Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will see showers with a high of sixty-three. Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 7:00 PM, for 11h 53m 19s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the eight hundred fifty-fifth day.
It’s Pi Day:
Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world. Pi is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant — the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — which is approximately 3.14159. Pi Day is an annual opportunity for math enthusiasts to recite the infinite digits of Pi, talk to their friends about math, and to eat Pie.
Recommended for reading in full:
Paul Rosenzweig writes Four Lessons From the Manafort Sentencing (“This is bad news for Trump, and good news for the system”):
Last week, many commentators were decrying the perceived lenity of Ellis’s sentence. Today Jackson offered a systemic correction. Given Manafort’s age and the severity of his crimes, seven and a half years seems about right. It’s actually on the high end for similar offenses. And given his age, Manafort may well die in jail, which cannot be a happy prospect for him.
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Second, and more important for the American public, the New York authorities have made clear that they are willing to serve as a pardon insurance policy for America.
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Thus, even were Trump to issue a full and complete pardon to Manafort for all the crimes he has committed, that move would not excuse Manafort from answering the New York State charges.
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Third, the New York indictment is not good news for Trump, personally. The Manhattan prosecutor has brought charges of fraud against Manafort for falsely inflating the value of certain real-estate properties he owned for mortgage purposes. Those allegations find a strong echo in the recent congressional testimony of the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, who said the president engaged in the exact same course of conduct in his personal capacity—inflating real-estate values to increase his net worth when it suited him, and then deflating those same values to avoid taxation.
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And finally, as bad as this news is for Trump, it is likely even worse news for the Trump Organization—now also possibly in [Manhattan District Attorney] Vance’s crosshairs for real-estate shenanigans.
The Committee to Investigate Russia writes Manafort Lawyer Lies Outside Courthouse:
Paul Manafort‘s attorney Kevin Downing blatantly lied to the media as he stood at microphones outside the DC federal courthouse and announced, “Judge Jackson conceded that there was absolutely no evidence of Russian collusion in this case. So that makes two courts. Two courts have ruled no evidence of any collusion with any Russians.”
In fact, Judge Berman Jackson, made a point of telling the court the matter of collusion was not even under consideration in Manafort’s case. Her effort to prevent Downing from repeating the lie he told the first time around when he spoke to reporters outside the courthouse after Manafort’s Virginia sentencing hearing apparently failed.