5.10 Rolling Stone: “Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president had a pressing question for his national-security aides and administration officials: Does China have the secret technology — a weapon, even — to create large, man-made hurricanes and then launch them at the United States? And if so, would this constitute an act of war by a foreign power, and could the U.S. retaliate militarily? Then-President Trump repeatedly asked about this, according to two former senior administration officials and a third person briefed on the matter. “It was almost too stupid for words,” said a former Trump official intimately familiar with the then-sitting president’s inquiry.
5.10 Axios: 70% of U.S. adults — across race, gender, political party and income — say the American Dream is achievable, Gallup polling found. 44% of Fortune 500 companies have at least one founder who is an immigrant or the child of immigrants, according to stats from New American Economy, founded by Michael Bloomberg. Even the children of immigrants who fall in the poorest quarter of the U.S. end up in the middle class, Princeton researchers found. 80% of America’s millionaires — foreign- and U.S.-born — are first-generation. The bottom line: The U.S. remains the leading destination for immigrants with big dreams. 20% of all the world’s immigrants are in the U.S., according to Pew Research Center.
5.10 John Leo dies at 86.
5.7 79-1 longshot Rich Strike wins the Kentucky Derby, overcoming the second-longest odds in the history of the race.
5.6 Ron Charles on Margaret Atwood in The Washington Post: “Not since Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin has a novelist been so closely aligned with such a dramatic upheaval of American political and cultural life.”
5.5 Tulip Festival in Washington Park in Albany.
5.4 Biden: “This is about a lot more than abortion. The idea that somehow there is no right of privacy … What happens if you have a state that changes the law, saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children. Is that legit under the way the [Supreme Court] decision is written? What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that’s existed . . . in recent American history.”
5.3 Heather Cox Richardson: ” The dog has caught the car.”
5.2 A leaked draft of an opinion by Samuel Alito shows that the Supreme Court has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division.”
5.1 After the Civil War, Frank Bannerman became America’s Military Surplus Baron, buying redundant military equipment and selling it at low prices for high profit. Think of him as a pre-internet eBay. After outgrowing his Brooklyn warehouses, he bought the only island in the Hudson, lying east of Cornwall. There he constructed another warehouse, built like a fanciful castle. It is now in ruins. Yesterday, with our friends Paul and Anne Lindstrom, we took a boat out of Beacon and visited this Gilded Age dream.