Good morning.

This small city will see abundant sunshine and a high of thirty-six today. Sunrise is 6:49 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 40m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 94.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Department meets this evening at 6:30 PM.

Worth reading in full —

Jennifer Rubin offers conservatives opposed to the incoming administration The independent center-right’s Trump survival guide: “First, tell the truth. Bret Stephens, a #NeverTrump journalist, explains:

What a columnist owes his readers isn’t a bid for their constant agreement. It’s independent judgment. Opinion journalism is still journalism, not agitprop. The elision of that distinction and the rise of malevolent propaganda outfits such as Breitbart News is one of the most baleful trends of modern life. Serious columnists must resist it. …

Many things explain Mr. Trump’s unexpected victory, but not the least of them was the ability of his core supporters to shut out the inconvenient Trump facts: the precarious foundations of his wealth, the plasticity of his convictions, the astonishing frequency of his lying. Mr. Trump attracted millions of voters thirsty to believe. That thirst may hold its own truth, but it doesn’t lessen a columnist’s responsibility to note that it won’t be slaked by another hollow slogan of redemption.

This is the distinction between cheerleaders (e.g., Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity) and actual journalists. The former’s loyalty is to a person, the latter’s to intellectual integrity and accuracy. It will be more important than ever, as Stephens says, for the latter to remain stalwart, calling it as they see it. The instinct to “give him a chance” and “pick your fights” may apply to activists, lawmakers and interest groups as part of strategic calculations; there is no similar obligation for journalists to suspend judgment or be lenient on liars.”

Tyler Kingkade considers What A Trump Presidency Could Mean For Combating Campus Rape: “Now, many are bracing for Donald Trump’s administration to take a more conservative approach to addressing to sexual assault on college campuses, largely due to the people he’ll appoint to lead the US Department of Education.  Policy wonks, higher education consultants, and rape victims’ advocates tell BuzzFeed News they are preparing for possible changes under Trump. Many expect the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights — the agency investigating more than 200 colleges, and nearly 100 K-12 school districts for mishandled sexual assault cases — to be less active. Republicans will also likely try to roll back a consequential “Dear Colleague” letter issued to schools by the Obama administration in 2011. The letter detailed what the gender equity law Title IX requires schools to do about sexual assault reports, including what standard of evidence should be used in campus disciplinary cases.”

Andrew Flowers writes that Most Welfare Dollars Don’t Go Directly To Poor People Anymore: “The 1996 reform didn’t result in a reduction in total spending on welfare, now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Since 1998, the first year for which we have complete data, total TANF spending — both from federal block grants as well as required state matching funds — has remained essentially flat, after adjusting for inflation,¹The monthly average of the Consumer Price Index was used to deflate the annual spending statistics. according to data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that is critical of welfare reform. Per-person spending has fallen, however: In 2014 there were about 12 million more people below the poverty level than in 1998, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. population has grown nearly 20 percent during that time….The result has been a dramatic shift of resources away from cash assistance and toward spending on other programs. In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.”

George Selgin’s started the countdown (3, 2, 1…) until Trump blames the Federal Reserve for Trump’s own ignorance & policy failures: “A newly-elected president Trump will quickly turn from making the Fed a scapegoat for his own campaigns’ tribulations to blaming it for his economic policy failures — starting with the equities market nose dive that’s likely to follow his surprise victory. But instead of continuing to rail against the Fed’s supposedly easy policy stance, you can bet that president-elect Trump would soon be blaming it for keeping money too tight.  In any event, a newly-elected Trump administration, through its unveiled hostility toward the Fed, could not fail to make that already “political” institution even more so, for the Fed knows very well that, if it wants to preserve its vaunted independence, it had better heed the administrations’ wishes. That’s what former Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, who understood the true nature of the Fed’s independence better than anyone, meant when he explained that the Fed was independent, not “from,” but “within,” the government.”

What if everything worked backwards? That would be Preposterous:

Good morning.

Here in Whitewater we’ll have cloudy skies giving way to sunshine and a high of fifty-six. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 4:30 PM, for 9h 42m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Common Council meets at for a public hearing on the 2017 municipal budget, 6:30 PM, and there will be a Fire Department business meeting at 7 PM.

Worth reading in full —

Kurt Eichenwald lists Two Myths Democrats Swallowed That Cost Them The Election: “1. The Myth of the All-Powerful Democratic National Committee. Easily the most ridiculous argument this year was that the DNC was some sort of monolith that orchestrated the nomination of Hillary Clinton against the will of “the people.” This was immensely popular with the Bernie-or-Busters, those who declared themselves unwilling to vote for Clinton under any circumstances because the Democratic primary had been rigged (and how many of these people laughed when Trump started moaning about election rigging?). The notion that the fix was in was stupid, as were the people who believed it….2. The Myth That Sanders Would Have Won Against Trump….”

Fiona Hill describes how Putin and the Kremlin are experts at reading the popular mood. And they were watching America: “Putin does not have deep knowledge of the intricacies of U.S. party politics. He cares little for the mechanics of the American electoral system and its complexities, and is disdainful of the messy nature of democracy in general. But one thing he does know well is how to gauge the national mood, play with emotions, and manipulate people. He also knows how to take the measure of individuals and exploit their flaws and weaknesses.”

Nelson Schwartz reports on Trump supporters’ hopes that he’ll save their jobs: “He cited Carrier again and again on the campaign trail, threatening to phone executives at the company and its parent, United Technologies, and to hit them with 35 percent tariffs on any furnaces and air-conditioners they imported from Mexico. To the cheers of his supporters, he predicted at rallies that Carrier would call him up as president and say, “Sir, we’ve decided to stay in the United States.” Now his supporters expect action. “If he doesn’t pass that tariff, I will vote the other way next time,” warned Nicole Hargrove, who has worked at Carrier for a decade and a half and is not certain what she will do if and when her job goes to Mexico.”

Trump moves to make government business his family’s business: “The Trump team has asked the White House to explore the possibility of getting his children the top secret security clearances. Logistically, the children would need to be designated by the current White House as national security advisers to their father to receive top secret clearances. However, once Mr. Trump becomes president, he would be able to put in the request himself.  His children would need to fill out the security questionnaire (SF-86) and go through the requisite background checks.  While nepotism rules prevent the president-elect from hiring his kids to work in the White House, they do not need to be government officials to receive top secret security clearances.”

Good morning,

In Whitewater, we’ll have a partly cloudy Monday with a high of fifty-nine. Sunrise is 6:37 AM and sunset 4:31 PM, for 9h 44m 29s of daytime. The moon is full today.

On this day in 1851, Moby-Dick is first published. On this day in 1861, historian Frederick Jackson Turner is born in Portage, Wisconsin. On this day in 1891, Frederick Banting, a Nobel Laureate for his pioneering treatment of diabetes with insulin, is born.

Worth reading in full — 

Andrew Sullivan sees Trump triumphant: “This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come — with this massive victory, he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast. He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court….”

David Remnick sees normalization leading to restrictions on civil liberties: “In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”….”

Kevin Drum urges his fellow progressives to calm down: “But he’s [Trump’s] not a cult leader beyond his own small base of superfans, and he’s not a king. Congress has its own ideas about what it wants to do, and they will do it. Trump will learn that repealing executive orders is harder than he thinks, and it’s unlikely he has the attention span to really keep at it. Hell, repealing Obamacare will be harder than Trump thinks. He’s not going to declare martial law or round up Muslims and throw them in internment camps. He will likely face a recession, but not a financial collapse. When it happens, the Fed will take the lead, and Republicans will throw money at it. That’s hypocritical, but also perfectly OK as a policy response….”

Masha Gessen offers rules for survival in an autocratic politics: “I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now:

Rule #1: Believe the autocrat. He means what he says. Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable. Back in the 1930s, The New York Times assured its readers that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was all posture. More recently, the same newspaper made a telling choice between two statements made by Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov following a police crackdown on protesters in Moscow: “The police acted mildly—I would have liked them to act more harshly” rather than those protesters’ “liver should have been spread all over the pavement.” Perhaps the journalists could not believe their ears. But they should—both in the Russian case, and in the American one….”

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of fifty-six.  Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 4:32 PM, for 9h 46m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Sometimes squirrels simply go mad & bad, as the residents of the Sterling Court retirement home in Deltona, Fl. recently learned:

On this day in 1927, the Holland Tunnel opens “with President Coolidge ceremonially opening the tunnel from his yacht by turning the same key that had ‘opened’ the Panama Canal in 1915.”  On this day in 1858, Wisconsin brewers John Gund and Gottlieb Heileman found the Heileman Brewery in La Crosse.