Good morning. 
Mother’s Day in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 59. Sunrise is 5:37 AM and sunset 8:05 PM, for 14h 28m 06s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1815, Francis Ronalds describes the first battery-operated clock in the Philosophical Magazine.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Bump writes Time has only weakened the argument that the Russia probe was a victory for Trump:
For example, in early February 2019, a member of Mueller’s team argued to a federal judge that an August 2016 meeting between Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and a man named Konstantin Kilimnik went “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating” — that is, the question of possible coordination. In the final Mueller report, though, the investigators admitted that they couldn’t answer key questions about that meeting.
At that meeting, Manafort had shared campaign data with Kilimnik, though Mueller’s team “could not reliably determine Manafort’s purpose in sharing internal polling data with Kilimnik during the campaign period.” This was hampered by Manafort offering false information to his team and to the grand jury and by Manafort’s using encrypted messaging apps.
“Because of questions about Manafort’s credibility and our limited ability to gather evidence on what happened to the polling data after it was sent to Kilimnik,” the Mueller report reads, his team, referred to as “the Office,” “could not assess what Kilimnik (or others he may have given it to) did with it. The Office did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort’s sharing polling data and Russia’s interference in the election, which had already been reported by U.S. media outlets at the time of the August 2 meeting.”
Only last month was the question of what happened more fully answered: Kilimnik — who had been previously identified as a Russian intelligence agent (including casually by Manafort’s number two at the campaign) — “provided the Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and campaign strategy.”
Adam Gopnik writes What Liberalism Can Learn from What It Took to Defeat Donald Trump:
The first lesson, and vindication, for those of that liberal turn of mind is the continuing demonstration of the superiority, both moral and pragmatic, of pluralism to purism. That truth has been demonstrated twice by that improbable liberal hero Joe Biden, first in the Democratic primaries and then in the general election. There was an extended moment, in 2018 and 2019, when a dominant belief on the left was that the only way to counter the extreme narrowness of Trumpism was with an equally pointed alternative. Bernie Sanders, whose values and programs—Medicare for All, breaking up the banks, a Green New Deal—have long appeared admirable to many, still seemed to rest his campaign on a belief that one could win the Democratic nomination without a majority, as long as the minority was sufficiently motivated and committed, and as long as the rest of the field remained fragmented.
But the inflamed flamed out. Biden, despite his uninspiring social-media presence and his generally antediluvian vibe, shifted, like his party, to the left, yet managed to pull together a broad coalition to win the nomination, and then did it again against Donald Trump. The pluralism of that coalition stretched from its base, among African-American women, to those suburban white women who turned on Trump, to disaffected McCain Republicans, in Arizona, to Latinos—who, warningly, in some areas voted less Democratic than in the past, but still voted Democratic. (And not to forget those neocon Never Trumpers who seem to have played a small but significant role in turning key votes in key places.)