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.)