Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be windy with showers, and a high of fifty. Sunrise is 6:36 AM and sunset 7:20 PM, for 12h 43m 39s of daytime. The moon is full today. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred sixth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1958, Chess Records releases Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode.

On this day in 1998, the Brewers go National:

[T]he Milwaukee Brewers played their first game as a National League Team, losing to the Atlanta Braves at Turner Field. The Brewers’ transfer, the first since the American League was formed at the turn of the century, was necessary to create a 16-team National League and a 14-team American League. [Source: “Brewer’s Timeline” on the team’s official Web site].

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Robert Shapiro writes Trump’s Census policy could boomerang and hurt red states as well as blue states:

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s decision this week to “reinstate” a question on citizenship status in the 2020 decennial Census (it was last asked in 1940), almost certainly will vastly increase the number of people who ignore or evade the 2020 decennial Census. The policy will certainly discourage undocumented immigrants from filling out a Census form, and so lower the official population count of nearly every state. Those states that would be most disadvantaged, however, are not those with simply the most undocumented people, such as New York and Illinois, but those 12 states whose undocumented populations account for more than the national average of 3.5 percent. That group is led, in order, by Nevada, Texas, California, New Jersey, Arizona, Florida and Maryland. For those states, the results could well mean fewer seats in Congress, fewer electoral votes, and smaller shares of more than $800 billion in annual federal funds allocated based in part on Census population data.

(Ross and Sessions explicitly tied the collection of 2020 Census information to federal law enforcement. That’s what makes his directive so remarkable and so dangerous.)

But the damage would be much more far-reaching. When Ross announced this decision, he said he did it at the behest of the Department of Justice and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, so DoJ could better enforce the Voting Rights Act by more accurately measuring how many people in each of the nation’s 72,000 Census tracts are eligible to vote. In so doing, Ross and Sessions explicitly tied the collection of 2020 Census information to federal law enforcement. That’s what makes his directive so remarkable and so dangerous.

My analysis, detailed below, suggests that some 24.3 million people would have good reason to skip the 2020 Census if they believe their names and addresses could be shared with law enforcement. Moreover, because most of them are not concentrated in the big blue states, and most of the federal funding tied to the Census involves programs like Medicaid, Section 8 housing assistance, and support for school lunches, the new Ross-Sessions policy could cut federal funding to the 23 mainly red states with poverty rates above the national average.

➤ Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg report Behind the chaos: Office that vets Trump appointees plagued by inexperience:

An obscure White House office responsible for recruiting and vetting thousands of political appointees has suffered from inexperience and a shortage of staff, hobbling the Trump administration’s efforts to place qualified people in key posts across government, documents and interviews show.

At the same time, two office leaders have spotty records themselves: a college dropout with arrests for drunken driving and bad checks and a Marine Corps reservist with arrests for assault, disorderly conduct, fleeing an officer and underage drinking.

The Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) is little known outside political circles. But it has far-reaching influence as a gateway for the appointed officials who carry out the president’s policies and run federal agencies.

Under President Trump, the office was launched with far fewer people than in prior administrations. It has served as a refuge for young campaign workers, a stopover for senior officials on their way to other posts and a source of jobs for friends and family, a Washington Post investigation found. One senior staffer has had four relatives receive appointments through the office.

➤ CBS News reports Concern over Russian ships lurking around vital undersea cables:

Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths. Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation?

Unsurprisingly, Russia isn’t saying.

But whatever Moscow’s intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival’s interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world’s calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions.

“We’ve seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven’t seen since the ’80s,” Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month.

➤ Lt. Col. Ralph Peters describes his departure in Why I left Fox News:

You could measure the decline of Fox News by the drop in the quality of guests waiting in the green room. A year and a half ago, you might have heard George Will discussing policy with a senator while a former Cabinet member listened in. Today, you would meet a Republican commissar with a steakhouse waistline and an eager young woman wearing too little fabric and too much makeup, immersed in memorizing her talking points.

This wasn’t a case of the rats leaving a sinking ship. The best sailors were driven overboard by the rodents.

As I wrote in an internal Fox memo, leaked and widely disseminated, I declined to renew my contract as Fox News’s strategic analyst because of the network’s propagandizing for the Trump administration. Today’s Fox prime-time lineup preaches paranoia, attacking processes and institutions vital to our republic and challenging the rule of law.

(As he served his country well for decades in the U.S. Army, he serves it well again by turning firmly away from Trumpism.)

➤ How ‘Bout The French Cake That’s Cooked on a Spit?:

Good morning.

Good Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-eight. Sunrise is 6:38 AM and sunset 7:19 PM, for 12h 40m 45s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.7% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred fifth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution takes effect:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.^[1]

On this day in 1865, Wisconsinites defend the Union at the Battle at Gravelly Run, Virginia:

The Battle at Gravelly Run erupted east of Petersburg, Virginia. The 6th, 7th and 36th Wisconsin Infantry regiments participated in this battle, which was one of a series of engagements that ultimately drove Confederate forces out of Petersburg. Wisconsin’s Iron Brigade regiments fought at Gravelly Run, and when ordered to fall back before the enemy, they were the last to leave the field.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ John Santucci, Matthew Mosk, and Stephanie Ebbs report EXCLUSIVE: More Cabinet trouble for Trump? EPA chief lived in condo tied to lobbyist ‘power couple’:

For much of his first year in Washington, President Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt occupied prime real estate in a townhouse near the U.S. Capitol that is co-owned by the wife of a top energy lobbyist, property records from 2017 show.

Neither the EPA nor the lobbyist, J. Steven Hart, would say how much Pruitt paid to live at the prime Capitol Hill address, though Hart said he believed it to be the market rate. The price tag on Pruitt’s rental arrangement is one key question when determining if it constitutes an improper gift, ethics experts told ABC News.

“I think it certainly creates a perception problem, especially if Mr. Hart is seeking to influence the agency,” said Bryson Morgan, the former investigative counsel at the U.S. House of Representatives Office of Congressional Ethics. “That’s why there is a gift rule.”

➤ Betsy Woodruff reports ICE Now Detaining Pregnant Women, Thanks to Trump Order:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ending its practice of automatically releasing pregnant women from detention, according to internal communications reviewed by The Daily Beast.

This is because of President Donald Trump’s executive order “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which requires stricter enforcement of immigration laws. Previously, the agency’s general practice was to release women from detention who were pregnant.

Now, pregnant women will only be able to get released if an ICE officer determines so on a case-by-case basis.

Pregnant women were still sometimes detained under the previous internal guidelines. Immigrants’ rights advocates say the practice is dangerous to women and to their unborn children, and that pregnant women are more likely to miscarry if they’re in detention than if they are free. This new policy means more pregnant women will spend time in detention.

➤ Conservative Michael Gerson contends This madness [Trumpism] will pass. Conservatives can’t give up:

If Trump were merely proposing a border wall and the more aggressive employment of tariffs, we would be engaged in a debate, not facing a schism. Both President Ronald Reagan and President George W. Bush played the tariff chess game. As a Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney endorsed the massive “self-deportation” of undocumented workers without the rise of a #NeverRomney movement.

But it is blind, even obtuse, to place Trumpism in the same category. Trump’s policy proposals — the details of which Trump himself seems unconcerned and uninformed about — are symbolic expressions of a certain approach to politics. The stated purpose of Trump’s border wall is to keep out a contagion of Mexican rapists and murderers. His argument is not taken from Heritage Foundation policy papers. He makes it by quoting the racist poem “The Snake,” which compares migrants to dangerous vermin. Trump proposes to ban migration from some Muslim-majority countries because Muslim refugees, as he sees it, are a Trojan-horse threat of terrorism. Trump’s policy ideas are incidental to his message of dehumanization.

…

Trump defines loyalty to conservatism as contempt for many of our neighbors. One might as well have proposed a fusion between popular sovereignty and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of inherent human rights. They were not a dialectic requiring a synthesis. They were alternatives demanding a choice.

…

For elected leaders to remind Americans who they are and affirm our common bonds. For conservative policy experts to define an agenda of working-class uplift, not an agenda of white resentment — which will consign Republicans to moral squalor and (eventually) to electoral irrelevance. For principled conservatives to hear the call of moral duty and stand up for their beliefs until this madness passes. As it will.

➤ Paul Waldman writes Republicans are reviving all their worst ideas right now. Here’s why:

As The Hill recently reported: “Republicans in the House are pivoting to messaging bills and away from the hot-button issues that have dominated the first two months of the year.” In case you’re wondering, “messaging bills” are those that are practically meaningless, but are meant to fool voters into thinking they’re doing something when they aren’t.

Not to be outdone, the administration has some idiotic, discredited ideas of his own. Last weekend, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told “Fox News Sunday” that the administration wanted a line-item veto, which would allow the president to veto individual parts of bills he doesn’t like. It was left to host Chris Wallace to inform him that the Supreme Court has already ruled a line-item veto unconstitutional, which seemed to leave the secretary confused but still allowed him to pretend that the president is peeved about all the spending he’s been forced to support.

(The end of Trumpism is a condition for a return to normality.)

➤ Last Sunday, CBS 60 Minutes interviewed Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ ‘Greek Freak’ (“Most people can’t pronounce his name, but he’s one of the best players in the NBA. And he has quite the story about how he got there”):

Good morning.

Maundy Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:40 AM and sunset 7:18 PM, for 12h 37m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred fourth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1865, the Appomattox Campaign begins in Virginia:

When it became clear that the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, was about to fall, Confederate leaders and troops began moving west toward the town of Appomattox Court House. Union troops, including several Wisconsin regiments, followed close on their heels in a series of battles fought March 29 – April 9, 1865, that became known as the Appomattox Campaign.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Mark Mazzetti reports Trump Aide Spoke During Campaign to Associate Tied to Russian Intelligence:

WASHINGTON — A top Trump campaign official had repeated communications during the final weeks of the 2016 presidential race with a business associate tied to Russian intelligence, according to a document released on Tuesday by the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election.

The campaign official, Rick Gates, had frequent phone calls in September and October 2016 with a person the F.B.I. believes had active links to Russian spy services at the time, the document said. Mr. Gates also told an associate the person “was a former Russian Intelligence Officer with the G.R.U.,” the Russian military intelligence agency.

The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is investigating numerous contacts between President Trump’s advisers and Russia-linked individuals and entities leading up to and after the November 2016 election. The document, filed in Mr. Mueller’s name, stated that the communications between Mr. Gates and the individual were “pertinent to the investigation.”

The individual is identified only as “Person A,” and the document describes him as someone who worked for Mr. Gates and Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, as part of their earlier representation of Russia-aligned parties and politicians in Ukraine, including the former president of Ukraine. A person with knowledge of the matter identified Person A as Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who for years was Mr. Manafort’s right-hand man in Ukraine.

➤ Michael S. Schmidt, Jo Becker, Mark Mazzetti, Maggie Haberman, and Adam Goldman report Trump’s Lawyer Raised Prospect of Pardons for Flynn and Manafort as Special Counsel Closed In:

WASHINGTON — A lawyer for President Trump broached the idea of Mr. Trump’s pardoning two of his former top advisers, Michael T. Flynn and Paul Manafort, with their lawyers last year, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

The discussions came as the special counsel was building cases against both men, and they raise questions about whether the lawyer, John Dowd, who resigned last week, was offering pardons to influence their decisions about whether to plead guilty and cooperate in the investigation.

The talks suggest that Mr. Trump’s lawyers were concerned about what Mr. Flynn and Mr. Manafort might reveal were they to cut a deal with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in exchange for leniency. Mr. Mueller’s team could investigate the prospect that Mr. Dowd made pardon offers to thwart the inquiry, although legal experts are divided about whether such offers might constitute obstruction of justice.

➤ Sharon LaFraniere reports Lawsuit Over Trump’s Ties to His Businesses Is Allowed to Advance:

WASHINGTON — A lawsuit accusing President Trump of violating the Constitution by refusing to divorce himself from his businesses cleared a critical hurdle Wednesday when a federal judge in Maryland refused the Justice Department’s plea to dismiss it.

In a 47-page opinion, Judge Peter J. Messitte rejected the federal government’s claims that the plaintiffs had not shown that they had suffered injuries that a court could address.

The suit, filed by Washington, D.C., and the State of Maryland, accuses Mr. Trump of violating constitutional anticorruption clauses intended to limit his receipt of government-bestowed benefits, or emoluments. The local jurisdictions claim that in hopes of currying presidential favor, government officials are patronizing Trump-owned properties instead of hotels or convention centers that the District of Columbia or Maryland own or have some financial interest in.

Although the case could still be thrown out on other grounds, the judge’s ruling adds to the president’s growing legal troubles.

➤ Sophie Tatum reports that Presidential misspellings create spike in dictionary searches:

President Donald Trump is known for his Twitter feed, often posting seemingly off-the-cuff messages or providing commentary on the news of the day.

But his seeming lack of a filter on the social media platform has also led to several misspellings. And it’s not always the President tapping away, he often dictates messages to an aide who ultimately presses send.

According to a report by Dictionary.com, when the President’s account has tweeted misspelled words, it has corresponded with a spike in searches of the same words spelled incorrectly on the website.

➤ Look toward The Hopeful Face of Middle America:

“I think that youth should be heard—and not only heard, but listened to,” says a teenager in the short documentary My America. As the reverberations from last weekend’s Marches for Our Lives continue to make headlines, Barnaby Roper’s film offers a galvanizing portrait of youth in America’s heartland.

Roper traversed middle America in search of answers after the 2016 election. “People would always say to me, ‘It was middle America’s fault,’” Roper told The Atlantic. “But I never understood this. So I wanted to go and see for myself. I wanted to make a film about the next generation of Americans—the generation that would inherit our successes and failures, our strengths and weaknesses.”

The production team, led by Cadence Films, encountered young people as diverse as the country in which they live. From teenagers fighting gun violence to extreme sports champions to misfits escaping homophobic families, the subjects of My America seem to have one thing in common: a disinclination to repeat the mistakes of an America past. “The American Dream is a total figment of the imagination,” says one young woman. “It died with history.”

Despite the fact that it was born of election results, Roper insists that “this is not a political film. It’s about hope. It’s about strength of the youth of our country. The youth of world need to be listened to.”

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 7:17 PM, for 12h 34m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 89.3% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred third day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1898, the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, rules that

A child born in the United States, of parents of Chinese descent, who, at the time of his birth, are subjects of the Emperor of China, but have a permanent domicil and residence in the United States, and are there carrying on business, and are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China, becomes at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States, by virtue of the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution,

All person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

On this day in 1933, a national group posthumously honors  C. Latham Sholes:

On this date a group of women paid thanks to the inventor of the typewriter, Milwaukee’s C. Latham Sholes, in a national radio program. Amelia Earhart, Anna Boettinger (Franklin Roosevelt’s daugher), Mrs. Robert E. Speer, the president of the National Young Women’s Christian Association, all participated in the program. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred Holmes, p. 316-328]

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ David A. Graham sees  A Cabinet of Conspicuous Corruption (“Wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars by several secretaries follows a tone set by the president”):

For spring cleaning this year, President Trump is looking at his Cabinet. The Associated Press reported Monday that Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin is near to being removed. When Trump fired H.R. McMaster as national-security adviser, that torpedoed a plan to dismiss McMaster, Shulkin, and Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, at once, according to Politico’s Eliana Johnson.

Shulkin and Carson face the same problem: dubious use of taxpayer dollars in their duties as secretaries. They can console themselves knowing that they’re in good company. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have been caught in extravagant expenditures, too. Less heartening is the sixth example, Tom Price, who was unceremoniously forced out as secretary of health and human services in September 2017.

This extravagant spending around public displays of status—call it, with apologies to Thorstein Veblen, conspicuous corruption—has become a trademark of the Trump administration. There are so many cases of huge spending of taxpayer dollars by Cabinet secretaries that it’s easy to lose track of them all—or simply to become desensitized—so here’s a few of the lowlights [summary follows in article].

➤ The Committee to Investigate Russia writes that  NRA Admits Accepting Foreign Funds:

The National Rifle Association (NRA) is admitting it does receive funds from foreign sources but claims it does not spend that money on U.S. elections, an assertion that is difficult for outsiders to evaluate.

NPR:

Pressure on the organization has also been increased by a McClatchy report which suggested that the FBI had been investigating whether a top Russian banker with Kremlin ties illegally funneled money to the NRA to aid President Trump’s campaign for president. The Federal Election Commission has also opened a preliminary investigation into this question.

The NRA is not required to be transparent about how money moves between its various political entities, and this leaves questions unanswered about how these foreign funds were ultimately spent.

In the context of ongoing investigations, Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the National Rifle Association earlier this month asking, “Can you categorically state that your organizations have never, wittingly or unwittingly, received any contributions from individuals or entities acting as conduits for foreign entities or interests?”

The NRA said that in fact they do receive foreign money, but not for election purposes.

(…)

The NRA’s response was not sufficient for Wyden. In a letter dated March 27, the senator demanded that the organization provide a detailed accounting of how foreign funds were used over the past three years, whether they were targeted at particular American audiences, and what its measured impact was.

Wyden also demanded to know whether any Russian nationals or foreign individuals had been members of the NRA’s donor programs, and whether the NRA received any money from sanctioned individuals.

(…)

The NRA has a variety of accounts, and the NRA Political Victory Fund is their official political action committee and must report all of its spending to the Federal Election Commission.

It also has other accounts that require less transparency, and do not report spending to the FEC — and in those funds, the NRA told Wyden, they “receive funds from foreign persons only for purposes not connected to elections, as permitted by federal law.”

However, the NRA acknowledges that money moves between those accounts: “transfers between accounts are made as permitted by law,” the NRA’s general counsel wrote.

➤ Joshua Matz contends Trump is running on animus autopilot:

President Trump is hard at work making animus the law of the land. Justice Department lawyers revealed his latest effort Friday night, announcing a revised plan to exclude nearly all transgender soldiers from the armed forces.

As many commentators have observed, the reasoning offered to support Trump’s policy is riddled with empirical errors and anti-trans stereotypes. It comes nowhere close to disproving the comprehensive study in 2016 that recommended allowing transgender people to serve openly. Like so many other missives from this White House, it makes only a token effort to conceal the disdain and disgust that underlie it.

Trump’s original “transgender ban” was blocked by four federal courts. After two of those rulings were affirmed on appeal, the administration decided against seeking Supreme Court review. It’s therefore safe to assume that Trump’s latest order will not go into effect unless it survives constitutional challenges.

And in thinking about that litigation, it’s hard to escape a feeling of deja vu. A little more than 14 months into Trump’s presidency, a pattern has emerged in cases challenging some of his most despicable decisions [list of steps in Trump’s pattern follows in article].

➤ Rhonda Garelick contends Stormy Daniels’s Boring Interview Was Actually Brilliant (“Once again, she proves she’s a worthy adversary for Trump”)

In fact, Stormy was entirely credible in every way. Calm, clear-eyed, and direct, she telegraphed competence and clarity of purpose. She answered questions quickly and without hesitation, never averting her gaze, lowering her eyes, or even pausing. Her words were simple and devoid of rhetorical flourishes. When asked, for example, whether she understood the $130,000 she’d accepted was “hush money,” Daniels’s firm “yes” flew from her mouth nearly before Cooper could finish his question. She offered this kind of swift, emphatic, and monosyllabic response several times.

Everything about this interview screamed legitimacy. 60 Minutes is the 50-year-old doyenne of broadcast journalism, a network show watched by grandparents and Trump supporters (and apparently even Trump himself). This was Stormy’s chance to take her case to the widest American public, to clear her name and tell her truth, even at the risk of being penalized for breaching her non-disclosure agreement (and possibly even at risk to her personal safety).

(I saw this interview last night. Trump’s conduct toward Daniels isn’t the worst of his offenses, but I agree that in her matter-of-fact presentation, Daniels did well for herself, all things considered.)

➤ NASA ScienceCasts describes Earth’s Magnetosphere:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see a morning  shower and a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset 7:15 PM, for 12h 32m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 80.2% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred second day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1794, Congress passes and Pres. Washington then signs an Act to Provide a Naval Armament of “six frigates at a total cost of $688,888.82. These ships were the first ships of what eventually became the present-day United States Navy.”

On this day in 1920, the nation’s first tank company is established in Janesville:

On this date Janesville was chosen as home base for the National Guard’s first tank company in the United States, the 32nd. When activated for duty during WWII, the unit was called Company A, 192nd Tank Battalion. This company fought in the Philippines during World War II. Many of the ninty-nine Janesville men who became prisoners of war and were tortured during the infamous Bataan Death March, were affiliated with this tank company.

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Michael Gerson contends We are not ‘globalists.’ We’re Americans:

At one haunted moment in American history — early in 1939, not long after Kristallnacht — Sen. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-Mass.) introduced a bill that would have allowed 20,000 unaccompanied Jewish refugee children into the United States. Opponents argued that Congress should focus on the welfare of American children and that German refugees were a Trojan horse. “Twenty thousand charming children,” said President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cousin, “would all too soon grow up into 20,000 ugly adults.”

The legislation died in committee. And most of the children, presumably, did not grow up at all. At the time, some 80 percent of Americans opposed increasing the quota of European refugees.

Six years later, journalist Marguerite Higgins was among the first to enter the Dachau death camp as it was being liberated by the 42nd Infantry. She found the main yard empty. But then “a jangled barrage of ‘Are you Americans?’ in about 16 languages came from the barracks 200 yards from the gate. An affirmative nod caused pandemonium. Tattered, emaciated men, weeping, yelling and shouting ‘Long live America!’ swept toward the gate in a mob. Those who could not walk limped or crawled.”

…

An extraordinary group of leaders — politicians, military commanders, diplomats — defined a practical and moral role for America in the global defense of free governments and institutions. “In natural abilities and experience,” writes historian Paul Johnson , “in clarity of mind and in magnanimity, they were probably the finest group of American leaders since the Founding Fathers.” Harry S. Truman lent his defiant moral sensibilities to the enterprise. Dwight D. Eisenhower matched humility with power. John F. Kennedy gave poetry to the struggle. “For it is the fate of this generation,” he said, “to live with a struggle we did not start, in a world we did not make. .?.?. And while no nation ever faced such a challenge, no nation has ever been more ready to seize the burden and the glory of freedom.”

This is what some now dismiss as “globalism” — the combination of America’s founding purpose with unavoidable international responsibilities. The postwar preeminence of the United States has been sustainable, not only because of our military power but also because the global order we shaped is not a zero-sum game. Both America and our allies benefit from American security commitments in Europe and East Asia. Both America and our trading partners can benefit from relatively free global markets.

➤ Ari Berman writes GOP Declares War on the Courts After Rulings That Threaten Its Majorities (“In crucial swing states, Republicans are trying to nullify court orders they don’t like”):

On Thursday, a judge ruled that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker must hold special elections this spring to fill two vacant state legislative seats that some Republicans fear could flip to the Democrats. But instead of scheduling new elections, Wisconsin Republicans came up with a different plan: They would convene a special legislative session to change the law governing special elections so they wouldn’t have to hold them before November.

Walker had a “plain and positive duty” to hold the elections, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Josann Reynolds, who was appointed by Walker in 2014, ruled on Thursday. She instructed Walker to issue an order within a week scheduling the elections.

But the next day, Walker threw his support behind the plan to change the election law. “It would be senseless to waste taxpayer money on special elections just weeks before voters go to the polls when the Legislature has concluded its business,” Walker said in a statement. “This is why I support, and will sign, the Senate and Assembly plan to clarify special election law.”

Democrats immediately denounced the move, saying Republicans were going to extraordinary lengths to avoid holding an election for two legislative seats previously held by Republicans that have been vacant since December. “Even for Republicans in Wisconsin, this would be a stunning action to keep citizens from exercising their right to vote,” said former Attorney General Eric Holder, who leads a Democratic group that sued Walker on behalf of Wisconsin voters in the two districts. “They appear to be afraid of the voters of Wisconsin.”

Wisconsin Republicans’ refusal to follow the court’s order is part of a broader trend among Republicans at the state level to nullify legal rulings they don’t like and attack judges who rule contrary to their positions.

➤ David Frum writes Trump’s Legal Threats Backfire (“The president is used to getting his way by bluster and intimidation, but the strategy that once worked for him is now working against him”):

Minutes after the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes, Team Trump fired off a heavy-breathing lawyer’s letter, bristling with phrases like “cease and desist” and “retract and apologize.”

This is exactly the approach by which Donald Trump inadvertently made millions for Michael Wolff. Having so spectacularly backfired the first time, why do it again? The short answer is: Team Trump knows nothing else.

Back when he was a private businessman, Trump learned how to use law as a weapon. The lesson he took from that is that if your pockets are deep enough—and your conscience dull enough—it doesn’t matter that you are wrong. The other party will go broke before you will lose.

…

A heavy-breathing lawyer’s letter from Team Trump does not frighten a Stormy Daniels. She can release it to The New York Times and watch it dominate the next day’s news cycle. With news domination come economic opportunities for her—and unremitting political damage for the presidency.

(Trump’s too small-minded to see that he now has more to lose than Daniels and other counter-parties.)

➤ Jay Michaelson contends Stormy Daniels’ Legal Strategy Strongly Suggests She Has Photos of Donald Trump (“The hush money and the alleged affair aren’t confidential anymore—she told ‘60 Minutes’ everything—so what is the fight about? Look at the fine print”):

If Daniels has retained copies of pictures or texts, then she is in clear violation of the central parts of the confidentiality agreement. Not only does the agreement explicitly forbid her from keeping copies of images or texts, it actually defines them as Trump’s – oh, sorry, David Dennison’s – personal, copyrighted property.

Incidentally, that, too, is quite unusual. Normally, that kind of provision appears in a consultancy or employment agreement. Here, however, it’s been grafted into a confidentiality agreement. If that DVD has pictures of Trump, it is literally Trump’s copyrighted property.

Unless, of course, the agreement is null and void.

Now the pieces come together. Avenatti wants to void the agreement because that way, Daniels can keep that DVD, or, if you want to be cynical about it, auction it off to the highest bidder.

That DVD could be the stained blue dress of this whole scandal: proof positive that the affair took place, that the coverup took place, and that Cohen and Trump are liars.

Then again, it might just be a blank DVD in a safe.

(Like many plaintiffs’ lawyers, Michael Avanetti is theatrical, flamboyant, but Michaelson’s description of Avanetti’s underlying strategy is plausibile: condidentiality has long ago evaporated with countless press accounts, but evidence of specific conduct may yet await disclosure if a court deems the agreement void.)

➤ James Gorman describes The Amazing Metabolism of Hummingbirds:

Hummingbirds have long intrigued scientists. Their wings can beat 80 times a second. Their hearts can beat more than 1,000 times a minute. They live on nectar and can pack on 40 percent of their body weight in fat for migration.

But sometimes they are so lean that they live close to caloric bankruptcy. At such times, some hummingbirds could starve to death while they sleep because they’re not getting to eat every half-hour or so. Instead they enter a state of torpor, with heartbeat and body temperature turned way down to diminish the need for food.

Kenneth C. Welch Jr. at the University of Toronto, Scarborough has studied the metabolisms of hummingbirds for more than a decade. His most recent research with Derrick J. E. Groom, in his lab, and other colleagues is on the size and energy efficiency in hummingbirds. By using data on oxygen consumption and wing beats to get an idea of how much energy hummingbirds take in and how much work they put out, the scientists found that during strenuous hovering flight, bigger hummingbirds are more efficient energy users than smaller ones.

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will see an afternoon shower with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 7:14 PM, for 12h 29m 07s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 71.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundred first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1945, the United States is victorious, after weeks of intense fighting, at the Battle of Iwo Jima.

On this day in 1881, a famous Wisconsin mascot passes away: “On this date Old Abe, famous Civil War mascot, died from injuries sustained during a fire at the State Capitol. Old Abe was the mascot for Company C, an Eau Claire infantry unit that was part of the Wisconsin 8th Regiment. During the Capitol fire of 1881, smoke engulfed Old Abe’s cage. One of his feathers survived and is in the Wisconsin Historical Museum. [Source: Wisconsin Lore and Legends, pg. 51]”

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Craig Timberg and Tom Hamburger report Former Cambridge Analytica workers say firm sent foreigners to advise U.S. campaigns:

LONDON — Cambridge Analytica assigned dozens of non-U.S. citizens to provide campaign strategy and messaging advice to ­Republican candidates in 2014, according to three former workers for the data firm, even as an attorney warned executives to abide by U.S. laws limiting foreign involvement in elections.

The assignments came amid efforts to present the newly created company as “an American brand” that would appeal to U.S. political clients even though its parent, SCL Group, was based in London, according to former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie.

Wylie, who emerged this month as a whistleblower, provided The Washington Post with documents that describe a program across several U.S. states to win campaigns for Republicans using psychological profiling to reach voters with individually tailored messages. The documents include previously unreported details about the program, which was called “Project Ripon” for the Wisconsin town where the Republican Party was born in 1854.

➤ Margaret Hartmann reports After Losing Pennsylvania Gerrymandering Battle, GOP Representative Costello Won’t Seek Reelection:

After the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a new map to replace the gerrymandered version that favored the GOP, U.S. Representative Ryan Costello was among the handful of Republicans who called forthe judges to be impeached. A month later, with even the Republican majority leader of the state House criticizing the impeachment effort, Costello has decided to withdraw from the midterm race instead.

Costello, who was first elected in 2014, was already facing a difficult reelection campaign before the new congressional map shifted his district from being an area where Hillary Clinton won by one point to one she would have taken by ten points. However, Costello denied that he was retiring from Congress because he was afraid of losing. In addition to considerations for his young family, he cited the “political environment” for his decision.

➤ Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report At a Crucial Juncture, Trump’s Legal Defense Is Largely a One-Man Operation:

Working for a president is usually seen as a dream job. But leading white-collar lawyers in Washington and New York have repeatedly spurned overtures to take over the defense of Mr. Trump, a mercurial client who often ignores his advisers’ guidance. In some cases, lawyers’ firms have blocked any talks, fearing a backlash that would hurt business.

Joseph diGenova, a longtime Washington lawyer who has pushed theories on Fox News that the F.B.I. made up evidence against Mr. Trump, left the team on Sunday. He had been hired last Monday, three days before the head of the president’s personal legal team, John Dowd, quit after determining that the president was not listening to his advice. Mr. Trump had also considered hiring Mr. diGenova’s wife, Victoria Toensing, but she will also not join the team.

That leaves the president with just one personal lawyer who is working full time on the special counsel’s investigation as Mr. Trump is facing one of the most significant decisions related to it: whether to sit for an interview.

➤ Eliot A. Cohen makes A Modest Plea for Patriotic History (“If Americans were more familiar with the complex heroes of their past, they would be better equipped to recognize people of good character today”):

It is telling that those who speak loudest about Making America Great Again tend to refer to themselves as nationalists rather than patriots. George Orwell took the measure of contemporary nationalism in a 1945 essay on the subject. Nationalism, he noted, is “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects.” Patriotism, on the other hand, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world.” The United States could do with more patriots and fewer nationalists.

One of the ways to grow patriots is through engagement with the past. Self-described white nationalists do not need to know anything—in fact, it is easier if they do not. It is not surprising that the chief American nationalist these days has proudly noted that he has not read a book for half a century. To understand and truly appreciate one’s own requires knowledge; to cruise the world inflaming your supporters, looking for trade fights with allies and murmuring soft words for dictators, on the other hand, ignorance does the job quite nicely.

Unsurprisingly, the events of the last two years have evoked a resurgence of interest in civic education, and particularly historical education. This is a good thing. Amid all the dismal statistics about American kids being unable to describe what is in the Bill of Rights, from which country the US won its independence, and whether Benjamin Franklin was president, there is good news. Even the usually wary Thomas B. Fordham Institute cheered the revamping of the Advanced Placement US History program by the College Board in 2014. At a grass-roots level there are a lot of teachers, school boards, and anxious parents who realize that the kids need to learn about who Americans are, how to think critically, and how democracy works.

➤ This Map Shows [Just Perhaps] Where We’ll Live On Mars:

Good morning.

Palm Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 6:47 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 26m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 59% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}five hundredth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}

On this day in 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire claims 146:

the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in US history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and 23 men[1] – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian and Jewish immigrant women aged 16 to 23;[2][3][4] of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and “Sara” Rosaria Maltese.[5]

The factory was located on the eighth, ninth and tenth floors of the Asch Building, at 23–29 Washington Place in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan. The 1901 building still stands today and is known as the Brown Building. It is part of and owned by New York University.[6]

Because the owners had locked the doors to the stairwells and exits – a then-common practice to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft[7] – many of the workers who could not escape from the burning building jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark.[8]

Recommended for reading in full —

➤ Jennifer Rubin writes They came, they marched, they inspired:

By the hundreds of thousands, they came. They gave impassioned and articulate speeches. The shared their experiences in Chicago, South Los Angeles and Florida. They gave one TV interview after another, displaying remarkable poise and heart-breaking sincerity. Adults decades older watched with awe. These are teenagers. How did these kids learn to do  this? 

The sense of amazement among adults, including jaded members of the media, was palpable — both because supposedly sophisticated adults had not pulled off this kind of change in attitudes about guns in the decades they’d been trying and because the teenagers shredded the talking points, the lies, the cynicism and the indifference that we’ve become accustomed to in our politics.

If this was a movie, you’d think it was inauthentic. However, it may be our image of our fellow Americans and teenagers that has been wildly inaccurate and unfairly negative. Too many of us have bought into the notion that teenagers are passive, addicted to their phones and lacking civic awareness. Too many have been guilted into accepting that “real Americans” are the Trump voters, and that the rest of us are pretenders, pawns of “elites.” The crowd reminded us of the country’s enormous geographic, racial, gender and age diversity. (Plenty of teachers, parents and grandparents turned out.) And in the case of guns, these people are far more representative of the views of the country than the proverbial guy in the Rust Belt diner.

➤ DigitalGlobe released satellite imagery confirming the huge size of the 3.24.18 March for Our Lives gathering in Washington, D.C.:

An impressive crowd gathered today in DC for the #MarchForOurLives rally pic.twitter.com/hiPRYcb7OJ

— DigitalGlobe (@DigitalGlobe) March 24, 2018

➤ Peter Beinart writes John Bolton and the Normalization of Fringe Conservatism (“Donald Trump’s incoming national-security adviser has provided support for anti-Muslim voices on the right”):

What Bolton has done, again and again, is to elevate the anti-Muslim bigotry of others. In 2010, he wrote the forward to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s book, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. Bolton’s forward begins with the words, “Barack Obama is our first post-American president.” But he leaves the meaning of those words vague. It is Geller and Spencer who declare that “Barack Hussein Obama” is pursuing the “implementation of a soft sharia: the quiet and piecemeal implementation of Islamic laws that subjugate non-Muslims.”

In 2010 and 2011, Bolton spoke at rallies against the “Ground Zero” mosque sponsored by Geller and Spencer’s organization, Stop Islamization of America. But Bolton has not echoed Geller’s wilder and uglier theories: among them that Obama is Malcolm X’s love child or that Muslims practice bestiality. He’s never said, as Spencer has, that “there is no distinction in the American Muslim community between peaceful Muslims and jihadists.”

Similarly, Bolton in 2012 defended Michelle Bachmann’s inquiry into whether former Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin was an agent of the Muslim Brotherhood. “What is wrong with raising the question?” he declared on Gaffney’s radio show. (John McCain, by contrast, called Bachmann’s inquiries “specious and degrading.”) But, as far as I know, Bolton never questioned Abedin’s loyalty himself. As in his push for Gaffney’s reinstatement at CPAC, Bolton doesn’t preach hatred of Muslims. He just aids those who do.

Once upon a time, the American right made room for conservative Muslims. Now it makes room for people who want to deny them equal rights. And John Bolton, America’s next national-security adviser, is part of the reason why.

➤ Norman J. Ornstein contends This major challenge to local news has gone almost unnoticed:

The proposed merger would be by far the largest in the history of local TV, adding up to 42 stations — including in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Denver and other top-20 markets — to the Sinclair empire. These would join the 173 stations Sinclair already owns, including outlets in other big cities such as Baltimore, Minneapolis, Seattle, St. Louis and the District, plus stations in key electoral states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Congress limits a single broadcaster to covering 39 percent of the country, but due to an arcane rule adopted before cable and satellite became the dominant way that Americans receive broadcast TV, ultra-high-frequency stations get counted at only 50 percent of their coverage. Sinclair, which owns many UHF stations, would have ended up covering a staggering 72 percent of the national audience if approved as initially proposed — an action that would be hotly disputed by many in Congress who believe this would breach the law. Adding to the problem are Sinclair’s numerous “sidecar” agreements, a controversial industry arrangement that allows companies to bypass ownership limitations by outsourcing management, as well as much content, to another station in the same market.

In theory, media outlets owned by megaconglomerates will not necessarily ignore local interests. The real question is whether owners interfere in the content of the outlets, either to promote and protect business interests or to tilt news coverage in a slanted, ideological direction. Sinclair has frequently been accused of the latter, via “must-run” programming mandates that tilt heavily toward the right — including recent promotional inserts requiring its anchors to lament “false news.” The company maintains that such segments make up only a tiny fraction of programming and provide “a viewpoint that often gets lost in the typical national broadcast media dialogue.” But they directly contravene the localism principle at the core of the Communications Act.

The Sinclair merger has been opposed by a slew of individuals, media companies, members of Congress, state attorneys general, and newspapers and other media outlets. Importantly, these objectors range across the ideological spectrum from conservative cable news networks to liberal public interest organizations.

➤ Here’s The Bodega Bringing the Beats in Brooklyn:

Geovanny Valdez goes from bodega owner by day to DJ Jova by night. With over 40,000 listeners tuning in to Relambia FM, the Latin radio station he started for the residents of East Brooklyn, New York, Valdez churns out an eclectic mix of urban music, romantic ballads, merengue, and classic oldies. But this show isn’t just about the jams, it’s a chance to give a voice to his community.(It seems reasonable, by contrast, to contend that dogs need only be groomed more simply for them to be clean and happy.)