Over time, the city proper has become more dependably blue. State and national political trends, affecting local demographics, have probably assured this result. See, The (Red) State, the (Blue) City.
Look at the last presidential election: Clinton carried the city, Trump carried the outlying towns within the area of the Whitewater Unified School District. (See, results from Walworth, Jefferson, and Rock Counties.)
Where once there was a divide between red and blue within the city, there is now a reliably blue city; the divide is now between the city and the smaller towns outside the city.
Older residents remember a more conservative city; that past won’t return. Current residents know that the towns nearby are more conservative than the city; that will stay true for the foreseeable future.
The city-towns divide represents things as they now are, and has consequences of economics, fiscal policy, education, and culture.
Previously: Parts 1 (introductory assumptions), 2 (population), 3 (oasis), 4 (demographics), and 5 (working age).
This Tuesday, June 13th at 12:30 PM, there will be a showing of Collateral Beauty @ Seniors in the Park, in the Starin community building.
Collateral Beauty (2016)is a drama about Howard, who, “retreating from life after a tragedy…questions the universe by writing to Love, Time and Death. Receiving unexpected answers, he begins to see how these things interlock and how even loss can reveal moments of meaning and beauty.”
Will Smith stars in the one hour, thirty-seven minute film, also starring Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Michael Peña, and Helen Mirren. The film carries a PG-13 rating from the MPAA.
Monday in Whitewater will see a high of eighty-seven and an even chance of thunderstorms. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:43 PM, for 15h 18m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 91.9% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred sixteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets this evening at 6:30 PM.
To say that Comey’s testimony “vindicates” Trump in any way ignores giant swaths of what the former FBI director actually said — it’s like leaving the theater after seeing Wonder Woman and telling people it’s a World War I documentary.
This is the place where Trump’s supporters exist: rather than seeing the president for who he clearly is, they construct an entirely different Trump in the negative space around him. If Comey accuses the president of obstructing an FBI investigation, they will say, “but look at all the laws Comey didn’t charge Trump with breaking!” If Comey says Trump lied, they’ll say “according to Comey’s own admission, here’s an instance where Trump told the truth!”
….For #AlwaysTrumpers, it is also important to concoct fictions about Trump and never back down from them. Trump supporters are required to pretend, for instance, that the president is a tough-as-nails, no-nonsense negotiator who will only get us the best deals – yet the briefest of trips through his Twitter timeline reveals a thin-skinned moral adolescent obsessed with settling scores and being well-liked.
(Trump, a serial liar, makes liars or fiction writers of his ardent supporters.)
Attorneys general for the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland say they will sue President Trump on Monday, alleging that he has violated anti-corruption clauses in the Constitution by accepting millions in payments and benefits from foreign governments since moving into the White House.
The lawsuit, the first of its kind brought by government entities, centers on the fact that Trump chose to retain ownership of his company when he became president. Trump said in January that he was shifting his business assets into a trust managed by his sons to eliminate potential conflicts of interests.
But D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) and Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) say Trump has broken many promises to keep separate his public duties and private business interests. For one, his son Eric Trump has said the president would continue to receive regular updates about his company’s financial health.
Donald Trump has told Theresa May in a phone call he does not want to go ahead with a state visit to Britain until the British public supports him coming.
The US president said he did not want to come if there were large-scale protests and his remarks in effect put the visit on hold for some time.
The call was made in recent weeks, according to a Downing Street adviser who was in the room. The statement surprised May, according to those present.
The conversation in part explains why there has been little public discussion about a visit.
May invited Trump to Britain seven days after his inauguration when she became the first foreign leader to visit him in the White House. She told a joint press conference she had extended an invitation from the Queen to Trump and his wife Melania to make a state visit later in the year and was “delighted that the president has accepted that invitation”.
Many senior diplomats, including Lord Ricketts, the former national security adviser, said the invitation was premature, but impossible to rescind once made.
“Look at the way I’ve been treated lately, especially by the media,” he complained in a commencement address last month to U.S. Coast Guard graduates. “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly.”
Looked at through this lens, Trump’s press coverage has been a political nightmare.
Isn’t that terribly unfair?
Here’s my carefully nuanced answer: Hell, no.
That’s because when we consider negative vs. positive coverage of an elected official, we’re asking the wrong question.
The president’s supporters often say his accomplishments get short shrift. But let’s face it: Politicians have no right to expect equally balanced positive and negative coverage, or anything close to it. If a president is doing a rotten job, it’s the duty of the press to report how and why he’s doing a rotten job.
The idea of balance is suspect on its face. Should positive coverage be provided, as if it were a birthright, to a president who consistently lies, who has spilled classified information to an adversary, and who fired the FBI director who was investigating his administration?
Most of the West tributes will focus on television’s Batman, naturally, but what even the most robust cineastes often overlook is West’s one great contribution to movie history, to the art house.
The 1960s were largely a bad time for sci-fi films. They’d blown their load in the 1950s, with pictures about atomically-altered bugs and extraterrestrial beings, all manner of body-snatching alien interlopers, peaceful Martians who get attacked by paranoid earthlings, you name it. We remember 2001: A Space Odyssey from the tail end of the ‘60s, but it wasn’t exactly box office gold. What sci-fi there was was commonly tucked away in low-budget productions, and there was none finer than 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars….
In Robinson Crusoe on Mars there are Martian canals, a polar ice cap, snow shelters, subterranean tunnels, autodestruct buttons, alien blasters, and a slave revolt, but the film’s haunting solemnity, its crucial, post-earth poetry, comes largely from West—the right-hand man in the cockpit, the space ghost who intervenes when reason is all but lost, and helps it again be found.
I’ve seen the Robinson Crusoe on Mars more than once, and have enjoyed more each time. Here’s the trailer from a fun, memorable film:
This is the fifth post in a series considering related local topics of cultures & communications within the city.
To love something truly is to see it clearly, with dry eyes. So if federal census data show that the largest group in the city – by far – is college-age residents 20-24 (5,300), and that those young residents easily outnumber traditional working-age residents (3,892), what can one say about those 25-64 year-old working-age residents? (Quick note: I’m in this age bracket.)
The first thing one can conclude is that in absolute number, they’re fewer than nearby Fort Atkinson. I’ve written on this before (see, Data Around Whitewater’s Size), but it bears repeating (data from the American Community Survey using 2015 data as the 2016 data do not have demographics by age):
Whitewater, aged 25-64: 3,892.
Fort Atkinson, aged 25-64: 6,454.
There are implications to a smaller working-age population than a student population.
When working-age residents 25-64 insist they’re the real town residents, they’re doing so only from innumeracy or arrogance: residents aged 25-64 are a demographic minority.
There’s a second implication, too: in absolute terms, the 25-64 age group isn’t so large as it presents itself.
Indeed, it’s not so relatively large within the city, or relatively compared to a nearby city.
So if there’s a claim to a superior position, that group (of which I am a part) does not have a numerical claim to superiority.
Previously: Parts 1 (introductory assumptions), 2 (population), 3 (oasis), and 4 (demographics).
Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny, with a high of ninety. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 52s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 96.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fifteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
…Donald Trump Jr. — the president’s eldest son — seemed to confirm Comey’s version of events in a Saturday interview on Fox News as he tried to emphasize the fact that his father did not directly order Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
“When he tells you to do something, guess what? There’s no ambiguity in it, there’s no, ‘Hey, I’m hoping,'” Trump said.
The Chishi Bridge is one of hundreds of dazzling bridges erected across the country in recent years. Chinese officials celebrate them as proof that they can roll out infrastructure bigger, better and higher than any other country can. China now boasts the world’s highest bridge, the longest bridge, the highest rail trestle and a host of other superlatives, often besting its own efforts….
But as the bridges and the expressways they span keep rising, critics say construction has become an end unto itself. Fueled by government-backed loans and urged on by the big construction companies and officials who profit from them, many of the projects are piling up debt and breeding corruption while producing questionable transportation benefits.
For all its splendor, the Chishi Bridge, in Hunan Province, exemplifies the seamy underside of China’s infrastructure boom. Its cost, $300 million, was more than 50 percent over the budget. The project struggled with delays and a serious construction accident and was tarnished by government corruption. Since it opened in October, the bridge and the expressway it serves have been underused and buried in debt.
Jack Posobiec had his Twitter sights set on James B. Comey.
A pro-Trump activist notorious for his amateur sleuthing into red herrings like the “Pizzagate” hoax and a conspiracy theory involving the murder of a Democratic aide, Mr. Posobiec wrote on May 17 that Mr. Comey, the recently ousted F.B.I. director, had “said under oath that Trump did not ask him to halt any investigation.”
….It mattered little that Mr. Comey had said no such thing. The tweet quickly ricocheted through the ecosystem of fake news and disinformation on the far right, where Trump partisans like Mr. Posobiec have intensified their efforts to sow doubt about the legitimacy of expanding investigations into Trump associates’ ties to Russia.
But as the journey of that one tweet shows, misinformed, distorted and false stories are gaining traction far beyond the fringes of the internet. Just 14 words from Mr. Posobiec’s Twitter account would spread far enough to provide grist for a prime-time Fox News commentary and a Rush Limbaugh monologue that reached millions of listeners, forging an alternative first draft of history in corners of the conservative media where President Trump’s troubles are often explained away as fabrications by his journalist enemies.
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.
Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownback’s veto and repudiating the conservative governor’s platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates’ newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.
“The citizens of Kansas have said ‘It’s not working. We don’t like it.’ And they’ve elected new people.” said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.
In Atlanta, during a Braves game, a contestant gets the chance to race against a competitor called the Freeze (who’s very fast). Here’s what happens when the contestant underestimates the contest, and the mighty Freeze:
This is the fourth post in a series considering related local topics of cultures & communications within the city.
Take a look at impartial census data for Whitewater, from the federal government (using American Community Survey population estimates for 2016 now available, and otherwise 2015 measurements).
Whitewater’s is a population that’s relatively young (where student-aged residents significanty outnumber non-student adults aged 25-64), and with a significant Latino community (almost certainly larger by percentage among the K-12 population than it is among older age groups).
These disparate groups most surely don’t have the same outlook. Pretending that there’s one, common outlook is at best mistaken, at worst arrogant. Seeing the city through the eyes of a few, without a dispassionate review of the city’s demographics, isn’t a reasoned outlook.
It’s nothing more than aged beholders’ nostalgia.
Data follow —
Previously: Parts 1 (introductory assumptions), 2 (population), and 3 (oasis).
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-eight. Sunrise is 5:15 AM and sunset 8:33 PM, for 15h 17m 14s of daytime. The moon is waning gibbous with 99% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred fourteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1978, Affirmed wins the Belmont Stakes, and becomes a Triple Crown winner. He would remain the last Triple Crown winner for 37 years, until 2015. On this day in 1837, workmen arrive to begin building what would be Wisconsin’s first capitol building.
Recommended for reading in full —
David A. Fahrenthold and Robert O’Harrow Jr. recount in Trump: A True Story how the “mogul, in a 2007 deposition, had to face up to a series of falsehoods and exaggerations. And he did. Sort of”:
It was a mid-December morning in 2007 — the start of an interrogation unlike anything else in the public record of Trump’s life.
Trump had brought it on himself. He had sued a reporter, accusing him of being reckless and dishonest in a book that raised questions about Trump’s net worth. The reporter’s attorneys turned the tables and brought Trump in for a deposition.
For two straight days, they asked Trump question after question that touched on the same theme: Trump’s honesty.
The lawyers confronted the mogul with his past statements — and with his company’s internal documents, which often showed those statements had been incorrect or invented. The lawyers were relentless. Trump, the bigger-than-life mogul, was vulnerable — cornered, out-prepared and under oath.
Thirty times, they caught him.
Trump had misstated sales at his condo buildings. Inflated the price of membership at one of his golf clubs. Overstated the depth of his past debts and the number of his employees.
(I’m sure Trump is ignorant of many things, but I doubt that when Trump cleared the room to talk to Comey he was ignorant of what he was about to attempt. In any event, Applebaum’s point holds: ignorance would not be exculpatory. Ironic, though, that so many of Trump’s hardcore supporters would insist that ignorance should not be an excuse when considering the conduct of minorities, but insist upon it when considering the conduct of the vulgar white billionaire they support.)
Labour, which has opposed the massive media takeover, gained seats in parliament following Thursday’s election. Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservative Party saw its majority wiped out. May is now trying to form a minority government.
Broadcasting regulator Ofcom is currently reviewing whether or not to approve Fox’s purchase of Sky (SKYAY), in which it already holds a 39% stake. It is due to complete its review by June 20.
“Had the Conservatives won a large majority, we think it would have been more straightforward to approve the deal relatively quickly,” said Polo Tang, head of European telecom research at UBS. “We still see scope for the deal to be approved but the risks around an extended review have increased,” he added.
In 2006, my boyfriend and I drove from Colorado to Moab, Utah, for a week of desert exploration. For 300 miles, we had no problems. Then the gas light came on, 40 miles from Moab and at least an hour after we had passed the last service station. Did we panic? No. The impending calamity only fed our sense of adventure. We drove giddily on, eventually coasting into a gas station on fumes just as the engine cut out.
Nowadays, I can’t be so cavalier. With two school-age kids, road trips require slightly more vigilance. Since my boys were born, my husband (the boyfriend from the Moab trip) and I have canvassed the country with them strapped into a succession of car seats. We drive to save money and to show them our world — and because we believe in the power of “windshield time,” the moments of intimate connection that intersperse the monotony of car travel.
Here’s what to consider before pulling out of the driveway….[list follows]
In Japan, there’s a specialty fruit craze sweeping the nation, from square watermelons to grapes the size of Ping-Pong balls. Still, the crown jewel of the luxury fruit basket is the white strawberry, bred to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot sweeter than its classic red counterpart. We took a tour of Yasuhito Teshima’s farm in Karatsu, Japan, to find out why so many people are spending a pretty penny for a taste of these famous white berries.
That same blogger – the one writing this post, actually – then says that in these economic and municipal fiscal conditions, one should turn from local political solutions to private and cultural ones. See, An Oasis Strategy.
No, of course not: in that post, I wrote that “[t]his city’s not of one culture or one identity; we’re not a homogeneous place. We’re a diverse and multicultural community. Revanchism on behalf of some won’t make the city great for any. On the contrary, that path will prolong present difficulties, and delay significantly (although not prevent) this city’s more prosperous future.”
That is, after all, why this post is called ‘Cultures & Communications.’
So, how do others in the city see this, and whether they do, what can one say about a city of multiple cultures? The next few posts will address this topic.
Previously: Parts 1 (introductory assumptions) and 2 (population).
The cats-only clinic in Dublin is looking for someone with “gentle hands capable of petting and stroking cats for long periods of time,” someone who is “capable of cat whispering to calm the nerves of some of our in patients,” and who has “an ability to understand different types of purring.”
The work week ends for Whitewater with partly cloudy skies and a high of eighty-two. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 16m 34s of daytime. The moon is full, with 100% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred thirteenth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1954, lawyer Joseph Welch, representing the U.S. Army, responds to one of the many baseless charges from Sen. Joe McCarthy, as described at the U.S. Senate website:
At a session on June 9, 1954, McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s attorneys had ties to a Communist organization. As an amazed television audience looked on, Welch responded with the immortal lines that ultimately ended McCarthy’s career: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”
Overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.
It is a clarifying moment whenever an honorable person speaks plainly in public about a person he or she evidently regards as dishonorable on a matter of public moment. And today, a nation not normally riveted by congressional hearings got a chance to see what I was talking about. In three hours of testimony characterized by well-controlled but palpable anger, Comey attacked what he described as “lies” about the FBI and “defam[ation]” about himself; he accused the President of the United States of implicitly directing him to drop a major criminal investigation of a former senior official; he described a pattern of disrespect for the independence of the law enforcement function of the FBI; he alleged that the President made repeated misstatements of fact in his public accounts of their interactions; and he stated flatly that he believed that the President had fired him because of something related to the Russia investigation—an investigation that directly involves the President’s business, his campaign, his subordinates in the White House, and his family.
Throughout it all, the sense that he had spent four months dealing with people who were not honorable was, once again, written on every line of his face and evident in the tone he took when describing the President.
Throughout the three-hour hearing, Comey dropped several breadcrumbs for legislators, FBI investigators, reporters, concerned citizens, and Tweetstormers to follow. Here are five of these enticing potential clues ….[list follows]
Friends of the president will reply that the Comey hearing did not produce a smoking gun. That’s true. But the floor is littered with cartridge casings, there’s a smell of gunpowder in the air, bullet holes in the wall, and a warm weapon on the table. Comey showed himself credible, convincing, and consistent. Against him are arrayed the confused excuses of the least credible president in modern American history.
I’ve my doubts about a Roomba for your garden, but readers may be more optimistic about it than I am:
Below is a video of James Comey’s June 8th open-session testimony before the U.S. Senate, a link to a transcript of these remarks, and his printed statement for the record (released before the hearing but not delivered in Comey’s oral testimony given today).
From 2015-2016, the city lost about 1.1% of her population (168 people). Even over a longer period, from 2010-2016, she barely grew .8% (or 116 people).
Of those residing in Whitewater, in fact, there has been a decline of mean household income: from 47,073 in 2010 to 42,490 in 2015.
That’s longer-term stagnation with short-term decline. There are (of course) economic and municipal fiscal implications of this condition, but there are cultural ones, too.
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty. Sunrise is 5:16 AM and sunset 8:32 PM, for 15h 15m 49s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.1% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred twelfth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1982, in an address to the British Parliament, Reagan correctly predicted that the “march of freedom and democracy will leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” Architect Frank Lloyd Wright is born this day in 1867.
A federal jury Wednesday awarded $6.7 million to a woman who was raped repeatedly by a guard when she was being held in the Milwaukee County Jail four years ago.
The guard, Xavier Thicklen, was acting under his scope of employment when the sexual assaults occurred and therefore Milwaukee County is liable for the damages amount, the jury determined.
The jury also found there was “no legitimate government purpose” to shackle the woman during childbirth labor, but jurors did not find she was injured and therefore awarded her no monetary damages, according to Theresa Kleinhaus, a Chicago attorney who litigated the case with other attorneys from the firm.
Kleinhaus said her client was pleased with the verdicts. The plaintiff is not being named because she was a victim of a sexual assault.
“She was raped repeatedly at the age of 19. She sought justice and she is glad the system delivered that justice,” Kleinhaus said. “She hopes to prevent other women from being sexually assaulted in the Milwaukee County Jail.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Sec. of State Colin Powell, describes Trump succinctly as an organized crime godfather:
Lawrence Wilkerson: Trump admin. is “like a mafia family… That’s the way I view Pres. Trump now – as a godfather” https://t.co/xy52mbxGro
— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 8, 2017
The clarion of the far right seems to be having second thoughts about how far right it wants to go.
Faced with an advertiser boycott and plummeting readership, Breitbart News has lately been trimming back some of its more extreme elements in what may be a bid for more mainstream respectability.
The site’s visitor traffic has fallen 53 percent since November, from 22.96 million unique individuals to 10.76 million last month, according to ComScore, which tracks Web trends. Other news sites have seen a falloff since the election, too — The Washington Post and the New York Times are off 24 and 26 percent during this period, respectively — but Breitbart’s losses are at roughly twice the mainstream rate.
At the same time, an advertiser blacklist of Breitbart organized by an anonymous online group called Sleeping Giants appears to be biting hard. Only 26 companies had ads on Breitbart last month, down from 242 in March, according to the marketing-news site Digiday. It said the remaining advertisers were primarily smaller direct-response companies, although Amazon.com remains one of its sponsors, despite pressure from its employees to cut ties to the site (Amazon’s chief executive is Jeffrey P. Bezos, who owns The Post).
The release of former FBI director Jim Comey’s prepared text for his upcoming congressional testimony has created a moment of crisis for Republicans and conservatives. And many are failing the challenge. Their reactions are revealing a profound dishonesty that far exceeds the norms of usual political spin, and are demonstrating that the Trumpified quarters of the GOP and the conservative movement are intellectually bankrupt and devoid of principle. These partisans now stand naked, and it sure ain’t pretty. It’s also a bad sign for the health of our constitutional democracy….
(I’d assume that GOP politicians and core Trump supporters will hold out long into the future; they’ll not yield. This ends when Trump, himself, is politically and legally ruined, so that there’s nothing left to support. See, Trump, His Inner Circle, Principal Surrogates, and Media Defenders.)
This is the sixth post in a series considering related local topics of cultures & communications within the city.