The Jury

There was little joy in Boston last Friday afternoon when 12 jurors unanimously sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death. Only 15% of the city’s residents supported the death penalty for the 21-year-old marathon bomber; across the country, four times that many wanted him executed. The reaction to the verdict was muted in Boston, even among the victims. Some quietly expressed gratitude that justice had been served. Others, notably Bill and Denise Richard whose 8-year-old son Martin was the youngest to die and whose 7-year-old daughter Jane lost her left leg, opposed the execution. There was no sympathy for Tsarnaev, but there was also no outcry for vengeance, no demand for public retribution – only a kind of sad and weary spirit, and a determination to move on. I was one of those who had hoped the jury would decide for life, although life in the supermax prison seems a living death. But I have only admiration for the 12 people, whose identities I will never know, who came to a different conclusion. I don’t know why they did so, but I think that, amid the horrific sadness of the testimony, they looked daily at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and saw . . . nothing – no sign of the empathy that connects us to each other. And so all the arguments of his defense team – which were efforts to humanize him – came to nothing.

We have seen so many instances of our justice system breaking down. Here, whether you agree with the outcome or not, it worked.

Stumble of the Week

I had heard that members of the National Football League cheat (and knock out their fiancées on elevators and use drugs), but I had never known that each team’s quarterback plays only with his own balls. This is just one of the things I have learned in my prodigious research into “Deflategate,” the scandal that is riveting New England. If you don’t live near Boston or watch lots of ESPN, you may be unaware of the claims that the New England Patriots improperly manipulated the pressure in their footballs to the advantage of their quarterback, Tom Brady. But in Boston this is front-page news, the topic of excruciating analysis on sports radio and the subject of a 243-page, multi-million-dollar report, which charges the Patriots with intentionally lowering the pounds per square inch in their footballs. Yesterday the Patriots hit back with a 20,000-word rebuttal that includes a report from a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, cites the “ideal gas law,” and says that the minute and forty seconds their employee spent in the bathroom with two bags of footballs was not to deflate the balls, but “is consistent with the time that it takes a gentleman to enter a bathroom, relieve himself, wash his hands, and leave.” The gentleman in question is known as “the Deflator” because he is trying to lose weight.

There is much more to come in this story, but unlike, say, the Middle East, the solution seems obvious: Why not have both teams play with the same ball?

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

As I walked along Market Street in San Francisco, past payday loan storefronts and pawnshops and “We Buy Gold” signs, the Dickensian stench of poverty rising from the sidewalk, unkempt people with paper cups and cardboard signs dared me to make eye contact. Whatever sympathy I might have had for one person down on his luck turned quickly to irritation at the legion of mendicants, their ranks swollen by addicts, drunks and scam artists, making me run an urban gauntlet of guilt. We like the objects of our generosity to be grateful, passive and scarce.

But that isn’t how they come these days in a world of massive displacement, where we read daily of thousands of desperate people washing up on a resort beach in Malaysia; of trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa crammed onto rickety boats in a diaspora in which more 2,000 people drown every year; of swimming across the Rio Grande at night and then driven across America by “coyotes” in what has become a multi-billion-dollar business dominated by organized crime. For them, our southern border is just one more obstacle to survival.

The United Nations Refugee Agency estimates that the number of displaced people worldwide now exceeds 50 million, a misery index that will overwhelm both national borders and traditional notions of charity. There are many reasons this is so, but the driving factor is war: “Peace is today dangerously in deficit. Humanitarians can help as a palliative, but political solutions are vitally needed.”

American Uber

To those who haven’t experienced the phenomenon known as Uber: it’s not just a taxi company with a Teutonic name, whose valuation has gone from $60 million to $50 billion since 2011; it’s also an improbable reminder that America’s melting pot still bubbles. I have yet to meet an American-born Uber driver, and perhaps as a result I’ve heard some poignant stories. I wrote in March of a young Eritrean man who fled to Sudan, was kidnapped for his body parts and ultimately ransomed by his father. More recently, I had a young Palestinian driver who had grown up an Israeli citizen in Jerusalem, come to America where he married a refugee from Guatemala who had been adopted by a woman from one of Baltimore’s first families. The couple, now settled in Boston, were awaiting their first child. Although he had fled from the Middle East, he carried none of the baggage of hate we associate with that place, blaming the violent passions on political opportunism, not ethnic animosity.

Yesterday, my driver had fled from Yemen because his family had been on the wrong side of the civil war. “When I was 13,” he told me, "they put me in jail. It was because of my last name." He will never return, he said, the tribal conflicts will never end. But he wasn’t looking back. “I want my son to understand what we have here.”

I am inspired by these stories of gritty immigrants for whom America still represents a beacon of hope.

Carly

“The health of our water is the principal measure of how we live on the land.”  Luna Leopold While Texans brace for Emperor Obama’s military invasion, Californians continue to pray for rain. With 93.4% of the state in its fourth year of “severe drought," a beautiful sunny day is an oxymoron and the clouds have no rain.

Carly Fiorina knows why. The latest contestant in the Republican presidential sweepstakes, Fiorina’s main claim is that she ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, the difficulty of which should not be underestimated. Her analysis of the drought is equally unsettling. “Droughts are nothing new,” she wrote recently. The problem this time is not nature. It’s people, specifically “overzealous liberal environmentalists” whose policies “allow much of California’s rainfall to wash out to sea” instead of being diverted to Central Valley cantaloupe farmers. “It comes down to this: Which do we think is more important, families or fish?”

This is nonsense. Anyone who thinks that a drop of water making it to the ocean is wasted should visit the once-mighty Colorado, which has been so thoroughly dammed and diverted (4.4-million acre feet a year to California alone) that it hasn’t flowed regularly to the sea since 1960. Its estuary has become a poisoned trickle. We’re the problem all right: we’re killing the river.

A river is not a pipe. It’s an ecosystem that, if we care for it, will return huge benefits – including fish. Our health depends on its health. The answer, Ms. Fiorina, is “families and fish.”

Conditional Love

If you don’t wear an American flag on your lapel, proclaim America the most exceptional nation in the history of the world, and say “thank your for your service” to every person you see in a uniform (“You’re welcome, but I’m in the Salvation Army”), then to many you aren’t a loyal American. I’m unclear how this squares with a self-proclaimed democracy in which (1) trust in our elected representatives barely breaks single digits, (2) fewer than half the people support the president, and (3) politicians of both parties are routinely indicted – e.g., New York’s Assembly Speaker (Democrat) and Senate Majority Leader (Republican). Maybe it’s just government we distrust. So let’s turn to the private sector, where banks commit crimes, get fined billions and no one in management gets fired; under-performing hedge fund managers average $465 million in yearly compensation; the Koch brothers recognize the reality of climate change but still fund its debunkers; the wealth gap has reached oligarchic proportions; and corporate lobbyists annually spend $2.6 billion writing laws and purchasing politicians. It’s disgraceful.

And yet, America was founded on a set of ideals, which, however short we fall, we continue to reaffirm:

• “We shall be as a city upon a hill” (1630).
• “We hold these truths to be self-evident” (1776).
• “[T]hat government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” (1863).
• “I have a dream that is . . . deeply rooted in the American dream” (1963).

This seems an “American exceptionalism” worth holding on to and living up to.

Geezers (Old Friends)

The four of us have known each other for well over five decades, even longer for some, which has given our friendships the comfortable, broken-in fit of an old jacket. Our paths have diverged over the years. We have lived in different places and done different things, concentrated on our own families and careers, lost touch with parts of our pasts and even, over time, with each other. But with old friends the bonds persist. When we meet again, even after many years, we pick up where we left off, not needing to define ourselves nor explain our references. As we have grown older, we have come to savor these things, and so, four or five years ago we decided to get together for a long weekend at least once a year. A lot has changed, of course, and only in our own eyes do we look the same as we used to. But above all, it’s the laughter that brings us together, laughter that comes as easily as before but seems kinder now.

There are many benefits that come with growing old, from cheap movie tickets to grandchildren to the relief that we may yet escape the messes we humans have made in this world – to old friends, whose common memories remind us that the past is not gone. It has been incorporated into the arc of our lives, whose stories are yet unfinished. We get together every year because we have learned that old friends keep us young.

The Courtroom

“All rise,” said the clerk, and they all rose, including the defendant, whose slight build and guileless face belie the horrific things he had done. That contrast is at the core of the defense’s strategy to save the life of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose trial entered its sentencing phase this week. The trial had been heading here since the opening statement, when Judy Clarke said, “It was him,” acknowledging in three syllables that her client had committed the crimes of which he stood accused – that he was one of two men whose knapsacks filled with bombs brought carnage and never-ending grief to the Boston Marathon two years ago. Clarke’s aim was not to assert Tsarnaev’s innocence, but to save his life. On Monday, the defense team cut right to the chase: Spare our client the death penalty, said attorney David Bruck, because life in prison without the possibility of parole is far worse. “One punishment is over quickly, the other will last for life,” condemned to a solitary existence 12x7-foot cell at Colorado’s super max prison, described by its former warden as “a clean version of hell.”

The defense’s portrait of Tsarnaev as a lost teenager – “a good kid” from a disintegrated family, overwhelmed by his murderous and fanatical brother – points to the possibility of rehabilitation.

“When it’s 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can’t even see the Rocky Mountains,” ex-warden Robert Hood told Mark Binelli, “let’s be candid here. It’s not designed for rehabilitation.”

The defense relentlessly builds its case of humanizing Jokar.

He was an incredibly hard worker who “always wanted to do the right thing,” his third-grade teacher told the jury.

“He looks around the room,” said a spectator, “and maybe it’s the last time he sees a woman in his life.”

“Jokar was super smart, very kind . . . a really lovely person,” said his fifth-grade teacher.

“This is where the government keeps other terrorists who used to be famous but aren’t anymore,” Bruck told the jury, “He goes here and he’s forgotten. No more spotlight like the death penalty brings . . . no martyrdom . . . no autobiography . . . no nothing.”

“He was quiet, friendly, humble,” said his eighth-grade teacher. “All the teachers loved him.”

“He’ll be crazy in a couple of months,” said a spectator.

In their determination to save his life, have his lawyers condemned Tsarnaev to a living death?

“Why don’t they just ask him?” said a spectator.

Environmental Scorecard

No issue better reflects the growing chasm between America’s two political parties than that of the environment, which was born in the Republican Party and was once a broadly bipartisan issue. The 1972 Clean Water Act, for example, passed the Senate, 86-0, and the House, 366-11 – and then easily overrode Richard Nixon’s veto, 57-12 and 247-23. But the League of Conservation Voters’ latest National Environmental Scorecard tells a completely different story, particularly in the House of Representatives, where most Democrats score above 90%, most Republicans below 10%. Among the leadership the difference is even starker – with Democrats at 92% and Republicans at 2%. And there’s a nice consistency among the declared presidential candidates: Cruz 0%; Paul 0%; Rubio 0%. The partisan differences are escalating for two reasons: (1) most Republicans’ current scores are significantly lower than their lifetime averages (Oregon’s Greg Walden has dropped from 11% to 3%, for example, and Virginia’s Frank Wolf from 26% to 6%); and (2) the tea party wing is pushing the GOP deeper into anti-environmental territory. Many House votes now attempt to roll back existing protections – keeping pesticides out of our waterways, for example, and carbon pollutants out of the air. Others seek to prevent the Defense Department from replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and the EPA from using peer-reviewed scientific studies with confidential health information.

This creates a dilemma for the League, as it tries to maintain a semblance of non-partisanship, something it has traditionally done by supporting Republicans with mediocre records – like Maine’s Susan Collins (55%) – over pro-environment Democrats. Such Republicans are ever harder to find.

Stumble of the Week

Only 19 months until Election Day, and already the candidates are stumbling wildly. This week, in two breathless paragraphs in Time, Rand Paul praised the Koch Brothers who, “unlike many crony capitalists who troll the halls of Congress looking for favors, . . . have consistently lobbied against special-interest politics.” Clearly gratified by such public genuflection, David Koch looked ahead to “when the primaries are over and Scott Walker gets the nomination,” a pride of place the Wisconsin governor kept for about a day – until he appeared to oppose legal immigration for depressing the wages of working people, something to which the brothers are not averse. And then there was the Byzantine story of the Clinton Foundation raking in not-always-reported donations from foreign billionaires who developed uranium mines in Canada and then sold their company to the Russians, all while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. Somewhere in the midst of this, a Russian investment bank involved in the uranium deal paid Bill Clinton $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow – all of which may be perfectly legal by some letter of the law, but it seems a twisted tale in need of explanation from a presidential candidate. It is said that when Harry Truman retired from the presidency in 1953, he and Bess got in their old car and drove themselves back to Independence, Missouri, where they lived in the house they had owned all their married lives on Harry’s army pension from World War I. That seems a long time ago.

Deportees

Europe’s leaders, who have come under heavy criticism for an inadequate response to the thousands of refugees trying to reach their shores, are calling the latest events on the Mediterranean a humanitarian crisis. This seems a small ray of hope in the ongoing disaster – because you can’t have a humanitarian crisis without humans, and it's a step forward to see a human tragedy where others see a border-security breakdown or an immigrant problem. It seems unfair to blame Europe for the desperate people embarking from North Africa on overcrowded boats owned by unscrupulous human traffickers, as a Boston Globe editorial did yesterday, arguing that “the European Union has a moral duty to provide the financial resources and manpower to stem this escalating humanitarian crisis.” Europe didn’t cause the crisis, at least in its present incarnation, and it is not going to be able to stop it – and I can't think of many countries that would make the efforts Italy has made to rescue those at sea.

We need to stop flaying ourselves long enough to recognize that while the West isn’t perfect, there’s a reason why millions of desperate people are trying to get here, and no amount of wishing or wall building is going to make them stop coming. One lesson from Europe is that, whether out of humanitarianism or self-interest, we need to accept the responsibility our success has given us by continuing to engage with the world, which has become a very small place indeed.

Patriots' Day

If I were Iran, I’d want a nuclear bomb too. I hope it never gets one because I think moving toward denuking the world – and particularly the Middle East – seems a better avenue to stability than arming it to the teeth, as the U.S. seems intent doing. According to Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper in yesterday’s New York Times, American companies, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, can’t fill their order lists fast enough for planes, drones and heavy weapons for delivery to almost any Middle Eastern country except Syria and Iran.

We hear a lot about how we shouldn’t trust Iran, which seems a good idea, but is it any wonder that Iran doesn’t trust us? In the world’s most dangerous region, America’s free-enterprise arms dealerships are selling billions of dollars of weapons to the avowed enemies of Iran, which is, let’s not forget, an avowed enemy of ISIS.

The current U.S.-Iranian negotiations present an opportunity to break out of 35 years of mutual mistrust, and I believe Congressional oversight is an important part of the process – as long as it isn’t just one more partisan club with which to bludgeon any initiative suggested by President Obama.

Today is Patriot’s Day in Boston. Security is extremely tight, but the determination of people here to transcend the 2013 Marathon bombing is remarkable. It’s a spirit in which the whole diverse community has come together to affirm its optimism, its resilience and its unity. That was once called the American spirit.

Jebillary

“The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man As disheartening as an hereditary president.

Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy five days ago, 19 months before the polls open. She has been on the front page of the New York Times ever since – even though she faces no opposition and her campaign to date has consisted of driving to Iowa, having coffee with people, and going unrecognized in a Chipotle restaurant. For this she garnered such headlines as: “The Hillary Clinton Reboot: Both Off the Cuff and Meticulously Planned;” “Another Clinton Now Vows to Fix Political Finance System;” “For a Clinton, It’s Not Hard to Be Humble in an Effort to Regain Power.” Nineteen months of this?

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, who hasn’t even announced yet, is roaming the country picking off big donors so effectively that he quickly pushed Mitt Romney from the race.

Publicly, Jeb and Hillary are distancing themselves from heredity and inevitability, and they do have impressive resumes. But in an election projected to cost $5 billion, it’s what happens in private that counts. These are the safe candidates behind those doors, the representatives of the old order, security blankets for the establishment. Look around, they say, you could do worse. We certainly could. The question is, can we do better?

Off the Books

Yesterday I heard on the radio the story of Marine Captain T.S. Williams, who crash landed his bullet-riddled jet fighter on an airstrip in Korea in February 1953, hitting the grass without flaps or wheels at 200 miles per hour. Ted Williams resented being called back to active duty six years after serving in World War II. He was a professional baseball player – the best pure hitter in history. But he was also a citizen-soldier who considered it his duty to go. He flew 39 combat missions before resuming his career. The four Blackwater employees who were sentenced to prison on Monday for killing 14 unarmed people in Nisour Square eight years ago were mercenaries hired by our government to prosecute its war in Iraq. None of us who weren't there can judge those men – only our justice system can do that, and it seems, once again, to have done a more credible job of protecting our principles in times of terror than many other institutions.

We can, however, condemn the things the men did in our country's name. And above all, we can criticize a government that fights its wars with hired hands, outside any chain of command and unfettered by military regulations, whose presence enabled the Bush administration to conduct operations off the books and out of sight, so that we still have no full accounting of the financial or human costs of this disastrous war.

There may be things to privatize, but America’s defense is not one of them.

Teddy Gets Randy

Even though it feels like hordes of Republicans are running for president (and but a single Democrat), in fact last week Rand Paul became only the second declared GOP candidate. So for now, with just 16 months to go, he and Ted Cruz stand alone in what will soon be a crowded field. Both Paul and Cruz appeal to the tea party base, but the similarities seem to end there. From my perspective, Ted Cruz presents the most unpleasant face of the Republican party – obstructionist, narrow-minded and mean – whereas Rand Paul represents its most interesting faction. An anti-war iconoclast whom Lindsey Graham called “to the left of Barack Obama” on foreign policy, he thinks the government should stay out of our private lives, opposes lobbyists, pork and the Patriot Act, and actively courts minorities and young people. For this child of the 1960s, I thought, here is a breath of fresh air.

Then I looked a little deeper: Paul advocates U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and calls Obamacare “unconstitutional” despite the Supreme Court's ruling otherwise. While he accepts donations in bitcoins, he has flirted with a return to the gold standard. He believes climate change is caused by humans but opposes regulating carbon emissions and loathes the EPA. He has linked vaccinations and autism, opposes all gun restrictions, abortion funding, same-sex marriage, the separation of church and state, and the Federal Reserve.

The deeper I look, the more Rand Paul morphs into Ted Cruz.

Beyond Appomattox

“There is nothing left for me to do,” said Robert E. Lee in the early morning of April 9, 1865, “but to go and see General Grant, and I would rather die a thousand deaths." A few hours later, Lee rode to Appomattox courthouse, where Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, effectively ending the most murderous war in American history. It is an article of American exceptionalism’s faith that what happened at Appomattox 150 years ago yesterday was steeped in honor and mutual respect, Grant generous in victory, Lee noble in defeat. The war was over, the union preserved, the nation ready to heal. Except, writes, Elizabeth Varon in Appomattox, “The two men represented competing visions of the peace. For Grant, the Union victory was one of right over wrong.” For Lee it “was one of might over right,” won by massive firepower and human slaughter. Grant foresaw a better future; Lee sought the restoration of a mythic past.

Grant won the war. Lee won the peace. Grant became the brutal “butcher,” despite a casualty rate half that of the gentlemanly Lee. “The Lost Cause” exemplified the South’s pastoral alternative to the North’s soulless factories and urban slums. And Tara, Gone With the Wind’s dreamy plantation, captured America's popular imagination as the "slave camps" that, Edward Baptist writes, “inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed,” never could.

It’s time, I think, to change our narrative and accept our past.

The Great Thirst

In Ireland they don’t call it the famine – those years in the mid-19^th century when English landlords exported huge quantities of grain and beef while a million Irish people were dying of starvation and a million more were leaving their homeland. They call it “the great hunger” because the blackened blight of the potato, the lone food on which peasant lives depended, caused massive suffering in the midst of agricultural plenty. It wasn’t a famine. It was a policy. So we read now of California, whose farmers produce most of America's fresh food, consume four-fifths of the state’s vanishing water, and are exempt from Gov. Jerry Brown’s mandatory water restrictions. California, where almonds, the most lucrative export, use 1.1 trillion gallons a year, where it takes 872 gallons of water to make a gallon of wine, 1,847 gallons for a pound of beef, and 4.9 gallons for a single walnut.

The drought is real in California, its end is nowhere in sight. And while farmers didn’t stop the rain, longstanding agricultural policies and practices exacerbated the long-predicted crisis.                                                              

The San Joaquin Valley didn’t become “the nation’s salad bowl” on its 15 inches of annual rain. It took massive irrigation projects and the diverted waters of the Colorado River to make the southwestern desert bloom. And it is one more testament to what Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, deemed “the West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”

Farkhunda

“When are you going to write about Farkhunda?” my daughter Gayley asked me. Today.

I hadn’t written about the 27-year-old woman who was beaten to death two weeks ago in Kabul because I had nothing to add to yet another story of murderous fanaticism and the diminished lives of women in the Middle East. This one seemed particularly horrific: I pictured a deranged woman wandering in rags, muttering incoherently, maniacally setting fire to a book, suddenly set on by a frenzied mob.

Like too many news stories these days, everything I knew turned out to be wrong. Everything and yet nothing. Farkhunda was not mentally ill, although her terrified family said she was. She was a law student who became incensed at the behavior of mullahs selling worthless charms to the gullible poor. She condemned the men, was falsely accused, and killed. Another victim.

Then I watched the video: young men with boots, sticks and boulders snuff out Farkhunda, as others cheer, laugh and record her death on their cell phones. It is a celebration.

I don’t know why Farkhunda baited the mullahs in their den. But her life reminds me that women are more than victims in much of the world. From the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to Malala Yousafzai to Pussy Riot to the Chinese feminists, they are those with the courage to confront the bullies.

Not long ago we debated women in combat, failing to acknowledge how often they are on the front lines.

“Hoosier Hospitality”

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “What was intended as a message of inclusion . . . was interpreted as a message of exclusion,” said House Speaker Brian Bosma of Indiana’s misbegotten religious freedom law. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Who is kidding whom? What other reason was there to pass a law that fixes a problem that doesn’t exist? How exactly are Christians discriminated against in Indiana? It seems to me they run the place. The original bill said precisely what its drafters meant it to say – which was, Garrett Epps noted in The Atlantic, that for-profit businesses (1) have the same religious rights as individuals and churches and (2) are legally protected against private discrimination suits. When Democrats proposed an amendment clarifying that the bill did not permit discrimination, Epps wrote, the majority voted it down.

Then the commercial backlash set in, and everybody backpedaled, blaming language for obscuring their noble intentions and rushing to clarify their own carefully chosen words. Now the lawmakers are congratulating themselves for passing a law that neither condemns nor condones discrimination. Well done, Indiana.

Of course, not everyone’s pleased. “Homosexual Zealots to Christians in Indiana: Back to the Plantation” blares the American Family Association’s website.

Meanwhile, Indiana just convicted a woman from a conservative Hindu family for botching her own abortion and then seeking medical help. The charge was “feticide;” the sentence 20 years.

Breaking News

• This morning Hillary Clinton notified Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) that she will turn over all 60,000 emails from her tenure as secretary of state, including those that were supposedly deleted. She will also give Gowdy’s committee the server from her Chappaqua home and 10,000 additional emails she had forgotten to mention. “I talked it over with Bill,” Clinton said. “It’s the right thing to do. Whatever happens, happens. But I’d rather feel good about myself than be president.” • As temperatures in Tulsa hit the high 80s, Senator James Inhofe pledged his support for President Obama’s blueprint for drastically cutting America’s greenhouse gas emissions. Asked about his apparent about face on global climate change, the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment said, “I don’t care what the science says, it’s already pushing 90 degrees down here, and it’s only April 1^st. And you know what? It’s not getting any cooler – scientists now say we are facing a ‘megadrought’ – the worst drought in 1,000 years.”

• “I wish I’d known about this sooner,” said Ted Cruz after his first visit to a doctor under his new health insurance plan. “I had no idea. I got an appointment with my own doctor and a low co-pay. This is so much better than Heidi’s coverage at Goldman, Sachs. So how come it isn’t available to every American – just like it is in Canada where I was born?”

• Today President Obama issued an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay.

April Fool’s.