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Manhattan DA says attempts to intimidate office won’t be tolerated after Trump’s call for protests
Manhattan DA says attempts to intimidate office won’t be tolerated after Trump’s call for protests, Dennis Romero and Jesse Rodriguez, NBC News
Alvin Bragg sought to assure staffers in a memo that they'll be safe. "Please know that your safety is our top priority," Bragg said in a memo to office staff obtained by NBC News from a senior official at the Manhattan DA’s office.

He added, "We do not tolerate attempts to intimidate our office or threaten the rule of law in New York."
Trump Did It Again
Trump Did It Again, Tom Nichols, The Atlantic
If arrested, he’s called on “protesters” to come to his defense.

Spokespeople from the former president’s office have already walked back Trump’s statement, noting that they have not been told of any specific date for an indictment or an arrest. Indeed, any attempt to book Trump is unlikely to happen as soon as Tuesday, for many reasons. But that’s not the point. Trump’s message today to the American people has already come through loud and clear: I am too dangerous to arrest…

[ed. note: doubts then expressed about this case]

That said, Trump himself today upped the ante by saying, in effect, that it doesn’t matter what’s in the indictment. Instead, he is warning all of us, point-blank, that he will violate the law if he wants to, and if you don’t like it, you can take it up with the mob that he can summon at will. This is pure authoritarianism, the flex of a would-be American caudillo who is betting that our fear of his goons is greater than our commitment to the rule of law. Once someone like Trump issues that kind of challenge, it doesn’t matter if the indictment is for murder, campaign-finance violations, or mopery with intent to gawk: The issue is whether our legal institutions can be bullied into paralysis.
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First, Biden was FDR. Now he’s Clinton. (Spoiler alert: He’s neither.)
First, Biden was FDR. Now he’s Clinton. (Spoiler alert: He’s neither.), E.J. Dionne Jr., The Washington Post
In 2021, Joe Biden was touted as a bold progressive president in the spirit of FDR. In 2023, he’s suddenly being cast as a center-hugging Bill Clinton.

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Maybe Joe Biden is just Joe Biden, and maybe it’s neither the 1930s nor the 1990s anymore.

Historical analogies can be instructive, but they’re also vexed. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Clinton are more complicated as politicians and people than as archetypes. Roosevelt could be cautious and often had to be pushed to be more progressive. Clinton was certainly a Third Way triangulator, but his health-care proposal was far more sweeping than Obamacare — and he was, by the way, a vocal Roosevelt fan.

Using the past to portray different Bidens also misses the dynamics of a political landscape transformed both by Donald Trump and by a stronger progressive movement inside the Democratic Party.
Trump Picks an Enemy: Us
Trump Picks an Enemy: Us, Charlie Sykes, The xxxxxx
The Orange Caligula sides with Russia. Here is Donald Trump channeling Kremlin propaganda, siding with Russia, even as he declares that our real enemy is . . . other Americans. Despite the wishcasting punditry, the magical thinking of his rivals, and the fervent hopes of the Hollow Men of the GOP, this man is the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, and therefore possibly the next president of the United States. (The DeSantis bubble hasn’t burst. But it’s leaking.)

~~I don’t mean to alarm you~~. You should be alarmed.
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Is the Western drought finally ending? That depends on where you look
Is the Western drought finally ending? That depends on where you look, Dan McEvoy, The Conversation
The winter of 2023 has made a big dent in improving the drought and potentially eliminating the water shortage problems of the last few summers.

I say “potentially” because in many areas, a lot of the impacts of drought tend to show up in summer, once the winter rain and snow stop and the West starts relying on reservoirs and streams for water. Spring heat waves like the ones we saw in 2021 or rain in the mountains could melt the snowpack faster than normal.

In California, the state’s three-year precipitation deficit was just about erased by the atmospheric rivers that caused so much flooding in December and January. By early March, the snowpack across the Sierra Nevada was well above the historical averages – and more than 200% of average in some areas. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced it was ending emergency water restrictions for nearly 7 million people on March 15.

It seems as though most of the surface water drought – drought involving streams and reservoirs – could be eliminated by summer in California and the Great Basin, across Nevada and western Utah.

But that’s only surface water. Drought also affects groundwater, and those effects will take longer to alleviate.
Why it matters that the ICC has issued a warrant for Putin
Why it matters that the ICC has issued a warrant for Putin, Lauren Wolfe, SubStack
Justice may come slowly, but it is possible.

No matter how Russian war criminals are charged, the extradition of Putin, just as with Milosevic, won’t happen while he’s in power, and a successor may be reluctant to hand Putin over — unlike the Serbian reformists with Milosevic. But what happened with Milosevic, as with the Nuremberg trials following World War II, shows that top leaders can be held to account.

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