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Culture, Politics

Anecdotes About Politics in a Small Town

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I posted last week about how it’s mistaken to think that most leaders in a small town are direct, forthright (see Plain-Spoken in a Small Town? Not Most Leaders).

Here are two stories about how politics sometimes works in a small town.

At a candidates’ forum last year, I had the pleasure of seeing a few residents speaking about their candidacies for a local office. One of the questions for each candidate was what he or she thought of Act 10. (For new readers visiting from out-of state, first a welcome, and second an explanation that Act 10 is the provision of Wisconsin law by which, among other provisions, Wisconsin restricts the collective bargaining rights of most public workers.)

Act 10 has been controversial, and so there’s really no one in the state who doesn’t have an opinion, one way or the other. Among candidates for office – those who are actually thinking about politics – anyone should have a clear opinion, whether favorable or unfavorable. (I opposed Act 10 as I doubted it would save money, and more fundamentally because I believe that anyone, in any vocation, should be able to organize vigorously against government for any lawful reason. That, by the way, would be the traditional libertarian view. My opposition has been clear.)

As it turns out, the oldest of the three candidates, having been in local politics for decades, couldn’t give a straight answer. Instead, he ventured that he once supported Act 10, before the felt that perhaps it might have gone a bit too far, before his voice trailed off and he had nothing more to say on the matter.

All those decades in office, so eager to be a town notable, and on one of the biggest political topics of state politics – affecting every community in Wisconsin – nothing but an ambiguous, let’s-not-make-waves answer.

That’s a scene from small-town politics.

(An aside: After the forum, this same candidate saw me in the audience, noticed that I had a notebook, and walked over to speak to me. He didn’t bother to introduce himself, but he did point to the notebook and ask, “where are you from?” One could guess his meaning, but I decided to give an unexpected answer, so I told him the name of the street on which I live, to see how he would react. He showed no sign that I was teasing him, not the slightest sense of humor or irony, and instead replied, “No, I mean what paper are you from?”

I smiled, and told him that I wasn’t from a newspaper, but was merely taking notes. He politely reassured me that it was okay to take notes during a public candidates forum. For a moment I thought that I would thank him for his gracious reassurance, but I decided against it, as he might have taken that, too, as a literal reply.)

Here’s my second anecdote, from public ceremony, a few years ago. While introducing a guest speaker, a local politician stopped to ask how long that speaker had lived in the community, and the speaker replied that he had been in Whitewater for (if I recall) about thirty years or so.  On hearing this, the politician approvingly replied that he guessed the townies (a term I don’t use) must have thought that after so much time he was one of their own.

Now I’ve lived in Whitewater for many years, have been an American all my life, from a family that was American before there was an America (so to speak), but it would never have occur to me to think what others thought on the matter should ever matter to me.

To think otherwise is to be mired in an identity politics.  Identity politics is strong in a place like Whitewater, but such strength as that only leads to a weak economy of empty streets, empty stores, low-wage jobs, and deteriorating buildings.

If someone came here a lifetime, a year, or a day ago, my first thought would be the same: what does one believe, and how will one carry on in advancement of those beliefs?  What does one think, and what will one do?

The proper question isn’t where or when, but what.   Where should be about what, about those principles that uplift and improve.

The gap between successful and unsuccessful towns is measured in the distance between where and what, each additional inch of separation being a community loss.

Libertarians, Trump

That’s Not What Libertarian Means

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Over at the Washington Post, one reads that In West Virginia coal country, voters are ‘thrilled’ about Donald Trump.  The mayor of Buckhannon (a Republican who voted for Clinton) describes Trump’s appeal:

Trump’s appeal here is stylistic as well as policy-driven, said David McCauley, the mayor of Buckhannon, the county seat, a pretty and bustling town of 5,700. It’s about coal, but also about being ornery and oppositional.

“Trump was just what people here have always been — skeptical of government, almost libertarian,” McCauley said. “He’s a West Virginia pipe dream: He’s going to undo the damage to the coal industry and bring back the jobs, and all of our kids down there in North Carolina are going to come home.”

McCauley is also a professor at a nearby university, and he doubtless knows that Trump’s not ‘almost libertarian’ – McCauley’s describing how people in that town see Trump.

I don’t doubt that there are people, ill-informed or desperate (or both) who think that Trump’s skeptical of government, but such people are as far off the mark as they could be.  Trump’s disposition and political views are closer to authoritarian than libertarian.

It’s a compliment that people see libertarianism as a good, hopeful politics, because of course it is. But it’s a good, hopeful politics not for its stylistic elements but for its fundamental principles:

FREE MARKETS in CAPITAL, LABOR, & GOODS, INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY, LIMITED & OPEN GOVERNMENT, and PEACE

A state-loving, market-meddling, press-hating, expression-restricting, minority-demonizing, foreign autocrat-loving mendacious mediocrity isn’t a libertarian, an almost-libertarian, or anyone libertarians would ever support.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.7.16

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Good morning.

Midweek in this small city will be mostly cloudy with a high of twenty-seven.  Sunrise is 7:13 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 07m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 51.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets at 6 PM.

It’s the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  On this day in 1954, U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy receives widespread criticism for the baseless charge that Pres. Eisenhower was “weak on Chinese communists.”

Worth reading in full — 

In 75 years later, USS Arizona band remembered, Meg Jones writes about members of a a U.S. Navy band on the deck of the U.S.S. Arizona at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor: “My grandparents as well as a lot of others didn’t know if their sons were alive or dead. I think the shock of it was so bad they never really talked about it,” said Nielsen, a retired optometrist who lives in Michigan. “Looking back now I think that it was such a significant thing that happened that it kind of derailed a lot of things in their lives. I just don’t think they had as much happiness in their life.” All Nielsen has is a few photos of his uncle, a newspaper clipping of his obituary and his Purple Heart. “I often think what it would have been like had he survived and had a nice career in music. I can just see him surviving the ’40s and being involved in music in some way. Who knows? Jazz or Nashville or something like that,” Nielsen said.”

Jason Stein writes that a Walker official predicts worsening roads, rising debt: “Madison — The share of Wisconsin highways in poor condition is on track to double over a decade, debt payments are set to rise for the next several years and state costs are poised to outpace new money for road and highway projects, Gov. Scott Walker’s transportation secretary told lawmakers Tuesday. There are 12,000 miles of Interstate, state and U.S. highways in Wisconsin and by 2027 42% of them will be in poor condition if the state doesn’t find new revenue or other solutions, state Transportation Secretary Mark Gottlieb testified Tuesday. In the coming years, the state is expected to end up using up to a quarter of every dollar in its road fund for debt payments under Gov. Scott Walker’s two-year plan to borrow a half billion dollars for highway and bridge projects, Gottlieb said in more than three hours of painstaking testimony.”

Predictably, Time magazine has selected its person of the year.

The AP reports on a supposed sale of Trump’s assets in Aide says Donald Trump sold stocks in June but offers no proof: “WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump sold all of his stocks in June as he plunged into the costly general election campaign, his transition team abruptly announced Tuesday. His advisers provided no proof of the transactions and would not explain the apparent sell-off.”

Even disposable materials may form realistic sculptures —

Economy, Employment

Trump’s Carrier Deal: Fewer Saved Jobs With Each Passing Day

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Desperate but hopeful people wanted to keep their jobs with Carrier in Indiana.  As it turns out, the promises of over a thousand jobs retained (albeit at a cost to other taxpayers) were exaggerated, whether by carelessness or manipulation:

INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) – The Carrier deal, brokered by President-elect Donald Trump, may not have saved as many factory jobs as was presented at the plant last week in Indianapolis.

Carrier workers received a flyer from the United Steelworkers, Local Union 1999. It details which jobs are staying here in Indy and which are going to Mexico. The numbers are a bit different from last week’s big announcement.

Last Thursday, amid much fanfare, President-elect Trump spent time on the factory floor and talked with union workers at the westside Indianapolis Carrier plant.

“We’re keeping a little over 1,100 jobs it turns out,” he told them.

He also made a big announcement about a big deal reached with United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, to save 1,100 American jobs that were going to be moved to Mexico….

But [T.J.] Bray and other union workers just learned some new numbers about the actual number of production jobs saved by the Trump-Pence deal….

“We found out today that more jobs are leaving than what we originally thought,” Bray said. “It seemed like since Thursday, it was 1,100 then it was maybe 900 and then now we’re at 700. So I’m hoping it doesn’t go any lower than that.”

Union workers got a letter at the plant saying Trump’s deal with Carrier will save only 730 factory jobs in Indianapolis, plus 70 salaried positions – 553 jobs in the plant’s fan coil lines are still moving to Monterrey, Mexico.

All 700 workers at Carrier’s Huntington plant will also lose their jobs.

Via USW: 730 union jobs saved in Carrier deal – not 1,100 @ WTHR.

Berlusconi, Far-Right Populism, Politics, Trump

Berlusconi’s Political Career as a Partial Analog for Trump’s

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One reads much these days about how similar Trump and Silvio Berlusconi supposedly are. There’s something tempting about comparing Trump’s political situation to Silvio Berlusconi’s: both are businessmen, held no earlier office before winning a national election, are admirers of Putin, crude, anti-intellectual, and lecherous.

There’s reason to look at parallels between the two; one needn’t look at those parallels exclusively, or with high confidence.

In The Dangers of Anti-Trumpism, Cinzia Arruzza argues that “Silvio Berlusconi’s tenure as Italian prime minister shows how not to resist an authoritarian demagogue.”  She’s careful, however, about the strength and weakness of comparing the two:

Trump’s very resistible rise to power is, to a certain extent, more astonishing than Berlusconi’s more predictable first electoral victory. While Trump hijacked the Republican Party, running up against opposition from a large part of the Republican establishment and from the media, Berlusconi used his media empire to both control information and create a new political party, accordingly reshaping the political spectrum….

Moreover, Berlusconi did not agitate for isolationism and protectionism, did not challenge international market agreements, and did not question Italy’s participation in the creation of the European Union and the eurozone — at least not until 2011. Finally, Italy does not play any hegemonic geopolitical role comparable to that of the United States.

These differences are significant enough to caution against facile predictions about the course of Trump’s presidency based on Italian vicissitudes. They do not, however, mean that nothing can be learned from the Italian experience….

That seems right: that there is something to learn, but that something offers a limited, partial understanding.

(In any event, I’ve no confidence whatever that a move toward Arruzza’s suggestion of a “radical and credible alternative” [emphasis added] would be a sound alternative to Trump.  Arruzza contends that “it was thanks to the neoliberal and austerity policies carried out by the center-left in the subsequent six years [after Berlusconi was first ousted] that Berlusconi’s power was consolidated [in his return to office].

I’ll not question her sense of the Italian scene, and how a traditional approach only allowed Berlusconi to return to office.  It’s enough to observe that Trump is, simply put, a radical populist, and Americans will find nothing but hardship in replacing one radicalism with another.  Running away from constitutional and political norms in a different direction won’t make us stronger.)

So for us, of Berlusconi’s example, one can say that there are lessons, but only partial ones.

Local Government, Politics

Stakeholder’s Just Another Word for Special Interest

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local In a small town like Whitewater, there’s much emphasis on finding and listening to stakeholders. In fact, local policymaking is mostly stakeholder policymaking.

As stakeholders aren’t merely and exclusively residents, but are more often influential residents and local special interests (business groups, business people, etc.) there’s a double-counting of connected residents, as though one gets a vote as a resident and again as a resident business person, for example. Stakeholders are mostly longstanding incumbents. A stakeholder politics is like nepotism, with longstanding, cozy connections instead of blood ties.

Officials in Whitewater will complain about a same-ten-people problem, but stakeholder politics rests on the same ten people, not as problem, but as a cardinal feature.

The benefit to officials is that the same ten people are well-known, and unlikely to present surprises. The disadvantage is that the same ten people exercise authority under conditions of dirigisme and so of stagnation. Familiarity brings a price tag of insularity, stagnation, and relative decline. See, along these lines, The People in the Room.

To get a sense of how addled stakeholder politics is, consider an account of a meeting two years ago to find a new chancellor for UW-Whitewater. (See, from a local newspaper, UW-Whitewater chancellor session held.)   The story – written not by a reporter but a ‘correspondent’ with university ties – describes a search consultant’s question to the assembled town notables:

[Search Consultant] Kozloff stated, “We really want to get a sense from all the various stakeholders of what you’re looking for in this new leader.”

“Many of you have known Dick Telfer for a number of years,” Bellman said. “We’re also interested in characteristics, attributes, strengths and skills that Dick has displayed over the years … things that you felt were particularly positive in integrating and understanding what is important in the community.”

….Much of the discussion focused on characteristics of Telfer that the group believes would be essential in a new chancellor, including high energy, being approachable and a good listener, understanding that the university is one of the major economic anchors in the community, and being a visible and active member of community life.

[Whitewater City Manager] Clapper said he hoped that the new chancellor would, like Telfer, “think about not just what’s going on in the office — not just what’s going on on campus — but how those those are going to impact the community that surrounds it.”

If one read only the story, and believed it as written, one wouldn’t guess that Telfer was passed over as chancellor more than once, pushed state capitalist schemes in opposition to any evident understanding of economics or entrepreneurship, presided over a campus with a large number of sexual assaults, two of which led to federal complaints against the university, and would later find himself a defendant in a federal lawsuit from a coach who would claim defamation and that the coach’s firing was the result of reporting a sexual assault to the police.  (I’ve a link to a long list of posts describing Telfer’s disappointing career.)

It’s wholly possible that every stakeholder in the room that day believed everything that he or she said. Meaning, of course, that it’s wholly possible that every stakeholder in the room that day lacked the discernment and judgment expected of an ordinary person.

The truth of stakeholder politics is special interest politics, and the result of special interest politics is weak judgment that produces inferior results. more >>

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.6.16

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Good morning.

Here in Whitewater, we’ll have a partly sunny Tuesday with a high of thirty-five.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset is 4:20 PM, for 9h 08m 42s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 40.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s city government will hold a public meeting on street reconstruction from 4:30 – 6 PM, and the city’s common council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1923, Pres. Coolidge delivers the first formal presidential address over the radio. On this day in 1821, Wisconsin’s first post office is established.

Worth reading in full —

Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward report on how the Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste:

“The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post. Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results. The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.”

Patrick Marley writes that Wisconsin’s Republicans crank up highway dispute: “Madison– Wisconsin Republicans amped up the debate over road funding Monday, with one side releasing a video to highlight the poor condition of highways and the other warning that drivers could be hit with a big tax increase. Monday’s positioning underscored the deep divisions among Republicans who control Wisconsin’s government when it comes to spending on highways. The state faces a road funding gap of about $1 billion over the next two years. Gov. Scott Walker says he won’t raise gas taxes or vehicle fees unless an equivalent cut is made in other taxes. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) argues a tax or fee hike may be necessary.”

Alissa Rubin reports that A New Wave of Popular Fury Could Hit Europe in 2017: “PARIS — For Europe, 2016 has brought a series of political shocks: near-record numbers of immigrants arriving from the Middle East and Africa; a vote by Britain to leave the European Union and renewed threats by Russia to meddle on the continent. But 2017 could be even bumpier. There will be at least three elections in Europe next year: in Germany, France and the Netherlands for sure, and now perhaps in Italy, too. Just about everywhere, political establishments are being blamed for tepid growth, for too few jobs and for favoring global financial markets over the common citizen. The latest indicator of popular discontent was Italy’s referendum on Sunday, when voters rejected constitutional changes proposed by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. That result was a stinging blow to Mr. Renzi, who said he would resign.”

Lawrence Freedman (@LawDavF), now emeritus professor of War Studies at King’s College London, finds himself (as do so many others) needing to defend the nature of historical fact (in response to the claim that “history is a matter of opinion and every player writes his own version):

One reads that “deep in the forest of Overland Park, Kan., little gnomes made a home. But how did they get there? This is the story of paying it forward, one little house at a time….”

The Gnomist: A Great Big Beautiful Act Of Kindness from Great Big Story on Vimeo.

 

Mendacity, Politics, Reasoning, Twitter

The Post-Truth Crowd

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Scottie Nell Hughes, a CNN political commentator and the political editor of Right Alerts, blithely declares that we’re in a post-truth era, where facts don’t exist apart from opinion:

“It is an idea of an opinion. On one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies but on the other half there are many people who say, no, it’s true….

One thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch, is that people that say facts are facts – they’re not really facts….

Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There are no such things, unfortunately, as facts.

So Mr Trump’s tweets, amongst a certain crowd, a large part of the population, are truth.”

One encounters this on Twitter frequently.  Consider the following exchange I had there recently:

Adams: Inner monologue replaces epistemology: Claims, With No Evidence, That ‘Millions of People’ Voted Illegally http://nyti.ms/2gvxNOi

Chutzpah (Deplorable) [his handle, not my description]: Quoting NYT defeats your purpose and makes it fiction. Journalists should prove #trump wrong not just yell falsehoods.

One sees three things here: (1) Chutzpah (Deplorable) believes that although Trump can assert what he wants, it’s not Trump’s burden of proof to confirm Trump’s own statements, (2) nothing in the New York Times can be right, and (3) it’s supposedly clever to defend Trump (whose most rabid Twitter followers include a cadre of anti-Semites) while using a Yiddish term and describing oneself as deplorable.

The big issue is that ‘Chutzpah (Deplorable)’ and his ilk (Russian trolls, nativists, etc.) think that those who assert have no obligation to prove their own contentions – it’s others who have to disprove them.  This is convenient, because by that standard if they spew twenty baseless claims per hour, they’ll tie up the discourse with no greater effort than the time it takes to make up stories.

This is an attempt to overturn millennia of reasoning by shifting the philosophical burden of proof.

Likewise, although the frequency of baseless claims during the national campaign seems new (and cumulatively vast), it’s not new at the local level, where many communities have listened to glad-handing excuse-makers for years, even as conditions decline.  See Fake News Was a Local Problem Before It Was a National One.

Locally, it’s often a choice between whether one believes small-town officials & their sycophantic defenders or one’s own lying eyes.

A fact-free perspective is now a national problem, one that its defenders present as fact that there are no facts, the truth that there is no truth.

We’ll be years fighting this, but better to fight now for a few hard years, rather than many lost decades.

Liberty, Politics, Trump

Saletan’s Faint Hope of Manipulating an Autocrat

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Somewhere, there’s sure to be someone insisting that a hooligan who beat someone unconscious only did so from insecurity, envy, or bad toilet training.  That explanation should be of no comfort to a victim (should the victim even recover). The one thing of which one can be sure is that someone attacked another, causing severe injury.

In a similar way, William Saletan, writing at Slate, finds it reassuring to declare that Trump’s many whims and insecurities can be manipulated, in an essay entitled, Here’s how to manipulate Trump. On this reading, Trump’s a character defective man whose worst tendencies are manageable.

This is a false, silly reassurance: even if  Trump were easily manipulated, that task will only fall to a few schemers near him, not the tens of millions who will experience economic and personal loss as Trump tramples liberties and rejects sound policies.

Worse, of course, is the truth that an inner weakling who breaks another’s nose is still someone who broke another’s nose.  That he did these things from ignorance or disorder matters less than that one is covered in crimson.   The common person who suffers injury will not be able to manipulate anyone in power, shouldn’t have to do so, and would be a fool to think there’s consolation in the belief that he was injured only from another’s supposed emotional weakness.

Saletan can save his silly psychological analysis; the work of defending personal liberty will fall to those who resist transgressions without speculating about whether the transgressors are weak.

America, Liberty, Politics

Evan McMullin’s Ten Points for Principled Opposition to Authoritarianism

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On Twitter, conservative @Evan_McMullin lists ten principles for political opposition under a Trump Administration. Libertarians would do well to embrace, and live each day, all ten. McMullin’s ten tweets began on December 4th at 12:08 PM and concluded at 12:12 PM.

(Points Six and Seven are especially important: it’s a grand coalition that we’ll need, and so we should and must embrace people of all walks of life in our common political endeavor. Libertarians have much to contribute through our resolute defense of free markets, individual liberty, and peace; we will find that we have much to gain in alliances and with the support of others, ideologically different from us, who yet share a commitment to a free society.)

Listed below are all ten of McMullin’s points, useful for reviewing often to assure one stays on the right path.

1. Read and learn the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Know that our basic rights are inalienable.

2. Identify and follow many credible sources of news. Be very well informed and learn to discern truth from untruth.

3. Watch every word, decision and action of Trump and his administration extremely closely, like we have never done before in America.

4. Be very vocal in every forum available to us when we observe Trump’s violations of our rights and our democracy. Write, speak, act.

5. Support journalists, artists, academics, clergy and others who speak truth and who inform, inspire and unite us.

6. Build bridges with Americans from the other side of the traditional political spectrum and with members of diverse American communities.

7. Defend others who may be threatened by Trump even if they don’t look, think or believe like us. An attack on one is an attack on all.

8. Organize online and in person with other Americans who understand the danger Trump poses and who are also willing to speak up.

9. Hold members of Congress accountable for protecting our rights and democracy through elections and by making public demands of them now.

10. And finally, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, have “malice toward none, with charity for all” and never ever lose hope!

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.5.16

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Good morning.

Whitewater’s week begins with cloudy skies and a high of thirty-five. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 4:20 PM, for 9h 09m 44s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 30.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1933, national Prohibition comes to an end when Utah becomes the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the Constitution. On this day in 1879, Wisconsin’s humane society is organized.

Worth reading in full —

Italy’s Premier, Matteo Renzi, Says He’ll Resign After Reform Is Rejected: “ROME — Italy plunged into political and economic uncertainty early Monday as Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said he would resign after voters decisively rejected constitutional changes, a step certain to reverberate across a European Union already buffeted by anti-establishment anger. “The ‘no’ won in an incredibly clear way,” Mr. Renzi said from the Chigi Palace. Holding back tears as he spoke in front of Italian and European Union flags, the usually brash and confident 41-year-old said, “I assume all the responsibility of the defeat,” adding that “my experience of government ends here.” He said he would go later on Monday to the country’s president, Sergio Mattarella, and “tender my resignation.”

Austria Rejects Far-Right Presidential Candidate Norbert Hofer: “VIENNA — In rejecting a far-right candidate for president on Sunday, voters in Austria showed the limitations of President-elect Donald J. Trump’s tailwinds on a continent where extremist politics have traditionally brought cataclysm. Call it the other Trump effect, one that may sow caution among some European voters suspicious of the advances of populist politicians. Populist forces have unsettled politics in Europe and the United States, frequently by using fake news and fanning fears of globalization and migration. The British vote to leave the European Union this year was complicated by such anxieties. The rejection of constitutional changes in Italy on Sunday hinged on a variety of issues. But the choice before Austrians was perhaps the starkest. The bitter yearlong campaign for the presidency pitted Norbert Hofer, a leader of the far-right Freedom Party, founded in the 1950s by former Nazis, against a mild-mannered 72-year-old former Green Party leader, Alexander Van der Bellen.”

Trump’s Taiwan phone call was long planned, say people who were involved: “Donald Trump’s protocol-breaking telephone call with Taiwan’s leader was an intentionally provocative move that establishes the incoming president as a break with the past, according to interviews with people involved in the planning. The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks. The call also reflects the views of hard-line advisers urging Trump to take a tough opening line with China, said others familiar with the months of discussion about Taiwan and China.”

You Heard It Here First: Trump May Not Propose A Budget Next Year: “The Trump administration is seriously thinking about not submitting a budget to Congress next year. Although the Congressional Budget Act requires the president to submit the fiscal 2018 budget to Congress between January 2 and February 6, Trump could easily say that it was the responsibility of the outgoing Obama administration to comply with the law before the new president was sworn in on January 20. But while the new president not sending a budget to Congress might not be illegal, it would clearly be unprecedented….So why might the Trump administration want to punt on this major opportunity by not submitting a budget? First, it would allow Trump to avoid the complaints that always come from those the budget proposals would harm by denying them a platform to criticize the White House. No proposals on paper would mean nothing to disparage.”

We should thank Carmela Vitale for her clever invention, the reason that pizzas come with that plastic table in the center:

Film

When Pro Surfers Learn to Farm

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What happens when a group of professional surfers get tired of the global surfing circuit? This charming short documentary tells the story of how three friends abandoned their sports careers for the whimsical calling of growing organic vegetables on Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way. “Surfing’s quite similar to farming in the way that you can do what you can to have a productive crop, but sometimes nature has different ideas,” says Matt Smith, one of the founders of Moy Hill CSA Farm. This film comes to us from the world-traveling web series The Perennial Plate. To learn more about this series, visit its Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pages.

Via The Atlantic.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 12.4.16

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Good morning.

We’ll have snow this Sunday in Whitewater, with a modest accumulation, and a daytime high of thirty-two. Sunrise is 7:10 AM and sunset 4:21 PM, for 9h 10m 49s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 22.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1783, at Fraunces Tavern, George Washington says farewell to his officers. On this day in 1945, on a vote of 65-7, the U.S. Senate approves participation in the United Nations.

Worth reading in full —

Steve Inskeep sees a difference between Donald Trump and the Legacy of Andrew Jackson: “For all the similarities, there’s a big difference between Jackson’s victory and Trump’s: Jackson’s greatest political achievement was the widening of democratic space. He brought new groups of voters into the political system. Expanding voting rights and a growing media perfectly coincided with his attention-grabbing campaigns, and the popular vote total tripled—tripled—between Jackson’s loss in 1824 and his victory in 1828. Trump, too, aspired to widen the electorate, but with less success. It’s true that he attracted some former Democrats, and received more votes than any Republican candidate in history, slightly more than George W. Bush in 2004. But in key states his party made it harder to vote. Among those who did participate, as of this writing, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than 2.3 million. While the national popular vote has no legal significance, it matters politically, as Jackson grasped in the 1820’s. It matters enough to Trump that he volunteered a conspiracy theory to explain his failure to win it.”

Nathan Pilkington debunks Five myths about the decline and fall of Rome: “The rise of Donald Trump supposedly heralds the decline of the American idea, according to many of his critics, who’ve taken the opportunity to compare this moment to the fall of Rome’s republic in 31 B.C. or its empire in the 5th century A.D. Any historian is happy when their period of study comes into vogue, but these requiems leave a false impression of Roman antiquity and the causes of its greatest crises. MYTH NO. 1. America is going throughwhat republican Rome did….”

Gary D’Amato writes that in the Big Ten title game, UW’s collapse [was] swift, severe: “Indianapolis– In one half of uncharacteristically bad football Saturday, the Wisconsin Badgers went from sniffing the College Football Playoff to, well, OK, a great consolation prize in Pasadena to, ugh, a likely date with Western Michigan in the Cotton Bowl.”

Molly Beck writes that for the Lincoln Hills and Cooper Lake facilities, there’s No resolution to youth prison investigation one year after raid: “State officials and lawmakers say they haven’t been briefed on the timetable for the completion of the investigation, which has been headed by federal authorities for nearly a year. “I don’t know what they’re doing or what their schedule is,” said John Paquin, administrator for the state Department of Correction’s division of juvenile corrections. And a DOC spokesman said the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office, which is handling a review of the allegations, hasn’t told department officials where the investigation stands. “They haven’t really shared much with us,” said DOC spokesman Tristan Cook. Wisconsin Department of Justice spokesman Johnny Koremenos also said state investigators haven’t been involved in the investigation since the FBI took over in February. The state had launched its own investigation in early 2015.”

So how would someone brew mead? Here’s how —