4.30 Historian Alvin Felzenberg: “There is no question that Trump did not invent himself — there are issues that he’s capitalized on that have been percolating for some time. If the president were to decide: ‘I made my point, did some good for the country, and am going to spend the rest of my days water skiing,’ the problems wouldn’t go away . . . Winston Churchill said America will always find the right thing to do after exhausting all the alternatives. Well, the time is here.”
4.30 CC Sabathia became the 17th pitcher, and only the third lefthander, to record 3,000 strikeouts
4.30 The Washington Post says “Trump’s Westchester club is tucked in the woods in the wealthy enclave of Briarcliff Manor. . . ”
4.30 Albany
4.29 Albany
4.29 Gino Marchetti dies at 93
4.29 Quarterback Josh Rosen, on learning that he had been traded: “I’m fine. It’s not like I’m some child soldier in Darfur. I’ve had it pretty good.”
4.29 According to a report in The Washington Post, Ron Rosenstein told Trump’s Chief of Staff “I can go. I’m ready to go. I can resign. But I don’t want to go out with a tweet.” Comments Ben Wittes,“ If you’re not willing to go … out with a tweet, you are already negotiating away your integrity.”
4.29 David Brooks in the Times: “When historians define this era they may well see it above all else as a time defined by fear. The era began on Sept. 11, 2001, a moment when a nation that had once seemed invulnerable suddenly felt tremendously unsafe. In the years since, the shootings have been a series of bloody strikes out of the blue. It’s been an era when politicians rise by stoking fear. Donald Trump declared an “American carnage” and made it to the White House by warning of an immigrant crime wave that doesn’t exist.”
4.29 Michael Cohen in The New Yorker: “You are going to find me guilty of campaign finance, with McDougal or Stormy, and give me three years — really? And how come I’m the only one? I didn’t work for the campaign. I worked for him. And how come I’m the one that’s going to prison? I’m not the one that slept with the porn star.”
4.29 At least 704 people in the United States have been sickened this year by measles, the greatest number of cases in a single year in 25 years
4.29 The video of “ME!” by Taylor Swift received 65.2 million views within its first 24 hours of its release, making Swift the solo and female artist with the platform’s largest single-day debut
4.28 Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fox: “Prosecutors prosecute people who interfere with government functions and that’s what the president did by obstruction. Where is this going to end? I don’t know, but I am disappointed in the behavior of the president. . . .If he had ordered his aides to violate federal law to save a human life or to preserve human freedom, he would at least have a moral defense to his behavior. But ordering them to break federal law to save him from the consequences of his own behavior, that is immoral, that is criminal, that is defenseless, that is condemnable.”
4.28 Avengers: Endgame takes in a record-breaking $1.2 billion during its opening weekend
4.28 In the 39th London Marathon, Lukas Bates, 30, running in a Big Ben costume which stretched nearly five feet above his head, finished in 3 hours, 54 minutes, 21 seconds. He got stuck at the finish line.
4.28 Reuters: Hundreds of election workers have died of overwork and almost 2,000 have fallen ill following the world’s biggest single-day elections in Indonesia earlier this month.
4.28 Lindsey Graham: “If you’re going to look at every president who pops off at his staff and you know, ask him to do something that’s maybe crazy, then we won’t have any presidents.”
4.28 Rep. James Clyburn on ABC: “The fact of the matter is, Robert E. Lee was a great tactician, [but he] Was not a great person. Robert E. Lee was a slave owner and a brutal slave master. Thankfully, he lost that war. And I find it kind of interesting that the president is now glorifying a loser. He always said that he hated losers. Robert E. Lee was a loser.”
4.27 Don Laible in the Utica Dispatch: “Here’s The Catch, by Swoboda’s own admission, is straight ahead prose. In a nutshell, the book is about a .240 lifetime hitter that worked hard. But, it’s what happened in-between the at-bats that makes this a must read.”
4.27 Ron Chernow at the White House Correspondents Dinner: “Campaigns against the press don’t get your face carved into the rocks of Mount Rushmore, for when you chip away at the press, you chip away at our democracy.”
4.27 Connecticut Civil War Roundtable
4.25 Captain Marvel, with Cara, Ginny, Shawn and Molly
4.25 Joe Biden: “America’s coming back like we used to be — ethical, straight, telling the truth . . . supporting our allies, all those good things.”
4.25 Washington Post: “Suing a committee chairman and his own accounting firm. Telling people who don’t work for him anymore that they can’t testify to Congress. Having his personal lawyer tell the Treasury Department not to release Trump’s tax returns to Congress. These are all actions designed to strong-arm a Congress investigating him. But Joshua Huder, a fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University, told me they seem like the moves of a president out of options. Trump is forced to take the most extreme measures because he doesn’t have enough soft power to negotiate with lawmakers behind the scenes, Huder argues. The result is Trump forces himself into high-profile legal and political battles that he has a real risk of losing. “The president lacks a lot of informal modes of influence,” Huder said, “and he can’t convince the allies he does have.” So the lawsuits keep coming.”
4.25 Deanna Paul in the Washington Post: “A recent uptick in sightings of unidentified flying objects — or as the military calls them, “unexplained aerial phenomena” — prompted the Navy to draft formal procedures for pilots to document encounters, a corrective measure that former officials say is long overdue. . . .These intrusions have been happening on a regular basis since 2014. Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday. Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to “investigate each and every report.” He said, “We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who’s doing it, where it’s coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again.”
4.24 The Ferryman, with Cara, Shannon and Ginny
4.24 World Health Organization: Children younger than a year old shouldn’t be exposed to any electronic screens
4.24 Bret Easton Ellis in White: “Most of us now lead lives on social media that are more performance based than we ever could have imagined even a decade ago, and thanks to this burgeoning cult of likability, in a sense we’ve all become actors. We seem to have entered precariously into a kind of totalitarianism that actually abhors free speech and punishes people for revealing their true selves. In other words: an actor’s dream.”
4.24 New York Times: “In a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it “wasn’t a great subject and should be kept below his level.” Even though the Department of Homeland Security has primary responsibility for civilian cyberdefense, Ms. Nielsen eventually gave up on her effort to organize a White House meeting of cabinet secretaries to coordinate a strategy to protect next year’s elections.”
4.23 Katrina van den Heuvel in the Post: “Trump should be accountable to the laws. The House should review the complete Mueller record. But Pelosi’s conclusion about impeachment — that “he’s just not worth it” — makes sense in this context. Given what is already public, Congress should censure Trump for actions that violate the laws and offend the basic duties and dignity of his office. And then Democrats would be wise to move on, focus on how Trump is betraying the very voters who put him in office, and bring his misrule to an end by sweeping him out of office in the 2020 election.”
4.23 Abigail Disney: “There are just over 200,000 employees at Disney. If management wants to improve life for just the bottom 10 percent of its workers, Disney could probably set aside just half of its executive bonus pool, and it would likely have twice as much as it would need to give that bottom decile a $2,000 bonus. Besides, at the pay levels we are talking about, an executive giving up half his bonus has zero effect on his quality of life. For the people at the bottom, it could mean a ticket out of poverty or debt. It could offer access to decent health care or an education for a child. Here is my suggestion to the Walt Disney Co. leadership. Lead. If any of this rings any moral bells for you, know that you are uniquely situated to model a different way of doing business. Reward all of your workers fairly. Don’t turn away when they tell you they are unable to make ends meet. You do not exist merely for the benefit of shareholders and managers. Reward all the people who make you successful, help rebuild the American middle class and respect the dignity of the men and women who work just as hard as you do to make Disney the amazing company it is.”
4.23 ABC News: More than 12,000 Boy Scouts may have been sexually abused by 7,800 leaders and volunteers between 1944 and 2016.
4.22 Eugene Robinson in the Post: “Here is the important thing: Trump will mount this attack no matter what Democrats do . And strictly as a matter of practical politics, the best defense against Trump has to be a powerful offense. I fail to see the benefit for Democrats, heading into the 2020 election, of being seen as such fraidy-cats that they shirk their constitutional duty. Mueller’s portrait of this president and his administration is devastating. According to Graham’s “honor and integrity” standard — which he laid out in January 1999, when he was one of the House prosecutors for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate — beginning the process of impeaching Trump is not a close call.”
4.22 Albany
4.22 Laurence Tribe: “It seems to me an abdication of constitutional responsibility for the House of Representatives to do anything less than impeach him and put him on trial in the Senate, whatever the predicted result. Make every member of the House and Senate stand up and be counted. Who among them take their fidelity to the nation and its Constitution and laws seriously enough to risk losing their perks as senators or representatives? Who among them should be retired by the voters as sellouts?”
4.21 New York’s tax revenue fell by $3.7 billion, a 4.7% decline, in the 2019 fiscal year that ended March 31, according to the cash report released by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli. A drop was expected, but not to the degree it occured, setting off alarm bells as the state started to see apparent effects of New York taxpayer behavior resulting from the new federal tax code.
4.21 Sophie Turner: “In honor of Easter, I guess ’Game of Thrones’ wanted the storyline to have a little Easter bunny hop hop hoppin’ into that pussaaaaay. And that’s the T.”
4.22 Joe Lockhart in the New York Times: “For Democrats, leaving Donald Trump in office is not only good politics — it is the best chance for fundamental realignment of American politics in more than a generation. Mr. Trump is three years into destroying what we know as the Republican Party. Another two years just might finish it off. Trumpism has become Republicanism, and that spells electoral doom for the party. Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century. Free trade abandoned for protectionism. Challenging our adversaries and promoting democracy replaced by coddling Russia and cozying up to dictators near and far. Fiscal conservatism replaced by reckless spending and exploding deficits. What’s left of the party is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government. Republicans today are the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson — a coalition that, in the face of every demographic trend in America, will mean the long-term realignment of the federal government behind the Democrats.”
4.21 Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a comedian with no political experience and few detailed policies , was elected president of the Ukraine, defeating Petro Poroshenko, who cast himself as a bulwark against Russian aggression.
4.21 Rudy Giuliani on CNN: ”“There’s nothing wrong with taking information from Russians. It depends on where it came from.”
4.20 Susan Hennessey and Quinta Jurecic in Lawfare.blog: “Here is, as Bill Barr might call it, “the bottom line”: The Mueller Report describes, in excruciating detail and with relatively few redactions, a candidate and a campaign aware of the existence of a plot by a hostile foreign government to criminally interfere in the U.S. election for the purpose of supporting that candidate’s side. It describes a candidate and a campaign who welcomed the efforts and delighted in the assistance. It describes a candidate and a campaign who brazenly and serially lied to the American people about the existence of the foreign conspiracy and their contacts with it. And yet, it does not find evidence to support a charge of criminal conspiracy, which requires not just a shared purpose but a meeting of the minds. Here is the other bottom line: The Mueller Report describes a president who, on numerous occasions, engaged in conduct calculated to hinder a federal investigation. It finds ample evidence that at least a portion of that conduct met all of the statutory elements of criminal obstruction of justice. In some of the instances in which all of the statutory elements of obstruction are met, the report finds no persuasive constitutional or factual defenses. And yet, it declines to render a judgment on whether the president has committed a crime. Now, the House must decide what to do with these facts. If it wants to actually confront the substance of the report, it will introduce a resolution to begin an impeachment inquiry.”
4.20 Mitt Romney: “I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President. I am also appalled that, among other things, fellow citizens working in a campaign for president welcomed help from Russia — including information that had been illegally obtained; that none of them acted to inform American law enforcement; and that the campaign chairman was actively promoting Russian interests in Ukraine. Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders.”
4.20 Eight terrorist bombs explode in Sri Lanka, killing more than 200 people
4.19 Lower Manhattan tour with Cara
4.19 Karen Tumulty in the Post: “Either house, could, with a majority vote, formally censure Trump, something that has not happened to any chief executive since the Senate censured Andrew Jackson in 1834. While this would be dismissed in some quarters as merely a symbolic act, it would be a historic rebuke of the Trump presidency — and would, properly, leave it to the voters to decide whether they have had enough of it.”
4.19 Ron Klain in the Post: Mueller fell short in what he delivered. This starts with his failure to get Trump to answer questions in person. There was ample precedent for insisting on such an interview: Bill Clinton testified before a grand jury in the Whitewater investigation; George W. Bush submitted to an interview with special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald about the Valerie Plame matter. In this case, with uncertainty about what the president knew about his son Donald Trump Jr.’s coordination with foreign hackers and meddlers; with the president at the center of lies about dealings and meetings with Russians; and with doubts about why the president did so many things to try to derail Mueller’s probe — commonly seen as indications of guilt — why didn’t Mueller press harder to question the president directly?
4.19 New York Business: From April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2018, domestic migration left the Empire State with 1.2 million fewer inhabitants, though foreign immigration cushioned the loss. Also offsetting the loss, births outnumbered deaths. The overall change from April 1, 2010 is a modest gain of 164,085. From July 1, 2017 to July 1, 2018, New York state’s population fell by 48,510 and New York City lost 39,523.
4.19 Mimi Rocah: “It seems quite clear Mueller intended for Congress to decide obstruction because he did not feel he could make a traditional prosecutive decision regarding the President so Barr not only inserted himself in that [process] but he really misrepresented that Mueller hadn’t given any indication of believing Congress should decide.”
4.19 Joshua A. Geltzer and Ryan Goodman in the Times: “A failure by political leaders to condemn the activities of a Trump campaign that openly welcomed Russian hacking and privately encouraged timely releases of damaging information about the campaign’s opponent would put our nation at further risk. As president, Mr. Trump has taken a series of steps at home and abroad that advance Russian policy interests. At home, he has weakened American democracy, all but paralyzed our ability to act through legislation and vilified key institutions — particularly law enforcement and the intelligence community. Abroad, Mr. Trump has weakened NATO, given Russia an increasingly free hand in Syria, minimized sanctions against Russian actors, questioned America’s commitment to protecting Eastern Europe from Russian aggression and defended Mr. Putin on the world stage. It’s hard to look toward the 2020 election with anything but concern
4.18 A photo essay in Atlas Obscura shows New York subway cars being used to build reefs in the harbor
4.18 George Conway in the Post: “White House counsel John Dean famously told Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing. What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J. Trump. Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay.
4.18 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman in The New York Times: “The White House that emerges from more than 400 pages of Mr. Mueller’s report is a hotbed of conflict infused by a culture of dishonesty — defined by a president who lies to the public and his own staff, then tries to get his aides to lie for him. Mr. Trump repeatedly threatened to fire lieutenants who did not carry out his wishes while they repeatedly threatened to resign rather than cross lines of propriety or law. At one juncture after another, Mr. Trump made his troubles worse, giving in to anger and grievance and lashing out in ways that turned advisers into witnesses against him. He was saved from an accusation of obstruction of justice, the report makes clear, in part because aides saw danger and stopped him from following his own instincts. Based on contemporaneous notes, emails, texts and F.B.I. interviews, the report draws out scene after scene of a White House on the edge.”
4.18 Dan Balz in the Washington Post: “The 448-page document is replete with evidence of repeated lying by public officials and others (some of whom have been charged for that conduct), of the president urging advisers not to tell the truth, of the president seeking to shut down the investigation, of a Trump campaign hoping to benefit politically from Russian hacking and leaks of information damaging to its opponent, of a White House in chaos and operating under abnormal rules.”
4.18 Trump to McGahn: “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes. . . . I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes.”
“Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I’m fucked.”-Donald J Trump
What is something no innocent man would ever say, Alex?#PresidentInJeopardy pic.twitter.com/ExKV536nLv— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) April 19, 2019
4.18 The Report: “When Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said “Oh my God, This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
4.18 The Report: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the president clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment.”
4.18 Harry Litman in the Post on Barr‘s pre-release press conference: The style and form of Barr’s news conference was even more one-sided. Barr crescendoed repeatedly at his several declarations echoing the president’s mantra of “no collusion” (even using that legally meaningless term). And the most bizarre aspect of the entire performance was his sympathetic portrayal of the president’s overwrought state of mind, resembling every bit a personal defense attorney rather than the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.”
4.18 The redacted version of the Mueller report is released.
4.18 AP: Gallup says the percentage of U.S. adults who belong to a church or other religious institution has plunged by 20 points over the past two decades, hitting a low of 50% last year. Gallup said church membership was 70% in 1999 — and higher than that for most of the 20th century.Since 1999, the figure has fallen steadily, while the percentage of U.S. adults with no religious affiliation has jumped from 8% to 19%. The biggest drops were recorded among Democrats and Hispanics. Church membership among Democrats fell from 71% to 48% over 20 years, compared to a drop from 77% to 69% among Republicans.
4.17 Researchers at Yale took the severed heads of 32 pigs, and restored some cellular function, blurring the line between dead and alive
4.15 A monstrous fire swept through The Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, destroying the wood-and-lead roof and opening three holes in the sweeping vaulted ceiling, but leaving the main building structurally sound
4.14 Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, went on the Chinese social media site Weibo to support China’s intense work culture known as “996,” which refers to working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. “If we find things we like, 996 is not a problem. If you don’t like [your work], every minute is torture.” He went on to call the opportunity to work 996 hours a “blessing.” Ma has a fortune estimated at around $40 billion
4.14 Tiger Woods wins his fifth Masters Tournament. It was his victory in a major tournament in 11 years.
4.14 Alexandre Tanzi in Bloomberg: “The cost of many products and services the upper middle class buys, from autos to college educations, is outpacing overall inflation.”
4.14 Nancy Pelosi on 60 Minutes: There’s nobody in the country who knows better that he should not be president of the United States than Donald Trump.”