Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:42 PM, for 13h 37m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 15.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1775, the Revolutionary War begins with the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
Recommended for reading in full —
➤ Jennifer Rubin observes Mitch McConnell is inviting a constitutional crisis:
Let’s cut through all this: Republicans are petrified of provoking Trump (“the bear”), whom they treat as their supervisor and not as an equal branch of government. The notion that Congress should not take out an insurance policy to head off a potential constitutional crisis when the president has repeatedly considered firing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein defies logic. By speaking up in such fashion, McConnell is effectively tempting Trump to fire one or both of them. That will set off a firestorm and bring calls for the president’s impeachment.
“There is evidently no limit on the complicity [McConnell] is willing to shoulder,” argued Norman Eisen, a former White House ethics counsel during the Obama administration. “Even as bipartisan support for the legislation is emerging in both houses of Congress — or perhaps because it is emerging — he stands in the way.” He added: “It is a betrayal of the rule of law for McConnell to take this position when the president has reportedly tried twice to fire Mueller, and discussed it frequently, and is now agitated over the Michael Cohen developments. McConnell will be fully as responsible as Trump if the special counsel is fired.”
At critical points during this saga, McConnell has put party over country, and fidelity to the executive branch over the concerns of an equal legislative branch. Remember, according to multiple news reports, McConnell is the one who, before the 2016 election, wanted to water down a bipartisan warning to the country about Russian interference. It was McConnell, together with Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who refused to set up a select committee or an independent commission to address possible Russian collusion. It was McConnell who pushed through the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, despite ample evidence that he had not been truthful with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding his contacts with Russians. His refusal to consider legislation that might head off a crisis is remarkably reckless.
➤ WNYC reports on The Company Michael Cohen Kept:
If you’ve seen video or images of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, they’ve probably been set in locations that exude power and importance: Cohen berating a CNN anchor in a TV studio, for example, or striding across the sleek marbled interior of Trump Tower, or more recently, smoking cigars in front of Cohen’s temporary residence, the Loews Regency Hotel on Manhattan’s Park Avenue.
But to understand how Michael Cohen arrived in those precincts, you need to venture across New York City’s East River. There, in a Queens warehouse district in the shadows of an elevated No. 7 subway line, is a taxi garage that used to house his law practice. The office area in the front is painted a garish taxi-cab-yellow, with posters of hockey players on the wall and a framed photo of the late Hasidic rabbi, Menachem Schneerson. Cohen practiced law there and invested in the once-lucrative medallions that grant New York cabs the right to operate.
Or you could drive 45 minutes deep into Brooklyn, near where Gravesend turns into Brighton Beach. There, in a desolate stretch near a shuttered podiatrist’s office, you’d find a medical office. According to previously unexamined records, Cohen incorporated a business there in 2002 that was involved in large quantities of medical claims. Separately, he represented more than 100 plaintiffs who claimed they were injured in auto collisions.
At the same time, in Brooklyn and Long Island, New York prosecutors were investigating what Fortune magazine called possibly “the largest organized insurance-fraud ring in U.S. history.” That fraud resulted in hundreds of criminal prosecutions for staging car accidents to collect insurance payments. Cohen was not implicated in the fraud.
A distinctive pattern emerged early in Cohen’s career, according to an examination by WNYC and ProPublica for the Trump, Inc. podcast: Many of the people who crossed paths with Cohen when he worked in Queens and Brooklyn were disciplined, disbarred, accused or convicted of crimes.
➤ Kelly Weill contends Less Than a Year After Charlottesville, the Alt-Right Is Self-Destructing (“Less than a year after its deadly rally in Charlottesville, the American alt-right is splintering in dramatic fashion as its leaders turn on each other or quit altogether”):
Some have turned federal informant. Others are facing prison time. More are named in looming lawsuits. All of them are fighting.
Last summer, the American alt-right was presenting itself as a threatening, unified front, gaining national attention with a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The collection of far-right and white nationalist groups proclaimed victory after President Donald Trump hesitated to directly condemn them and instead blamed “both sides” and the “alt left” for the violence. But less than a year after Charlottesville, the alt-right is splintering in dramatic fashion as its leaders turn on each other or quit altogether.
Matthew Heimbach’s arrest in a March trailer park brawl with members of his neo-Nazi group—some of whom he was allegedly screwing—felt like a too-obvious metaphor. Heimbach was the head of the Traditionalist Worker Party, a youth-focused white supremacist group that floated to the front of media coverage and hate rallies in the run-up to Donald Trump’s election.
But by March, Heimbach and the TWP had spent the previous months embroiled in a series of online spats with other alt-right factions. On March 14, police in his Indiana hometown arrested Heimbach after he allegedly assaulted TWP spokesperson Matthew Parrott during a fight over their wives, both of whom Heimbach was allegedly sleeping with. Heimbach’s wife is Parrott’s stepdaughter.
The high-profile bust was an accelerant in what had been a slow-burning feud among the alt-right. Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, said the schism started after Unite the Right, a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August. The rally turned deadly after a man affiliated with a white supremacist group plowed a car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing one and injuring more.
(This is all good news, of course, for democratic norms, but there’s still more to be done to bring these all of these lumpen men to their political demise.)
➤ Josh Marshall reports Trump: If Farmers Get Hit, They’ll Understand:
“When we do a deal with China – which probably we will, if we don’t they’ll have to pay pretty high taxes to do business with our country. That’s a possibility. But if we do a deal with China, if during the course of a negotiation they want to hit the farmers, because they think that hits me, I wouldn’t say that’s nice, but I tell you, our farmers are great patriots. These are great patriots. They understand that they’re doing this for the country. And we’ll make it up to them. In the end they’re going to be much stronger than they are right now.”
(Emphasis in original.)
➤ One cannot help but admire A ‘Poisoned’ City’s Spirit of Resilience:
“They poisoned the whole city and left us to fend for ourselves,” says Leon El-Alamin, a resident of Flint, Michigan, in Brian Schulz’s documentary, For Flint. “We feel like we’ve been placed in a position to die slowly.”
But die slowly Flint has not. Even as the city, which faces an ongoing water crisis, recedes from national headlines, its residents display an indomitable spirit. For Flint serves as a microcosm of this resiliency, despite the health concerns, multiple economic downturns, and dizzying crime rates that plague the city. “You would expect something like this in a third-world county, not in the United States of America,” says Valorie Horton, who parlayed a 33-year General Motors career into a second calling as an advocate for arts-deprived youth. The film profiles Horton and two other residents who are inspiring positive change in what many reports have deemed one of the “worst places to live” in America.
“Almost all of the coverage surrounding Flint focused on the hardships the city faced,” Schulz told The Atlantic, “so I wanted to give the community a positive voice that had not yet been heard. Like the many great athletes who call Flint home, the city’s residents possess the determination and grit that will push them past the hardships that they continue to face.”