In 2014, Gov. Walker ran for re-election, and two years later Trump ran for president. The two-party results for the GOP candidates in the City of Whitewater were much different.
In 2014, Gov. Walker narrowly lost the City of Whitewater to Mary Burke:
Walker 2,616 49.8%
Burke 2,634 50.2%
In 2016, Trump decisively lost the City of Whitewater to Hillary Clinton:
Trump 2,676 42.1%
Clinton 3,674 57.9%
There’s no realistic scenario under which Trump will ever carry the City of Whitewater. Walker, however, came close in ’14. Yet, even with the gubernatorial race, Trump is likely to overshadow races in Wisconsin and across America.
Thursday in Whitewater be cloudy with a high of twenty, with snow beginning this evening. Sunrise is 6:59 AM and sunset 5:18 PM, for 10h 18m 15s of daytime. The moon a waning crescent with 47.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1922, President Harding has a radio installed in the White House: “At the time, radio was the hottest technology there was, and the White House was on the cutting edge. Almost two years later, Calvin Coolidge, who followed Harding, was the first president to broadcast from the White House. Coolidge’s address for Washington’s Birthday was heard on 42 stations from coast to coast. Before that historic broadcast, radio had played a big role in Coolidge’s victory in the 1924 presidential election. The night before the election, Coolidge made history when the largest radio audience ever tuned in to the broadcast of his final campaign speech. Coolidge won the election easily, and in March, Americans listened for the first time to their president take the oath of office on the radio.”
Senior aides to President Donald Trump knew for months about allegations of domestic abuse levied against top White House staffer Rob Porter by his ex-wives, even as Porter’s stock in the West Wing continued to rise, multiple sources told CNN on Wednesday.
Porter denied the allegations but resigned on Wednesday.
A scramble ensued inside the West Wing to defend him when the claims became public this week, the sources said. That effort continues even after his resignation.
By Wednesday morning, however, events had begun overtaking spin. The White House convened several small meetings to determine what was to be done about “Porter-gate,” as one senior White House official said. Among the options weighed included having Porter leave the White House, allowing him to weather the fallout, or encouraging him to take “some time off,” the official said.
They settled on a departure, though two officials confirmed to The Daily Beast that Kelly, for his part, had implored Porter not to quit.
The recently resigned Trump aide said there would be a “smooth transition” around Porter’s exit. But virtually nothing about the episode can be categorized as “smooth.”
The saga began with a Daily Mail piece published on Tuesday evening that reported on allegations of routine domestic abuse by Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness. “He was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive and that is why I left,” she told the Mail, which previously reported on Porter’s romantic relationship with White House communications director Hope Hicks. “He was angry because we weren’t having sex when he wanted to have sex and he kicked me,” Holderness recalled. “It seems such a juvenile thing at the time, but I remember thinking about words my mother had told me when it happened.”
This is not the only turn in the spotlight this week for Kelly, a generally press-shy individual. The chief of staff, rejecting calls for the White House to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, said that “Dreamers” should have registered during the Obama administration, and those who did not were “too lazy to get off their asses.” Democrats lashed out at Kelly about the comments behind closed doors, but rather than try to set the incident aside, Kelly repeated what he’d said to reporters. As even rigorously nonpartisan reporters noted, Kelly was invoking shopworn stereotypes about immigrants and people of color.
Only a few weeks ago, Kelly reportedly torpedoed a deal between Trump and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to extend DACA. After a productive meeting between Schumer and the president, Kelly called Schumer and informed him that the deal was insufficiently tough on immigration, eventually leading to a brief government shutdown.
It seems as if scales are falling from some eyes in Washington, allowing them to see Kelly more clearly—just the same arc of meteoric rise followed by disillusionment that Porter followed. When Kelly was moved to the White House in July, at the time of the political murder-suicide of Reince Priebus and Anthony Scaramucci, he was hailed as the “adult in the room.” With his military background and baseline competence, this was true—but, as it turned out, this was more of a commentary on what came before. Adoring press coverage portrayed Kelly as a patriot who was taking on an impossible job with an impossible president out of love of country and out of desire to protect the nation from its own president.
It quickly became clear, however, as I wrote in October, that Kelly is a true Trumpist. Early on, he was caught on film appearing to grimace as Trump offered aid and comfort to white supremacists; it didn’t take too long for it to become clear that this was just Kelly’s default facial expression, and he had no compunctions about the president’s actual comments.
What’s more puzzling is that leaders of the religious right feel it’s somehow necessary to shoehorn the president’s character into some kind of born-again template, a mold he has never fit and never will.
By the accounts of more than a dozen women, Trump is a serial sexual predator. On the infamous Access Hollywood tape, he boasted of grabbing women’s genitals. And in the 2006 encounter with Stormy Daniels, he allegedly betrayed his marriage vows to Melania shortly after the birth of his youngest son.
To this day, he bears false witness an average of several times a day and uses vulgarities to denigrate entire nations of people.
Yet Graham and Falwell say they believe Trump has morally changed over the years. “He’s not the same person now that he was back then,” Falwell told CNN. “That’s why evangelicals are so quick to forgive Donald Trump when he asked for forgiveness for things that happened 10, 15 years ago.”
On more than one occasion, the president has all but rejected a fundamental religious tenet: seeking Christ’s forgiveness. “I am not sure I (ever) have,” he said in 2015.
Evangelical leaders should dispense with the do-overs and simply acknowledge that Trump is what he is: a means to a political end.
A dog stuck in the middle of a frozen creek was rescued after a firefighter who just happened to be passing by saw her on the ice all by her lonesome. pic.twitter.com/4oboNoEx4Y
➤ Foxconned (“How much is Wisconsin paying for a Taiwanese manufacturer’s jobs?”):
Already, it is hazy just how much of a boost to the local economy Foxconn is expected to make. The company said it planned to hire 3,000 workers over four years, whereas the state said the new facility would create 13,000 jobs with an average salary of nearly $54,000, along with 10,000 temporary construction gigs and an eventual 22,000 “indirect and induced jobs,” from firms supplying goods and services to Foxconn and its workers. (To give a sense of scale, Wisconsin currently has around 472,000 manufacturing workers.)
By either metric, Wisconsin—which reportedly beat out six states in a hush-hush bidding war to attract the plant—is spending a lot to win Foxconn’s investment. The Washington Postestimates that the breaks could cost the state as much as $230,700 per job created. Tim Culpan at Bloomberg Businessweek puts it at $1 million per job, enough to buy every man, woman, and child in Wisconsin a new iPhone.
…
More than that, tax incentives tend to sap state coffers without necessarily generating good jobs or creating positive spillovers in the regional economy—both things that would boost a state’s tax revenues and thus help justify the investment. “Incentives are still far too broadly provided to many firms that do not pay high wages, do not provide many jobs, and are unlikely to have research spin-offs,” argues Timothy J. Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, a labor-market research organization, in a major analysis of such state and local tax breaks. “Too many incentives excessively sacrifice the long-term tax base of state and local economies. Too many incentives are refundable and without real budget limits. States devote relatively few resources to incentives that are services, such as customized job training.”
Plus, states rarely seem to consider whether the money they lavish on corporations might be better spent elsewhere—on public goods like bridges, say, or educational initiatives for their workforces. “If offering more tax incentives requires spending less on public education, congestion-relieving infrastructure projects, workforce development, police and fire protection, or high technology initiatives at public universities, the overall impact on a state’s economy could actually be negative,” argues the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonprofit research group.
MADISON – To land the massive Foxconn factory, Gov. Scott Walker has committed the state to paying more than eight times as much per job as Wisconsin will provide under similar job creation deals struck last year, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis has found.
At more than $200,000 in state taxpayer money per job, the incentive package for the Taiwanese company is easily the state’s most expensive deal of 2017, totaling more than three times as much per job as the next most costly deal.
I’m wondering if someone who lives in Marinette, Rhinelander, Superior, Chippewa Falls or even here on the island of Madison, thinks they’ll be getting their bang for the buck while their roads, schools, environment and whatever else suffers because there’s $4.5 billion floating away to one small area of the state.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin taxpayers will be paying the tab for the extensive incentives given to Foxconn so the company would build here. State and local incentives are well over $3 billion, a package officials acknowledge – even under the best circumstances – taxpayers won’t break even on for at least 25 years.
Is it all worth it? That particular riverboat gamble mostly is unknowable at this point.
This much, though, is clear: Every job filled by an Illinoisan instead of a Badger will be bad news for those picking up the tab for billions in tax incentives.
Locals were giddy. Foxconn had a small office here, but this seemed like the start of an entire new industry. Pennsylvania’s governor boasted about the deal. The Brookings Institution think tank hailed Foxconn’s decision as a sign of U.S. manufacturing’s strength.
But the factory was never built. The jobs never came. “It just seemed to fade to black” after the announcement, recalled a local official. It was the start of a mystery, created by a chief executive known to promise projects all over the world that never quite pan out. Yet few people seem to notice. Foxconn and others continue to get credit for deals that never take place. In December, Pennsylvania’s economic development staff was still touting the $30 million factory that never was.
Foxconn Technology Group plans to select Providence, Rhode Island-based Gilbane Building Co. as the general contractor for its $10 billion Mount Pleasant manufacturing campus, according to numerous real estate and construction industry sources.The site Foxconn Technology Group has selected for its 20 million-square-foot campus.
“Everyone kind of knows,” said a construction industry source who did not want to be identified.
Gilbane, which has an office in Milwaukee, will serve as the general contractor, working with another international company based in Germany that focuses on clean air, that source said.
The suit charges that the property owners are getting far less than other property owners who have already sold their land to the town for the factory. The attorney filing the suit, Erik Olsen, said he’s not sure if he and his clients will be able to stop the factory from being built. But he argues that the government should have to follow the laws about property purchases, which dictate that all the owners must be treated equally when it comes to pricing.
“My clients believe, and I believe too, that they should be treated justly,” he said. “Is it really OK to pay some people multiples of their land value, and other people not? The government has broad powers but not totally arbitrary powers.”
The Klingenmeyer family is one of the families The Journal Times has featured to give a human face to families directly affected by the new development. While the family has not taken legal action challenging the project, they are anxiously awaiting news about the fate of their home and have not yet gotten a quote for how much money they may get for their property.
…
Like a lot of families, the Klingenmeyers learned their property would be part of the Foxconn Technology Group project on Oct. 4 when the areas were announced.
Foxconn plans to build a massive manufacturing plant in the Village of Mount Pleasant and up until the October announcement, the Klingenmeyers thought their house would be spared. Rumors were going around that the company was going to be buy land from Interstate 94 up to County Highway H.
But at the announcement, that’s when they learned their land was in Area III.
The Department of Natural Resources announced Wednesday that it would hold a public hearing March 7 on Racine’s request to tap an additional 7 million gallons of water a day from Lake Michigan, largely to meet the needs of Foxconn Technology Group’s planned manufacturing complex.
I am an average assembly-line female worker at Foxconn, and the scene above is not only common at my job, but also common for many of my female colleagues around me.
Loudly telling dirty jokes, ridiculing female colleagues about their looks and figures, using the excuse of “giving direction” to make unnecessary body contact…in factory workshops, this kind of “sexual harassment culture” is prevalent (sexual harassment of unmarried female workers is particularly serious), with many people having grown accustomed to it. If a sexually harassed woman worker protests, she is likely to be accused of being “too sensitive” and “unable to take a joke.”
Wednesday in Whitewater be mostly cloudy with a high of sixteen. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 5:16 PM, for 10h 15m 39s of daytime. The moon is in its third quarter. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1497, the most famous bonfire of the vanities takes place in Florence: a burning of objects condemned by authorities as occasions of sin. The phrase usually refers to the bonfire of 7 February 1497, when supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola collected and publicly burned thousands of objects such as cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, Italy, on the Mardi Gras festival. Such bonfires were not invented by Savonarola, but had been a common accompaniment to the outdoor sermons of San Bernardino di Siena in the first half of the century.”
Backers of President Donald Trump are sharing more “junk” political news – ideologically extreme, conspiratorial, sensationalist and phony information – over Twitter and Facebook than all other groups combined, significantly magnifying the polarization in the American electorate, according to an analysis by British researchers.
Rather than obtaining news over social media from mainstream outlets, these Americans shared posts from 92 Twitter accounts of fringe groups such as “100PercentFEDUp,” “Beforeitsnews,” “TheAngryAmericans” and “WeArethenewmedia” during the three months before Trump’s first State of the Union address, the Oxford University researchers reported.
The study, which culled data from hundreds of thousands of social media accounts, found similar patterns among Facebook users.
Although the “junk” news sites considered in the analysis included those on both the left and right, lead researcher Philip Howard said the findings suggest “that most of the junk news that people share over social media ends up with Trump’s fans, the far right. They’re playing with different facts, and they think they have the inside scoop on conspiracies.”
In 1988, the last time South Korea hosted the Olympics, North and South Korea were more alike than different, separated by an arbitrary line yet joined by history, language and the bonds of family.
Both Koreas had come a long way, emerging from colonial rule and rebuilding their economies after a devastating civil war.
But the Olympics in Seoul in 1988 ended up being a turning point. Over the past 30 years, the two countries have diverged sharply — economically, politically and culturally.
South Korea rapidly industrialized, growing at one of the fastest rates in the world. The North stagnated.
The South shed its military dictatorship and opened up to the world. The North remained isolated and authoritarian, and endured a devastating famine that killed an estimated 2 million people, according to some estimates.
At issue is the 2010 sale of a uranium company with extensive US holdings to a Russian firm. Republicans, including President Donald Trump, have charged that as secretary of State, Clinton authorized the deal in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. The allegations are misleading for a number of reasons, but Republicans have nonetheless sought to use them as a counterweight to the Trump-Russia probe.
Democrats now say that senior Justice Department officials told House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staffers in a December 15 briefing that the whistleblower had offered no evidence about Clinton. The Justice Department officials also said during the briefing that they considered the whistleblower, who has been identified in media reports as William Campbell, too unreliable to use as a witness due to inconsistencies in his story, according to a letter sent Tuesday by Reps. Elijah Cummings (Md.) and Adam Schiff (Calif.)—the top Democrats on the House oversight committee and the House intelligence committee—to the Republican chairmen of those panels.
After hyping the Uranium One case throughout much of 2016 and 2017, Republicans have grown relatively quiet about the issue in recent weeks. Instead, they’ve sought to focus attention on the controversial memo written by staffers of House intelligence committee chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), attacking the process through which FBI agents sought a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign aide suspected of acting as a Russian agent. Tuesday’s letter may help explain why Republicans have largely stopped talking about the Uranium One whistleblower after raising the matter repeatedly last fall.
“The Department of Justice has now provided us with a detailed briefing that directly contradicts these Republican allegations,” Cummings and Schiff wrote in their letter.
PRESIDENT TRUMP CLAIMED in a tweet over the weekend that the controversial Nunes memo “totally vindicates” him, clearing him of the cloud of the Russia investigation that has hung over his administration for a year now.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, if anything, the Mueller investigation appears to have been picking up steam in the past three weeks—and homing in on a series of targets.
…
The first thing we know is that we know it is large.
We speak about the “Mueller probe” as a single entity, but it’s important to understand that there are no fewer than five (known) separate investigations under the broad umbrella of the special counsel’s office—some threads of these investigations may overlap or intersect, some may be completely free-standing, and some potential targets may be part of multiple threads. But it’s important to understand the different “buckets” of Mueller’s probe.
As special counsel, Mueller has broad authority to investigate “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump,” as well as “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation,” a catch-all phrase that allows him to pursue other criminality he may stumble across in the course of the investigation. As the acting attorney general overseeing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein has the ability to grant Mueller the ability to expand his investigation as necessary and has been briefed regularly on how the work is unfolding. Yet even without being privy to those conversations, we have a good sense of the purview of his investigation.
For many years, Republicans have railed against Madison, and against Dane County, as bastions of dysfunctional liberalism. Indeed, this impulse has been strong even after the GOP gained control of both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office.
Funny, though, that it’s Dane County – not the WOW counties of Waukesha, Ozaukee, or Washington – that’s the engine of state growth:
Fueled by a tech boomlet, Dane is adding people at a faster rate than any county its size between Minnesota and Massachusetts. In 2016, it accounted for almost 80% of Wisconsin’s net population growth and is now home to more than 530,000 people.
“It is just stunning what has happened,” said economic consultant and former university administrator David J. Ward, describing a physical transformation that includes an apartment-building spree in downtown Madison as well as Epic Systems’ giant tech campus in suburban Verona, a new-economy wonderland where more than 9,000 employees (many in their 20s) work in a chain of whimsical buildings planted in old farm fields.
…
“We’re obviously doing something right and a lot better than the way (Walker) is doing it for the rest of the state. And it’s not because we’re the home of the state university and it’s not because of state government, because he has spent the better part of the last seven years strangling them,” said [Madison Mayor Paul] Soglin in an interview, arguing that his city represents a growth model of investing in education and quality of life and “creating a great place where people want to be.” (He contrasted it to the use of massive subsidies to bring FoxConn to Wisconsin).
Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, who also bristled at Walker’s tweet, pointed to the state’s new ad campaign to draw millennials from Chicago, noting the Madison area is the one place in Wisconsin attracting that age group in significant numbers. (Many of Epic’s employees settle in downtown Madison and take a dedicated bus every day to the Verona campus.)
“Guess where millennials want to live? In communities that are tolerant, that invest in quality of life, that care about their environment, that provide recreational opportunities for them, a thriving downtown — everything Dane County has. We’ve worked on that,” Parisi said.
A small-town like Whitewater’s heard so much about development from the center-right, as though they owned the concept (and indeed, the town), but they’ve left Whitewater only stagnant.
This libertarian blogger is a member of no political party.
Although not a member of a party, it should be clear to anyone visiting this website that I’m opposed to Trumpism. I have been, am, and always will be #NeverTrump.
There’s no chance that I’d support many of the solutions Dane County’s leaders would advocate nationally.
Those leaders, are, however, right that prospects want to live “in communities that are tolerant, that invest in quality of life, that care about their environment.”
Jennifer Rubin is right that it’s Trump[ism] vs. an America that works (“Trump’s message is aimed at Americans who are resentful, feel left behind and are both physically and culturally marginalized. The flip side of this, however, is that Trump either ignores or vilifies urban America, refusing to acknowledge that diversity is part of the formula for their success”).
Dane County’s not a libertarian place, to be sure, but it is a productive place. Walworth County’s political leaders can’t say the same. Whitewater’s planners – whether of left or right, whether regulating or subsidizing against the market – can’t say the same.
Places like Whitewater suffer an unfortunate brain drain – we have talented residents, but too many leave after only a few years. It doesn’t have to be this way.
A college town with residents who want to pretend it’s not a college town, or work against that fact, has a bleak future.
A college town with a mediocre university leadership mostly interested in satisfying small town grandees, or touting even its own failed leaders, also faces a bleak future.
Stagnation benefits a few who would prefer the whole city were as though a senior care center, would prefer their neighborhoods were sheltered from the free choice of buyers and sellers, who would prefer to use government to boost conditions for those in their own, small & aged demographic. But for most in the city, stagnation is, well, stagnant.
Whitewater has great opportunities ahead, but will realize them only when the many are free to live and work in creative, unexpected, productive ways.
Tuesday in Whitewater be mostly sunny with a high of fourteen. Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 5:15 PM, for 10h 13m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6:10 PM, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1778, the United States of America and France enter into the Treaty of Alliance: “a defensive alliance between France and the United States of America, formed in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, which promised mutual military support in case fighting should break out between French and British forces, as the result signing the previously concluded Treaty of Amity and Commerce.[1] The alliance was planned to endure indefinitely into the future. Delegates of King Louis XVI of France and the Second Continental Congress, who represented the United States at this time, signed the two treaties along with a separate and secret clause dealing with future Spanish involvement, at the hôtel de Coislin (4, place de la Concorde) in Paris on February 6, 1778.[2]”
In a May 10 press conference… then-Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the president had “lost confidence in Director Comey” and that “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.” She stated that the president had “had countless conversations with members from within the FBI” in the course of making his decision to fire Comey. The following day, Sanders stated that she personally had “heard from countless members of the FBI that are grateful and thankful for the president’s decision” and that the president believed “Director Comey was not up to the task…that he wasn’t the right person in the job. [Trump] wanted somebody that could bring credibility back to the FBI.”
Trump himself blasted Comey too, stating in an interview that the former director was “a showboat. He’s a grandstander” and that the FBI “has been in turmoil. You know that, I know that, everybody knows that. You take a look at the FBI a year ago, it was in virtual turmoil—less than a year ago. It hasn’t recovered from that.” A few days later, the New York Times reported that Trump had told Russian officials visiting him in the Oval Office the day after Comey’s firing that Comey was a “nut job.”
Over the next few days, a wealth of evidence emerged to suggest that Trump and Sanders were playing fast and loose with the truth. But we now have the documents to prove that decisively. Their disclosure was not a leak but an authorized action by the FBI, which released to us under the Freedom of Information Act more than 100 pages of leadership communications to staff dealing with the firing. This material tells a dramatic story about the FBI’s reaction to the Comey firing—but it is neither a story of gratitude to the president nor a story of an organization in turmoil relieved by a much-needed leadership transition.
Within a few days of the firing, both current and former FBI officials began pushing back against the White House’s claims. Then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Comey “enjoyed broad support within the FBI” and that “the vast majority of employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”
(Emphasis added. Over 100 pages of documents show that Trump and Sanders simply lied when they said there was meaningful FBI turmoil or opposition to Comey.)
NEW YORK — President Donald Trump is learning a basic and painful lesson of Wall Street: Stocks also go down.
A global market sell-off that began Friday continued into Monday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping more than 1,500 in afternoon trading.
The big slide comes alongside growing concern that an economy juiced by a massive corporate tax cut, and already at full employment, could overheat and require forceful action from a new and untested Federal Reserve chairman — installed by Trump — to cool things down.
On top of concerns about rising inflation, the tax cuts are already increasing the federal government’s need to borrow and accelerating the date by which Congress must raise the federal debt limit. And as of Monday, there was still no plan in Washington to raise the limit and avoid a catastrophic default.
The result is that a president who tossed aside traditional presidential caution in cheerleading the stock market now stands poised to take the blame for any correction.
(Live by boosterism, perish by boosterism. No serious understanding of markets would have so personalized their movement as Trump did. )
Releasing the memo — while suppressing a dissenting assessment from other members of the House Intelligence Committee — was clearly intended to demonstrate that the FBI is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. The effort ended in a pathetic fizzle. Nunes’s brief, amateurish documentfailed to demonstrate that FBI surveillance was triggered solely or mainly by a Democratic-funded dossier. But for cherry-picking above and beyond the call of duty, Nunes (R-Calif.) deserves his own exhibit in the hackery hall of fame. This was a true innovation: an intelligence product created and released for the consumption of Fox News.
What was evident is that the memo helped call attention to Carter Page’s Russia ties, a bad fact for a campaign claiming no “collusion” with Russia. Former Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) acknowledged, “So, this is the problem with Carter Page. He had a problem of connections with people that the FBI believed were Russian intelligence officials or were at least passing information back to Russian intelligence officials. … The FISA warrant was really targeted at somebody they knew to be — to have a relation with Russians. And so all of this spin about what it means for Trump or not I think is, well, overblown, candidly.”
Not even Gowdy would accept the premise that the FISA warrant affected the rest of the investigation: “So to the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower. The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’s meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice. So there’s going to be a Russia probe, even without a dossier.”
Even on Fox News, the designated Republican, Rep. Chris Stewart (Utah), backpedaled. “I think it would be a mistake for anyone to suggest the special counsel should not continue his work. This memo, frankly, has nothing at all to do with the special counsel.” You know, if you can’t find a booster to spin on Fox News, it’s probably not going well for Republicans.
To land the massive Foxconn factory, Gov. Scott Walker has committed the state to paying more than eight times as much per job as Wisconsin will provide under similar job creation deals struck last year, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis has found.
At more than $200,000 in state taxpayer money per job, the incentive package for the Taiwanese company is easily the state’s most expensive deal of 2017, totaling more than three times as much per job as the next most costly deal.
To get a fair comparison with Foxconn, the newspaper purposefully looked only at the more expensive 2017 deals in which the state offered tax credits for jobs created. That’s because it tends to cost more in tax credits to spur a company to create a new job rather than to retain an existing one.
Even then, the Foxconn Technology Group deal stands out.
Tim Bartik, an independent economist who studies economic development, said Wisconsin is paying many times more per job than he typically sees in other projects nationally and is even shelling out more than some states were willing to pay per job for the much-hyped Amazon headquarters.
A few remarks:
The more one hears, the worse this deal looks.
There may yet be more taxpayer costs.
Capitalism is a private undertaking, of buyers, sellers, builders, dreamers, etc. State capitalism is sham capitalism.
There are differences between spending on production, consumption, and infrastructure. In Foxconn, one finds public spending to subsidize both manufacturing and transportation infrastructure.
Spending isn’t fungible as one jumps from manufacturing, to retail, to residential housing. In a small town like Whitewater, there’s often a reactionary jump from one kind of project to another, as though roads, office buildings, hotels, and light industry were all the same.
There’s a local lesson in this, for small towns like Whitewater. With a large public campus in a small town, Whitewater isn’t lacking a developed infrastructure. Additional public expenditures in that regard are likely to be underperforming for the cost.
If it’s expensively difficult to buy manufacturing jobs, it’s no easier – indeed harder – to buy residential and retail growth apart from an employment gain.
If you build it, they will come? Not on the single-family housing side they won’t: the demand in Whitewater is for rental property. More of what buyers aren’t buying in Whitewater will have an effect, to be sure, but a greater supply of lesser-demand items won’t make those lesser-demand items more valuable.
Whitewater’s planners – whether left or right leaning – don’t have an economic program (as voluntary transactions of buyers and sellers do not favor planners’ schemes). They have a cultural program of social engineering. They’re a minority of a minority (less than half the population as they’re aged 25-65, and even of those aged 25-65 only a fraction of that cohort).
Regulating or subsidizing against existing demand is at best a waste of money, at worst a stubborn delusion and a waste of money.
Monday in Whitewater will bring afternoon snowfall with a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 7:03 AM and sunset 5:14 PM, for 10h 10m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 71.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1849, the University of Wisconsin opens: “the University of Wisconsin began with 20 students led by Professor John W. Sterling. The first class was organized as a preparatory school in the first department of the University: a department of science, literature, and the arts. The university was initially housed at the Madison Female Academy building, which had been provided free of charge by the city. The course of study was English grammar; arithmetic; ancient and modern geography; elements of history; algebra; Caesar’s Commentaries; the Aeneid of Virgil (six books); Sallust; select orations of Cicero; Greek; the Anabasis of Xenophon; antiquities of Greece and Rome; penmanship, reading, composition and declamation. Also offered were book-keeping, geometry, and surveying. Tuition was “twenty dollars per scholar, per annum.” For a detailed recollection of early UW-Madison life, see the memoirs of Mrs. W.F. Allen [Source: History of the University of Wisconsin, Reuben Gold Thwaites, 1900]”
SAVANNAH, Ga. — The bridge that carries Highway 17 into Savannah is hard to miss: Its H-shaped towers are among the tallest structures for miles. But many people in the city would like never to lay eyes again on the green and white signs that say the span honors the segregationist former Gov. Eugene Talmadge.
“We would never take the worst parts of his speeches and put them up on big billboards over the bridge and say, ‘Well, welcome to Savannah, here’s what we stand for,’ ” said Stan Deaton, senior historian at the Georgia Historical Society, which is based here. “But having his name on that bridge is tantamount to doing so.”
Residents of Savannah have been trying for decades to get the state to rename it, only to see their efforts sputter and die in the back rooms and boardrooms of Atlanta, the capital.
But this year is different, and state lawmakers could vote in the coming weeks to give the bridge a less controversial name. And it all may be because of two new factors in the equation: a bit of legal detective work and the Girl Scouts, hundreds of whom are planning to descend on the Capitol this week to argue that the bridge should celebrate Juliette Gordon Low, the Savannah native who founded their organization.
A new media startup that billed itself as a “radical,” “grassroots” collective has admitted to being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Russian government following an exposé by The Daily Beast. Redfish, launched last fall, initially presented itself as an independent, community-based news organization, producing short video features on topics such as the economic crisis in Venezuela and the push for independence in Catalonia. Its work, however, soon began airing on RT, Moscow’s English-language news network, and a Daily Beast investigation revealed that the majority of its staff were longtime employees of the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus. In a statement following that investigation, Redfish conceded that it is in fact “a subsidiary of Ruptly, RT’s video agency.”
(Longtime employees of the Russian government’s propaganda apparatus – that’s a job not worth having, and a degraded & degrading life.)
Washington • The autocratic leader lies and then falsely charges his opponents with lying. He politicizes institutions that are supposed to be free of politics by falsely accusing his foes of politicizing them. He victimizes others by falsely claiming they are victimizing him.
The autocrat also counts on spineless politicians to cave in to his demands. And as they destroy governmental institutions at his bidding, they insist they are defending them.
In her classic 1951 book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt offered two observations that help us understand the assumptions and purposes behind the memo created by the staff of Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the chair of the House Intelligence Committee turned propagandist for President Trump.
The totalitarian method of the 1920s and 30s, she noted, was to “dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.”
She also said this: “Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
Bear Arendt’s warnings in mind in pondering the Nunes screed whose sole purpose is to discredit an investigation that appears to be getting closer and closer to Trump.
A blatant McCarthyite hit piece that breaks little new ground, it cherry-picks from troves of information to feed a dangerous narrative: Even if special counsel Robert Mueller gets the goods on Trump — on Russian collusion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, or all three — the facts won’t matter because the inquiry was driven by partisanship.
The memo pretends that the most important actor in the case is Carter Page, a Trump adviser who had left the campaign by the time the events it describes transpired. The memo’s core assertion is that in a request to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to authorize surveillance on Page, the FBI relied the findings of former British intelligence official Christopher Steele without informing the court that Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele, was paid by Democrats to collect bad stuff on Trump.
Actually, Page is a side player in the story, and his engagement with Russian spies was on the radar of intelligence agencies long before Steele prepared his now-famous dossier. Among the document’s many volumes of convenient omissions is that Fusion GPS was hired first by conservative foes of Trump.
Republican leaders’ open defiance last week of the FBI over the release of a hotly disputed memo revealed how the GOP, which has long positioned itself as the party of law and order, has become an adversary of federal law enforcement as the party continues its quest to protect President Trump from the Russia investigation.
The FBI, the Justice Department and other agencies are now under concerted assault by Republicans, facing allegations of corruption and conspiracy that have quickly moved from the fringes of the right into the mainstream of the GOP.
Republicans in Congress insist that their efforts are meant to fulfill their duty to provide oversight of the executive branch and root out suspected bias. But critics say their campaign — to “cleanse” the FBI, in the words of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) — has been clearly orchestrated to safeguard the president and undercut the Russia probe, which includes an examination of whether Trump or his associates have sought to obstruct justice.
“It’s an extraordinary moment,” said Steve Schmidt, a strategist on George W. Bush’s and John McCain’s presidential campaigns who opposes Trump. “The party has become completely unmoored from things that it held as close to sacred until very recently, including a fidelity to the country’s security institutions.”
(Trump sees law as his whim, and order as his advantage.)
Wisconsinites know Sykes well – one can expect opinions are formed on his past work; for today it’s enough that he’s right about our present situation.
Sunday in Whitewater will see snow in the morning on a cloudy day with a high of fifteen. Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 5:12 PM, for 10h 08m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 79.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1783, Britain’s King George III proclaims a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War (although as a practical matter Britain was defeated after Yorktown two years earlier). On this day in 1789, electors choose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page bragged that he was an adviser to the Kremlin in a letter obtained by TIME that raises new questions about the extent of Page’s contacts with the Russian government over the years.
The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.
“Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.
He’s been coaching other Republican lawmakers to sell the $1.5 trillion tax cut to voters, and telling people on Twitter to check their paychecks for wage hikes. The bill — which was deeply unpopular when it passed along party lines in December — is now breaking even in a new opinion poll.
So Saturday morning, by way of good news, Ryan’s Twitter account shared a story about a secretary taking home a cool $6 a month in tax savings.
Here is the passage in the Associated Press:
Julia Ketchum, a secretary at a public high school in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was pleasantly surprised her pay went up $1.50 a week. She didn’t think her pay would go up at all, let alone this soon. That adds up to $78 a year, which she said will more than cover her Costco membership for the year.
The tweet was deleted within hours, probably guaranteeing it will never be forgotten, and leaving people baffled as to why Ryan ever thought it would make a good advertisement for the tax plan’s supposed middle-class benefit.
It’s true that the bill is stingy to people at the bottom of the pay scale. In fact, the average tax break for someone making $25,400 a year or less happens to be $60 — the exact price of a Gold Star Costco membership.
(Ryan’s gained extraordinary prominence, as a vice presidential candidate, budget chairman, and now speaker of the House. He never had, though, any real testing before his rise from his mediocre hometown newspaper, and a cosseted man is a weak, and often thoughtless, one.)
What we have witnessed during the first year of the Trump Administration is a determined effort to demolish the separation between politics and the fair administration of justice—an attempt to turn the DOJ’s investigative powers into the personal political tool of the president. Some have attempted to dismiss the president’s conduct as the actions of a new president, a free-wheeling businessman unaccustomed and unacquainted with the finer points of the office and government in general.
However, a year later, it has become clear that the president views the idea that the DOJ should be anything other than an extension of his political operation as an unacceptable constraint on his authority. He told a reporter in December that he has “the absolute right” to do whatever he wants with “his” Department of Justice. The president has sought to put that statement into action from the very day he was inaugurated.
Early in his tenure, President Trump demanded former FBI Director James Comey’s “loyalty,” and fired him when he did not get it in the form of ending the Flynn investigation and removing the cloud of the Russia probe. He has repeatedly called for the reopening of the investigation into his 2016 opponent, Secretary Clinton. He publicly berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, a step recommended by the Department’s professional ethics staff. Finally, just in the past week it was reported that the president asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, the official responsible for overseeing the Special Counsel’s investigation, whether he was “on my team,” and then-Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe if he voted for the president.
Both the president’s public statements and his private actions make it clear that he is seeking nothing less than to destroy the institutions and norms that shield the Department of Justice from his direction. This is all the more pernicious considering the fact that his own campaign is under investigation for possible collusion with the Russians in their interference in the presidential election. He would take the reins of the FBI to protect himself and to deploy their immense investigative powers against his political opponents at will.
➤ Renato Mariotti contends The Memo Doesn’t Vindicate Trump. It’s More Proof of Obstruction.
The president himself said, after the memo’s release on Friday, that it “vindicates” him in the probe.
But it does no such thing. The memo from House Republicans, led by Representative Devin Nunes, fell well short of the hype. Its main argument is that when the Justice Department sought a warrant to wiretap the former Trump adviser Carter Page, it did not reveal that Christopher Steele — the author of a controversial opposition-research dossier — was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign through a law firm.
This is actually a fairly common — and rarely effective — argument made by defendants who seek to suppress evidence obtained by a warrant.
What might be the lasting legacy of the Nunes memo is how President Trump reacted to it. According to reports, Mr. Trump suggested “the memo might give him the justification to fire [the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein] — something about which Trump has privately mused — or make other changes at the Justice Department, which he had complained was not sufficiently loyal to him.”
In fact, Mr. Trump’s approval of the release of the memo and his comments that releasing it could make it easier for him to fire Mr. Rosenstein could help Robert Mueller, the special counsel, prove that Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, with a “corrupt” intent — in other words, the intent to wrongfully impede the administration of justice — as the law requires.
Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada gives a descriptive tour of the Mars rover’s view in Gale Crater. The white-balanced scene looks back over the journey so far. The view from “Vera Rubin Ridge” looks back over buttes, dunes and other features along the route. To see where the rover is now, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/whe…
To aid geologists, colors in the image are white balanced so rocks appear the same color as the same rocks would on Earth. Why? Click here: https://go.nasa.gov/2Fs8tFd
Saturday in Whitewater will be cloudy with afternoon snow showers and a high of thirty-three. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 5:11 PM, for 10h 05m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred fiftieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1690, the first paper money was issued in America: “Over three centuries ago on this day, Massachusetts printed America’s first paper money. Before creating bills, Americans used Pine Tree Shillings and other coins as their currency. After the British shutdown a Massachusetts mint, these coins were in short supply. So, in 1689, when the British wanted Americans to fight the French in Canada, there was no money available to pay the troops. Since the soldiers wouldn’t fight for free, the government thought it best to issue certificates to the troops in lieu of paying them with coins. A piece of paper would represent a coin’s worth and could later be redeemed for “real money.” ”
February 3, 1959 is the day the music died: “Bad winter weather and a bus breakdown prompted rock-and-roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper to rent a plane to continue on their “Winter Dance Party” tour. Icy roads and treacherous weather had nearly undermined their performances in Green Bay and Appleton that weekend, so after a show at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959, they boarded a four-seat airplane. The three performers and pilot Roger Peterson perished when the plane crashed about 1:00 AM on Monday, February 3rd (“The Day the Music Died,” according to singer Don McLean in his song “American Pie”) .”
For the past week or so, the big kerfuffle dominating the news related to Russia has been over the memo—a classified memorandum drafted by the Republican staffers of the House Intelligence Committee that claims the FBI inappropriately used the now infamous Steele dossier in an application for a super-secret warrant authorizing surveillance of a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser named Carter Page. Donald Trump and his champions—including Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chair of the committee, and the other Republicans on the panel—want this memo publicly released, presumably because they believe it would undermine the FBI’s Russia investigation. Democrats on the committee contend that the memo cherry-picks facts and is misleading. The FBI and the Justice Department oppose its release, noting that such a disclosure would reveal important national security secrets. Others have noted that this is all a red herring; even if there was something fishy about this one warrant application—and there’s no telling if there was—that would have no bearing on the rest of the FBI’s investigation of Moscow meddling in the 2016 election and interactions between Trump associates and Russians.
But look at what just happened. I spent the opening of this article explaining this dust-up, rather than far more important recent developments related to the Russia scandal. And that’s the point. The Trump White House wants the politerati worked up over this sideshow. Consider these two other occurrences from this week. On Monday, Trump’s CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, told the BBC that Russia will “target” the midterm elections this year. The very same day, it was reported that the Trump administration will not implement the new sanctions on Russia that Congress passed last year in legislation that Trump begrudgingly signed into law. So here we have word that the US political system remains under threat from Vladimir Putin’s covert information warfare campaign and that the Trump administration has decided not to intensify sanctions that might deter Moscow from again subverting American democracy. Still, these significant events received a sliver of the coverage devoted to the tussle over #releasethememo.
A stunt has kicked aside substance. Not only do the memo shenanigans deflect attention from the intelligence committee’s main job—probing the scandal; they also keep the spotlight from shining on a profound national security concern: the continuing threat from Russia. It is not well known that the Moscow cyber assault on the 2016 elections went beyond the presidential campaign. Russian hackers also broke into the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the party outfit in charge of House races, and swiped and released key internal documents about some of the most important House races that year. This included the group’s strategy documents assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Democratic candidates and its confidential voter turn-out models. Moscow’s assault on the DCCC was an extensive operation that had an impact. In several House races, candidates used the leaked material to attack Democrats. (In primary contests, Democrats exploited the leaks against Democratic rivals. In the general election, Republicans did the same.) DCCC officials came to believe the dumps were a decisive factor in several races in which the Democrat lost.
Imagine a society in which you are rated by the government on your trustworthiness. Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.
When you step outside your door, your actions in the physical world are also swept into the dragnet: The government gathers an enormous collection of information through the video cameras placed on your street and all over your city. If you commit a crime—or simply jaywalk—facial recognition algorithms will match video footage of your face to your photo in a national ID database. It won’t be long before the police show up at your door.
This society may seem dystopian, but it isn’t farfetched: It may be China in a few years. The country is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ movements, purportedly to reduce crime and terrorism. While the expanding Orwellian eye may improve “public safety,” it poses a chilling new threat to civil liberties in a country that already has one of the most oppressive and controlling governments in the world.
Gronk, G.O.A.T., dog masks — the million of Americans attending Super Bowl parties this weekend are bound to hear those terms and plenty of others that will be unfamiliar to people who don’t follow football.
…
We’re here to help. Here’s a short glossary of terms relevant to Super Bowl LII that will allow anyone to hold up their end of a conversation about horse punching or greasy poles [list follows].
The immediate catalyst was the jobs report, which showed the strong United States economy might finally be translating into rising wages for American workers — a sign that higher inflation could be around the corner. But what is really worrying investors is that the fuel behind this stock market boom, namely cheap money from global central banks, may disappear sooner than they thought.
In recent weeks, the shift in sentiment has played out across the world’s largest financial markets. As stocks have sold off, Treasury yields have surged. The dollar has slumped.
“It’s a legitimate concern, when inflation spikes up a little bit, that people should evaluate how is this going to affect profits and how is this going to affect the Fed,” said Jonathan Golub, chief United States equity strategist at Credit Suisse. “The market is becoming more vigilant around these concerns, and that’s good and that’s healthy.”
So, if one lives in Whitewater, he or she may find a shopper-advertiser in the mailbox, with ads from (mostly) out-of-city advertisers. Even if one omits the publisher’s own ads, and public service announcements, the ratio of out-of-city to Whitewater ads is something like 3 to 1. Indeed, the largest ad, on the front page, is for a meat market in Jefferson, WI, and every other front-page ad is also for an out-of-city merchant.
Fundamentally, for this print publication, most of the ads come from out-of-city businesses.
What does this mean?
1. It means that these advertisers believe that there’s value in letting potential Whitewater customers know about their Fort Atkinson, Jefferson, Palmyra, and Milton businesses. They must believe – rightly or wrongly – that the ads bring returns that justify their cost.
2. These are print ads, and for the items advertised, the delivery to homeowners’ mailboxes, and the general nature of print readers (older), this is an audience of the middle-aged.
3. There are Whitewater businesses competitive with these out-of-city merchants, but (a) many people in Whitewater would already know about those Whitewater businesses, and (b) city merchants have an option of digital ads on the Whitewater Banner. (That’s an interesting question for businesses already familiar to Whitewater’s residents: shouldn’t every ad in print or online be a specific call to action?)
4. Out-of-city merchants have, both proportionately and absolutely, larger numbers of consumers aged 25-65 than Whitewater does. See Data Around Whitewater’s Size and Whitewater, Cultures & Communications, June 2017 (Part 5: Working Age). They have a larger, middle-aged consumer market in their own cities. For the cost of a print ad, they may think they can attract a few extra customers to their comparatively advantaged businesses. It’s incremental gain, not a customer base, they’re seeking.
5. Old Whitewater has two solutions for the relatively smaller numbers in the 25-65 age bracket. First, to restrict rental opportunities for the majority of the city’s population – a majority that expresses a desire for more rental options. The first option foils free choice to advance the plans of an aging, middle-aged minority faction within the city.
Second, to try to develop additional single-family homes in Whitewater. On a scale to compete with the larger, existing single-family home markets in Fort Atkinson, Milton, Jefferson, etc. would require several hundred, if not over a thousand, additional homes. That’s not a big task – it’s a wildly improbable one.
6. Merchants and city officials should acknowledge and support this city’s majority demographic, rather than pretending it’s not this city’s majority demographic. Whitewater should be a place for all people, but that’s not possible when a few aged men and women – a minority within a minority – deny or thwart the city’s actual majority.
To love a place requires more than a controlling desire. A few striving planners and their minority faction want to change the free choices of thousands of buyers and sellers in this beautiful city, and in cities nearby.
The direction of this city – as expressed through the wishes of thousands in the marketplace each day – will confound both the efforts of those who want to restrict and those who want to subsidize against this direction.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny skies with a high of eighteen. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 5:10 PM, for 10h 03m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.0% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}four hundred forty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
The 1925 serum run to Nome, also known as the Great Race of Mercy, was a transport of diphtheriaantitoxin by dog sled relay across the U.S. territory of Alaska by 20 mushersand about 150 sled dogs 674 miles (1,085 km) in five and a half days, saving the small town of Nome and the surrounding communities from an incipient epidemic.
Both the mushers and their dogs were portrayed as heroes in the newly popular medium of radio, and received headlinecoverage in newspapers across the United States. Balto, the lead sled dog on the final stretch into Nome, became the most famous canine celebrity of the era after Rin Tin Tin, and his statue is a popular tourist attraction in New York City‘s Central Park. The publicity also helped spur an inoculation campaign in the U.S. that dramatically reduced the threat of the disease.
…
All participants in the dogsleds received letters of commendation from President Calvin Coolidge,[10] and the Senate stopped work to recognize the event. Each musher during the first relay received a gold medal from the H. K. Mulford Company. The mayor of Los Angeles presented a bone-shaped key to the city to Balto in front of City Hall;[10] silent-film actress Mary Pickford put a wreath around the canine’s neck.[10] Poems and letters from children poured in, and spontaneous fundraising campaigns sprang up around the country.
The influential Koch brothers and their powerful donor network plan to pour money into Wisconsin this fall to keep Gov. Scott Walker in the statehouse and replace U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.
The Koch network’s chief lieutenants renewed their vow this weekend to spend up to $400 million on politics and policy to shape November’s midterm elections nationwide.
That’s more than the combined resources spent by the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association and the Chamber of Commerce in the 2016 election cycle.
They outlined plans Monday to spend big on political advertising now through the end of July on as many as 14 key Senate races and 15 gubernatorial elections — including those in Wisconsin. Their goal: Flood the airwaves with political messaging early to help shape voters’ opinions long before the election season’s final months.
“We need to be on offense starting now,” said Emily Seidel, CEO of the Kochs’ political arm, Americans for Prosperity.
As we’ve said before, we are not in the business of opposing the release of information of potential public value. But if the Nunes memo were truly about fair congressional oversight of law enforcement, as Mr. Ryan claims, Republicans would allow the simultaneous release of a Democratic memo on the same subject. But they are not, though Mr. Ryan’s staff says the speaker supports releasing the Democratic memo after giving it more scrutiny. That leaves only unsettling possibilities for why Mr. Nunes, a longtime Trump ally, is pushing to disseminate his version as the president’s ire about the Russia investigation crests and speculation swirls about his desire to fire senior law enforcement officials, including special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein. CNN reported Thursday that Mr. Trump believes the Nunes memo “could discredit the agency” by exposing “bias within the FBI’s top ranks.”
Mr. Ryan bears full responsibility for the deterioration of congressional oversight of intelligence operations. Once a bipartisan responsibility that lawmakers treated soberly — as they still do in the Senate — oversight under Mr. Nunes has become another front in Mr. Trump’s assault on the law enforcement institutions investigating the president and his associates. House Republicans are poisoning the committee’s relationship with the intelligence community and distracting from real issues demanding attention.
In all the noise around the memo, it is easy to lose sight of the scary truth that a hostile foreign government attempted to influence the 2016 election and shows every intention of trying again this year. You’d think Mr. Nunes’s committee would be alarmed by this threat to American democracy. Instead, Mr. Nunes, with Mr. Ryan’s aid and comfort, is helping Mr. Trump impede an investigation into these very issues. It is sad to see the speaker allow the House to be tarnished in this way.
On March 2, 2017, Attorney General Jeff Session recused himself from any investigations into the 2016 presidential campaign. This left his deputy, Rod Rosenstein, in charge of the probe into Russian meddling in the election and the possibility of illegal coordination with Donald Trump’s campaign. Not only is Sessions prohibited from making decisions about the investigation, he is barred from responding to queries from Congress or the media about them. Yet despite his recusal, Sessions has found ways to wade into the investigation. In some instances, experts see a clear violation; in others, a series of improper comments and acts whose cumulative effect is that the attorney general is, in fact, a player in the Russia investigation.
Sessions has also promised, under oath, to recuse himself from any investigations into Hillary Clinton that arose duringthe heated 2016 election. As a key member of Trump’s campaign, which for months pushed the idea that Clinton should be imprisoned for various alleged crimes, Sessions said at his confirmation hearing that he would formally recuse himself from investigations into matters like Clinton’s private email server and family foundation—a promise his office says he intends to keep. But again, there are signs Sessions is meddling.
Sessions’ recusal in March nearly cost him his job. As the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller gets closer to Trump and his top aides, Sessions is under increasing pressure to protect Trump and his inner circle from the investigation. Despite his recusal, Sessions appears to be using his formal powers as the nation’s top law enforcement officer and his bully pulpit to shield the president by discrediting his own department’s investigations. As Republicans in Congress mount new attacks on Mueller’s probe, including accusations of bias by FBI investigators, Sessions’ actions and comments legitimize their claims.
Here’s a timeline of Sessions’ interference in investigations he’s recused from [list follows in article].
As Fox News opinion hosts have grown increasingly conspiratorial in the past week — going to ever-greater lengths to defend President Donald Trump — other conservative commentators are expressing alarm at what they describe as a rising threat to both their movement and the country.
Those concerns seemed to come to a head Thursday night, when Fox host Sean Hannity was widely mocked for his logic-bending dismissal of The New York Times’ report that Trump had sought to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.
But Hannity’s coverage was just part of a wider trend, observers say. For the past week, Fox News opinion hosts have seized on claims by some Republican lawmakers about a “secret society” at the FBI and “deep state actors” to fashion unproven narratives designed to protect Trump and delegitimize Mueller.
On Wednesday night, Hannity told viewers, “The constitutional violations are severe and historically unprecedented in this country. You have deep state actors using and abusing the powerful tools of intelligence we give them to protect this country.”
On Tuesday, Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs said, “It may be time to declare war outright against the deep state and clear out the rot in the upper levels of the FBI and the Justice Department.”
In 2014, Gov. Walker ran for re-election, and two years later Trump ran for president. The two-party results for the GOP candidates in the City of Whitewater were much different.
