3.15 A white supremacist in Christchurch NZ livestreamed his shooting rampage during Friday prayers at two mosques that left at least 49 dead and another 48 receiving hospital treatment. The shooter also posted a 74-page manifesto entitled `The Great Replacement,’ in which he identified himself as a 28-year-old white man born in Australia. He claimed he was defending ‘our lands’ from ‘invaders’ and ensuring ‘a future for white children,’ and said was motivated in part by Dylann Roof’s 2015 massacre of nine black churchgoers in South Carolina.
3.14 CIA with Greg and Susan
3.13 Albany
3.12 Albany
3.12 Sir Tim Berners-Lee in Wired on the 30th anniversary of the world wide web: “The web has become a public square, a library, a doctor’s office, a shop, a school, a design studio, an office, a cinema, a bank, and so much more. Of course with every new feature, every new website, the divide between those who are online and those who are not increases. And while the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups a voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30.”
3.12 David Ignatius in the Post: Dick Cheney, the former vice president, made just about the nastiest crack a Republican could offer about President Trump’s foreign policy when he said it “looks a lot more like Barack Obama than Ronald Reagan.” . . . Cheney’s remarks tell us that we are experiencing what may be a political realignment in the United States, in which some of our political labels don’t work very well. There’s a populist wing in both parties, with Trump and some progressive Democrats expressing broadly similar concerns about the United States’ overextension in the world and the unfairness of the existing global order to working people. There’s a traditionalist wing in both parties, too, which supports the old Cheney-esque U.S.-led world order and its network of alliances and trade agreements. This traditionalist approach was embodied in the shared invitation this week by Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, to address a joint session of Congress. There’s a world of difference, to be sure, between Trump’s bullying, rich-guy version of populism and Sen. Bernie Sanders’s empathetic, progressive version. Similarly, Pelosi’s version of internationalism is less defense-oriented and hawkish than McConnell’s. But politics is confusing these days partly because the usual left-right spectrum doesn’t always apply. Is free trade liberal or conservative? How about internationalism? What about privacy protection? . . . Political systems can be like scientific theories. Sometimes there emerge so many anomalous elements that don’t fit the existing structure that the theory collapses, and a new one arises. In science, that means, for example, that the theory that the sun revolves around the Earth loses its explanatory power, and evidence proves the opposite is the case. In politics, new parties emerge, or the existing ones develop new identities. We may be entering such a period. The definition of a winning Democrat may be that, in response to Trump’s rambling circus of self-aggrandizement, he or she could create a genuinely coherent new political order.
3.12 Yet another Brexit vote failure in Parliament
3.12 The Giants trade Odell Beckham Jr to the Browns
3.12 Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as “downright evil.” In real numbers, this suggests that 48.8 million voters out of the 136.7 million who cast ballots in 2016 believe that members of opposition party are in league with the devil.
3.12 In a major college admissions scandal that laid bare the elaborate lengths some wealthy parents will go to get their children into competitive American universities, federal prosecutors charged 50 people on Tuesday in a brazen scheme to buy spots in the freshman classes at Yale, Stanford and other big-name schools.
3.11 Paul Krugman in the Times: Demented anger is a significant factor in modern American political life — and overwhelmingly on one side. All that talk about liberal “snowflakes” is projection; if you really want to see people driven wild by tiny perceived slights and insults, you’ll generally find them on the right. Nor is it just about racism and misogyny. Although these are big components of the phenomenon, I don’t see the obvious connection to hamburger paranoia. Just to be clear: To paraphrase John Stuart Mill, I’m not saying that most conservatives are filled with rage over petty things. What I’m saying instead is that most of those filled with such rage are conservatives, and they supply much of the movement’s energy. Not to put too fine a point on it, pathological pettiness almost surely put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016 election. At this point you probably want to know what I think we should do about it. The truth is that I don’t know. I guess there’s some case for using taxes rather than regulations to control pollution, since you won’t be telling people directly what to do. But one suspects that the people I’m talking about will still find something to be hysterical about.
3.11 Nancy Pelosi: “Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”
3.11 Hal Blaine, drummer non-pareil, dies at 90. Records he played on: Be My Baby, Good Vibrations. Mr. Tambourine Man, Eve of Destruction, Monday Monday, Mrs Robinson, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Let the Sunshine In, Strangers in the Night, Help Me Rhonda, The Boxer
3.11 The Huffington Post: The U.S. electorate is the oldest it’s ever been and will keep getting older for at least four more decades. Researchers call it the “demographic transition.” Americans over 65 are now the fastest-growing age group in the country. The U.S. Census projects that by 2035, the population past retirement age will outnumber the population under 18 for the first time in history. While younger, more diverse generations have captured the media narrative about U.S. politics, its defining feature in the future may be its oldest participants. “As much as diversity is growing in the U.S., the baby boomer generation still has a lot of financial power, political power and consumer power,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “There’s a lot of focus in the media on the younger generations, but in fact, the younger population is growing more slowly than seniors.” America’s current demographic makeup, Frey said, is unprecedented. Due to rising longevity, falling birth rates and the sheer number of baby boomers (currently between 55 and 73 years old), today’s older Americans have held onto power longer than any previous generation. In 1950, as the boom began, just 8 percent of Americans were over 65; the United States had more people under 25 than over 45. By 2010, when the boomers began to retire, those numbers had flipped and the share of the population over retirement age had increased by 50 percent. Their power goes beyond raw numbers. Older Americans are more likely to vote than millennials and Gen Xers, particularly in midterm and primary elections. They are three times more likely to donate to political campaigns. Plus, they are clustered in rural and sparsely populated states, giving them disproportionately large Senate and Electoral College representation. This partly explains why the average member of Congress is now 58.6 years old, roughly a decade older than they were in 1981 and two decades older than the population at large.
3.8 Miami Herald: Li Yang, the ex-owner of spa linked to Robert Kraft, is a big Republican donor who 
watched Super Bowl with Trump at Mar-a-lago
3.8 Bret Stephens in the Times: Donald Trump is gearing up to run a campaign based on a thriving economy (check), a country at peace (check), a mess of congressional investigations that will quickly confuse and bore the public (check), Democrats who want to turn Silicon Valley into a giant utility (check), an inconclusive Mueller report (likely check), and a Democratic Party that can neither bring itself to censure an anti-Semitic congresswoman nor publicly embrace the free-market system (check, check). Democrats still seem to think 2020 is going to be a referendum on the president. It’s not. It’s going to be a choice. Right now, the Trump campaign could hardly ask for a bigger favor from its overconfident opponents.
3.8 HuffPo: Most Republican women said gender discrimination is not a serious problem in the United States, according to a new HuffPost/Yahoo/CARE survey. Only 30 percent of Republican women polled said gender discrimination is a serious problem, compared with 74 percent of Democratic women.
3.7 Dan Jenkins dies at 89. In the words of his creation Billy Clyde Puckett: Laughter is the only thing that cuts trouble down to a size where you can talk to it.
3.7 Paul Mannafort sentenced to a paltry 47 months
3.6 Sen. Martha McSally, the first female Air Force fighter pilot to fly in combat, said Wednesday that she was sexually assaulted by a superior officer, and later, when she tried to talk about it to military officials, she “felt like the system was raping me all over again.”
3.6 In an interview with Gayle King on CBS about charges of rape and sexual imprisonment, R. Kelly got upset. “Stop it. You all quit playing! Quit playing! I didn’t do this stuff! This is not me! I’m fighting for my fucking life! Y’all killing me with this shit! I gave you 30 years of my fucking career!”
3.5 Jane Mayer on Fox News in The New Yorker: “[I]n the late summer of 2017, a few months before the Justice Department filed suit, Trump ordered Gary Cohn, then the director of the National Economic Council, to pressure the Justice Department to intervene. According to a well-informed source, Trump called Cohn into the Oval Office along with John Kelly, who had just become the chief of staff, and said in exasperation to Kelly, ‘I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened! I’ve mentioned it fifty times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!'” Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs, evidently understood that it would be highly improper for a President to use the Justice Department to undermine two of the most powerful companies in the country as punishment for unfavorable news coverage, and as a reward for a competing news organization that boosted him. According to the source, as Cohn walked out of the meeting he told Kelly, ‘Don’t you [effing] dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.'”
3.6 Oxford Professor Oliver Curry says there are seven moral precepts that unite humanity: Help your family; Help your group; Return favors; Be brave; Defer to superiors; Divide resources fairly; Respect others’ property.
3.6 Bob Lonsberry on Radio WHAM 1180: “If Andrew Cuomo has somewhere an aspiration to be president, or if he feels some sense of duty to his party or the country, he should throw his hat in the ring. We may no longer live in a world where merit has relevance in politics, but among all the potential Democratic candidates, there is no one – not even Joe Biden – who has a resume as varied and deep as Andrew Cuomo. The Democratic presidential aspirants are a bunch of speech givers and bomb throwers. They are talkers and activists, people who rose on a cause or a race, piggybacking on the rage of one disaffected group or another. They might well be able to win an election, but there is little hope that they could lead a country. And there is almost nothing in the backgrounds of any of them that leads you to believe they could administer an organization as large as the executive branch of the federal government. Nor is there anything to make you think that any of them have the grit to go toe to toe with some foreign despot or international rival. Except Cuomo. He’s run one of the biggest states in the Union for many years. He’s negotiated political hurdles at the state and federal level. He doesn’t back down from anybody. And he would be a good representative of the progressive philosophy of the Democratic Party. He would be a good candidate for his party, and if he got elected he could do the job. I detest him and what he has done to my part of our state. But objectively, laying aside my prejudices and principles, he’s better than anybody else the Democrats have. He should be a presidential candidate. Democrats across the country ought to have that choice.”
3.6 Jennifer Rubin in the Post: “If Democrats want to win as much as they say they do, they should invert the William F. Buckley Jr. rule: vote for the most progressive candidate (for Buckley, it was the most conservative candidate) who can win. Democrats also should make sure that the candidate they pick can then rack up as many wins as possible in a political environment in which he almost certainly will not have the House majority and a filibuster-proof Senate majority. To get all that, they would be well-advised to look for a Democrat with a successful track record as a chief executive. They’ll find that this criteria very likely will lead them to someone with all the qualities they seek: character, honesty/integrity, inclusiveness, vision and experience.”
3.6 Forbes names Kylie Jenner, the 21-year-old lip kit mogul, reality TV star, and mother of Stormi Webster, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire ever
3.6 Quartz.com: Two care homes in Sweden are using 3-D printers to shape a puree to look like broccoli and chicken legs to try make meals more palatable to their residents
3.5 Former Trump attorney Ty Cobb: “I think Bob Mueller’s an American hero. I think Bob Mueller’s a guy that, you know, even though he came from an arguably privileged background, you know, has a backbone of steel. He walked into a firefight in Vietnam to pull out one of his injured colleagues and was appropriately honored for that. . . . He is a very deliberate guy. And he — but he’s also a class act. And a very justice-oriented person. . . . I don’t feel the investigation is a witch hunt. I wish it had happened on a quicker timetable. But it didn’t. And that’s, you know, and that’s unfortunate. But at the same time, it’s not a real criticism of the special counsel.”
3.4 Eugene Robinson in the Post: The president of the United States gave a rambling and incoherent two-hour speech in which he raved like a lunatic and told crazy, self-serving lies from start to finish. If that no longer qualifies as alarming, we’re in serious trouble.”
3.4 Lawrence Summers in the Post: “Modern monetary theory. . . is the supply-side economics of our time. A valid idea — that traditional fiscal-policy taboos need to be rethought in an era of low real interest rates — has been stretched by fringe economists into ludicrous claims that massive spending on job guarantees can be financed by central banks without any burden on the economy. At a moment of economic and political frustration, some in the more extreme wing of the out-of-power political party are seizing on the possibility of a free lunch to offer politically attractive ways out of economic difficulty. Modern monetary theory is fallacious at multiple levels.”
3.3 Edward Issac Dovere in The Atlantic: “Cuomo can be irritating, confounding, and egotistical. He can also be engaging, intense, and charismatic. He deliberately stands apart from the leftward tilt of his party, but his record of bills signed into law on many core progressive issues is unmatched by any other Democrat, in D.C. or the states, with the possible exception of Jerry Brown. He wins in landslides, but most politicians in New York and beyond can’t stand him. He doesn’t fit easily into the Democratic Party and has, at least for now, taken himself out of the two-year-long 
battle over its identity. Is there a place in national politics for a man who has spent a career lighting bridges on fire and obsessing over power plays in Albany that don’t matter at all outside New York? Is there a place for a person who gets tagged as a moderate? Who doesn’t get into the presidential mix himself? And yet: As Democrats are desperate to show they can bring more results than promises, he is a three-term governor of one of the biggest, most complicated states, with a long list of accomplishments. As Democrats worry that the party’s 2020 nominee won’t be able to take on Donald Trump, he is another brash Queens guy, and just as eager to throw around his machismo and bravado. He’s waiting on Biden. Other than that, Cuomo clearly thinks he has a stronger case to make than any of the people running now. But not so strong that he’s ready to actually make it.”
3.2 Trump at CPAC: “You know I’m totally off script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off-script. True. And if we don’t go off-script, our country is in big trouble, folks. Because we have to get it back.”