Good morning.
Easter Sunday in Whitewater will be increasingly sunny with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 6:09 AM and sunset 7:39 PM, for 13h 29m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred fifty-ninth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1962, at Gerde’s Folk City, Bob Dylan first performs a version of Blowin’ in the Wind. On this day in 1944, the the USS Wisconsin battleship is put into active duty for service during the Second World War.
Recommended for reading in full —
Eric Lipton, Ben Protess, and Andrew Lehren report that With Trump Appointees, a Raft of Potential Conflicts and ‘No Transparency’: “WASHINGTON — President Trump is populating the White House and federal agencies with former lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who in many cases are helping to craft new policies for the same industries in which they recently earned a paycheck. The potential conflicts are arising across the executive branch, according to an analysis of recently released financial disclosures, lobbying records and interviews with current and former ethics officials by The New York Times in collaboration with ProPublica. In at least two cases, the appointments may have already led to violations of the administration’s own ethics rules. But evaluating if and when such violations have occurred has become almost impossible because the Trump administration is secretly issuing waivers to the rules.”
Avi Sek reports that Trump says he can’t be sued for violence at his rallies because he won the election: “Last year, protesters from a campaign rally sued Donald Trump — claiming the future president urged his supporters to assault them. Now Trump is the president, of course. And while the lawsuit grinds on, with more accusations added last week, he claims he won immunity along with the election. “Mr. Trump is immune from suit because he is President of the United States,” his lawyers wrote Friday, rebutting a complaint filed by three protesters who claimed Trump incited a riot against them at a Louisville event in March 2016. Trump’s team challenged the accusations — negligence and incitement to riot — on many other grounds, too. But a federal judge already rejected their attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out earlier this month. And in another new filing in the same case, a Trump supporter accused of assaulting protesters agreed with the plaintiffs that Trump wanted a riot — while denying he actually harmed anyone.”
Bourree Lam writes that The Fight Over Trump’s Tax Returns Isn’t Over: “The release of Trump’s tax returns is an issue Americans of both parties seem keen to hang on to. In January, a poll by ABC News and The Washington Postfound that 74 percent of Americans believed that Trump should release his returns. Another poll found that 64 percent of Republicans want to see Trump’s tax returns too….With that level of interest, it’s no wonder that Rachel Maddow’s tax scoop in March, a few pages from the president’s 2005 tax returns, was a nonevent that still received immense media and public attention. Anna Chu, one of the organizers of the Tax March who works at the National Women’s Law Center, told DCist that the leak didn’t show what the public needs to see. And a one-page leak of Trump’s record to The New York Times only whet the public’s appetite. The speculation that his returns might turn up concerning revelations is amplified by ongoing worries that Trump hasn’t taken adequate measures to distance himself from his businesses while in office, resulting in myriad conflicts of interests.”
Kristine Phillips reports that Congressman [James Sensenbrenner, whose district includes Whitewater, WI] tells constituents that nobody has ‘got to use the internet’: “During the meeting in Wisconsin on Thursday, the attendee asked about the recent decision by Congress to wipe away an Obama-era policy that sought to limit what Internet service providers, such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast, can do with customers’ Internet browsing history. The concern is similar to one raised by consumer activists: Not all Internet users have options to switch to a different company if they don’t agree with their current provider’s privacy practices….
In response, Sensenbrenner, who voted to scrap the Federal Communications Commission’s privacy rules that were set to take effect at the end of this year, said:
“Nobody’s got to use the internet. … And the thing is that if you start regulating the Internet like a utility, if we did that right at the beginning, we would have no Internet. … Internet companies have invested an awful lot of money in having almost universal service now. The fact is is that, you know, I don’t think it’s my job to tell you that you cannot get advertising for your information being sold. My job, I think, is to tell you that you have the opportunity to do it, and then you take it upon yourself to make that choice. … That’s what the law has been, and I think we ought to have more choices rather than fewer choices with the government controlling our everyday lives.”
(Sensenbrenner’s shown he’s out-of-touch before, and is a poor fit to represent a college town. He’s every aged, well-off man who becomes complacent, thinking that what he did thirty years ago justifies his carrying on forever. Enlarged and entitled is no way to go through life; each day demands a renewal of one’s understanding of current conditions.)
Here’s a story about a little bunny that could: