Good morning.
Whitewater’s Saturday will be sunny with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 6:22 AM and sunset 7:30 PM, for 13h 07m 17s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 92.6% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}one hundred fifty-first day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On April 8, 1974, Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s home-run record (714) by hitting his 715th home run off Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Al Downing. On this day in 1865, Union forces including the 8th, 11th, 14th, 20th, 23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th, 33rd, and 35th Wisconsin Infantry regiments capture Spanish Fort and seize control of Mobile Bay, Alabama.
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Jason Stein and Patrick Marley report GOP allies Scott Walker, Robin Vos have heated Twitter, text exchange on Wisconsin budget: “As I recall, the debate started with the unprecedented discussion of starting with a new budget & the continued attacks on transportation. It would be odd if I didn’t defend my positions,” Walker wrote at one point in the text exchange. “I think it actually started with the decision of your office to not really involve us before the process began unlike each of your other budgets … So without giving us ownership of anything in your budget it’s kind of hard for us (to) just rubber stamp it,” Vos responded. “Unlike the last budget where we met with nearly every member in advance & got trashed,” Walker snapped back.”
The New York Times editorial board asks, After the Airstrikes on Syria, What’s Next?: “It was hard not to feel some sense of emotional satisfaction, and justice done, when American cruise missiles struck an airfield in Syria on Thursday. The country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, needed to understand that there would finally be a cost for his brutality, in this case the use of chemical weapons with sarin, a banned nerve agent, that killed scores of civilians earlier this week in one of the worst atrocities of the Syrian civil war. But it is also hard not to feel unsettled by the many questions raised by President Trump’s decision. Among them: Was it legal? Was it an impetuous, isolated response unrelated to a larger strategy for resolving the complex dilemma of Syria, a nation tormented not just by civil war but also by the fight against the Islamic State? So far, there is no evidence that Mr. Trump has thought through the implications of using military force or figured out what to do next.”
Louisa Loveluck and Zakaria Zakaria write that Warplanes return to Syrian town devastated by chemical attack: “BEIRUT — Residents of the Syrian town devastated by a chemical-weapons attack last week said that warplanes had returned to bomb them Saturday as Turkey described a retaliatory U.S. assault as “cosmetic” unless it removed President Bashar al-Assad from power. At least 86 people were killed in Tuesday’s attack on the northwestern town of Khan Sheikhoun, which left hundreds choking, fitting or foaming at the mouth. Eyewitnesses said Saturday that fresh airstrikes on the area — now a ghost town — had killed one woman and wounded several others. Photographs from the site showed a pair of green slippers, abandoned by a blood-spattered doorway. The U.S. military launched 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield early Friday in the first direct American assault on Assad’s government since that country’s six-year civil war began. Although American officials have predicted that the strikes would result in a major shift of Assad’s calculus, they appeared to be symbolic in practice. Within 24 hours of the American strikes, monitoring groups reported that jets were taking off from the bombed Shayrat air base once again.”
Rosie Gray writes of Trump’s Disillusioned Supporters (the president’s military action in Syria is a bitter disappointment for some of his biggest fans): “What Trump did was nothing less than a betrayal, a betrayal of his supporters, of his message ‘America First!,’ of his promise to be different—to learn from the mistakes of the past and chart a new course,” said Richard Spencer, the alt-right leader who takes credit for coining the term. “I’ll wait and see, of course, but I’m not sure I can continue to support him. Most all of the alt-right feels the same way.” Spencer tweeted on Thursday, “Tulsi Gabbard 2020 #Trumped,” a reference to the Democratic congresswoman who recently made a controversial trip to Syria and met with Bashar al-Assad. Mike Cernovich, the pro-Trump blogger and Twitter personality who identifies as a member of the “new right,” has been tweeting and livestreaming his opposition to military action almost constantly since the news of the strikes last night. Cernovich, who claimed this week that the chemical attack was carried out by “deep state agents,” told me he still supports Trump. “If Hillary had been elected I wouldn’t even bother speaking out, as war would be certain,” Cernovich said in an email. “I’m still a Trump supporter, as last night’s air strikes appeared to have been limited. I do not and will not support another war in the Middle East.” “There comes a day in every child’s life when his Daddy bitterly disappoints him,” Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart tech editor and provocateur who resigned from the site earlier this year amid controversy over remarks he’d made about pedophilia, wrote on his Facebook on Thursday night.”
Tech Insider describes 5 survival myths that could get you killed: