recommended for reading in full — Scott Walker fails sportsmen, Mueller probes connections to WikiLeaks, Putin aims to rule for life, politicians’ racial attacks, and video on the special genius of dogs —
Here’s why: Walker doesn’t know a .30-06 from a .30-30 cartridge, a Rage from a Muzzy broadhead, or a spinning reel from a baitcaster. Even so, he enthusiastically politicizes hunting and fishing to seek support from hunters, anglers, trappers and other conservationists.
In return, he hip-checks them from his treestand. Consider these 21 examples, which weren’t outlined in Scott’s Plan:
In 2011, Gov. Walker signed Act 21, which revamped administrative rule-making for state agencies. The act curtailed the Wisconsin Conservation Congress’ citizen-based advisory role to the seven-citizen Natural Resources Board, which sets DNR policy. Those rule-making powers now reside with the governor.
In 2011, Walker signed legislation ending “earn-a-buck” regulations, which required hunters to shoot a doe or fawn before shooting a buck. The only alternative for reducing deer herds is antlerless-only hunts, which no county has imposed.
After contracting Texas biologist James Kroll as the state’s “deer czar” in 2012, Walker entrusted DNR secretary Cathy Stepp to work with 50 citizen-volunteers in four committees to craft “action plans” for Kroll’s 80-plus recommendations. Walker then sat silent in 2013 when Stepp and DNR Board member Greg Kazmierski largely ignored the citizens’ efforts, and wrote their own plan. Their hodgepodge of regulations provides no regional coordination between the state’s 72 counties, no “tools” for reducing herds when needed, and no systematic testing program for monitoring chronic wasting disease.
Walker never urges hunters to get their deer tested for CWD, and his administration has slashed CWD funding. The DNR’s CWD budget averaged $1.14 million annually from 2012 through 2018, basically half of its $2.21 million average from 2008 through 2011, and a quarter of its $4.8 million average from 2004 through 2007. Meanwhile, CWD is worsening in southern Wisconsin’s endemic region. In 2010, the DNR found 219 CWD cases in 7,097 deer tested in the agency’s Southern farmlands region, a 3 percent infection rate. In 2017, the DNR found 558 CWD cases in 5,545 tests in that region, a 10.6 percent rate.
Walker sat quiet in 2011-12 as Stepp and Kazmierski eliminated October antlerless-only firearms hunts to control deer herds. They also ended buck hunting during southern Wisconsin’s late-December gun season, even though male deer are more likely to carry CWD.
During his first term, Walker let Stepp kill regular participation by UW-Madison researchers, retired DNR biologists and active DNR biologists in citizen advisory committees on fish and wildlife management.
In 2015, Walker helped eliminate the DNR’s 60-person science services bureau, eventually paring its staff to 15 researchers, and reassigning them to fisheries, wildlife and wastewater management programs.
Walker vetoed language in the state’s 2015-17 budget to allow people to walk “directly across the tracks of any railroad.” The Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee had inserted that phrase into the budget so people could legally cross railroad tracks to reach public hunting and fishing areas.
In 2015, Walker ended taxpayer support for state parks. Subsequent cuts eliminated the parks’ ranger force. Attempts to fill that void with the DNR’s hunter-funded conservation wardens failed this year.
In 2015, Walker eroded the state’s historic public-trust doctrine governing waterways by signing legislation to open more shoreline development.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation is scrutinizing how a collection of activists and pundits intersected with WikiLeaks, the website that U.S. officials say was the primary conduit for publishing materials stolen by Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Mueller’s team has recently questioned witnesses about the activities of longtime Trump confidante Roger Stone, including his contacts with WikiLeaks, and has obtained telephone records, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Investigators also have evidence that the late GOP activist Peter W. Smithmay have had advance knowledge of details about the release of emails from a top Hillary Clinton campaign official by WikiLeaks, one person familiar with the matter said. They have questioned Mr. Smith’s associates, the person said.
Right-wing pundit Jerome Corsi was also questioned by investigators about his interactions with Mr. Stone and WikiLeaks before a grand jury in September, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Corsi declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Stone said he hasn’t been contacted by the special counsel. Mr. Smith died last year.
Mr. Mueller’s office declined to comment.
Throughout 2016, Messrs. Stone, Smith and Corsi, who long worked on the margins of Republican politics, tried to dig up incriminating information about Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president, according to emails and some public comments. A lawyer for President Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
(These ‘activists’ look more like opportunistic fifth-columnists.)
Vladimir Putin will fight to preserve his authoritarian grip on Russia for decades, according to a former Kremlin insider who has a unique insight into some of the president’s most closely-held beliefs.
Vitaly Mansky was granted unparalleled access to the Kremlin and Putin’s original presidential campaign in order to make films for state TV, which were effectively pro-Putin propaganda. He has now turned against the Russian president, making an extraordinary documentary—using footage shot from the inside—that explores Putin’s uncompromising thirst for power and his quest to restore what he sees as Soviet-era glory to the country.
Mansky told The Daily Beast that Putin’s dictatorial instincts and record in the Kremlin meant he now “has no choice” but to cling to power forever.
Not only was the filmmaker allowed to accompany Putin during the first years of his presidency, but he was given a license to question him on camera in a way that has not been seen in almost two decades since.
That footage remained under lock and key until now.
In Putin’s Witnesses, which is up for the Grierson Award for best documentary at the London Film Festival this week, we see the president’s unguarded explanation of how he will enforce full control over Russia and restore the Soviet Union’s prioritization of state over the individual. In one candid conversation in the back of his official car, he explores the limits of democratic authority.
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“Putin has studied the lives and history of his predecessors very well,” said Mansky, suggesting he will try to stay in power for the next 20 or 30 years. “He has no choice now.”
“Not only would he not like to follow in the footsteps of Ceau?escu and Milosevic, he wouldn’t even want to follow the fate of Pinochet who could have faced the courts in his own country.”
(The stronger the dictatorial grip, the more dangerous for the dictator in uncurling his fingers .)
People of color are running for state and national office, and the country has responded with the most American of traditions: by attacking them in very racist ways.
Some attacks are coded. Some are frankly stated. To keep track, we’ve begun a running list, limited to attacks made on candidates of color by their opponents, by opposing political organizations or by opposing campaign surrogates. We’ll make exceptions, however, where a third-party act against a candidate is so racist that it can’t be ignored. For each candidate we’ve graded the attacks on their subtlety using a scale of one to five white hands, in honor of the infamous Jesse Helms ad— five being the most explicit.
If you’re aware of anything not listed here, send an email tojulia.craven@huffpost.comor scoops@huffpost.com.
Jennifer Rubin writes of three ideas to bolster democracy (enhanced voting rights, independent and non-partisan justice, and robust speech rights):
First, Republicans, in an effort to hang on to their declining electoral advantage based on white voters, have tried every trick in the book to limit voting by those they suspect will favor Democrats. Hence, we have witnessed the phony Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity (which utterly failed to provide any evidence of widespread voter fraud), widespread poll closings, voter poll purges and, in Georgia, efforts to slow-walk voting applications. Republicans act as though they cannot win races in which an electorate that’s representative of the country gets to vote. Put differently, they can win only where democracy is thwarted.
That must end. That must end. The good news is that with control of governorships and state legislatures, a bevy of pro-democracy changes can be implemented, including voting by mail, automatic voter registration, state legislation to enhance transparency in campaign financing, elimination of political gerrymandering in favor of neutral commissions, expansion of polling places and early voting, and weekend voting days (or making Election Day a state holiday).
Second, we must protect the Justice Department from politicization and partisan micromanagement.
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Third, the administration is attempting to enact an unprecedented set of limitations on public gatherings and demonstrations in Washington. The nonpartisan Niskanen Center this week submitted a comment letter signed onto by 35 individuals and eight groups from a wide ideological spectrum contesting the proposed rules put out by the National Park Service. In a news release, the Niskanen Center observed that “the proposed changes read like they were drafted by minions of Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, or Vladimir Putin.” The letter blasts proposals to charge for demonstrations, bar demonstrations near the White House and vastly expand permitting requirements, arguing that “we cannot even take issue with the NPS’ reasoning behind this proposal … because there is not a single sentence in the entire regulatory preamble mentioning or discussing this in any way. This is highly unlikely to be mere oversight; rather, it is a most disturbing example of the NPS’ desire to curtail citizens’ First Amendment rights even without any notice or discussion.”
A quick word about Jennifer Rubin: some pro-Trump writers truly dislike her, and have even asked the Washington Post to stop describing Rubin as of the ‘center-right.’
Those of us who are Never Trump (that is, conservatives and libertarians who are part of a larger opposition to Trump) most certainly don’t care what these Trumpists think someone should be called. We’ll not change how we describe ourselves, and if anything we will as happy warriors hold to our own descriptions all the more firmly.
