CONRAD BLACK: A Secular Good Friday Came Early.

The reaction to the cruise missile attack on Syria has been highly encouraging for President Trump. First, Democrats have generally acknowledged that it was a justified action in response to the brazen atrocity of murdering civilians and particularly children with Sarin gas. Second, it has attracted some criticism from the isolationist right, which makes it harder for the president’s opponents to attack him for being an isolationist. Third, although the Russians were advised to remove their personnel from the target area, it clearly debunks the theory that Trump is in dishonorable cooperation with Russian leader Putin.

Trump has therefore managed to cover all the bases with a simple military exercise that put no Americans at risk.

Read the whole thing.

AARON MATÉ: MSNBC’S Rachel Maddow Sees a ‘Russian Connection’ Lurking Around Every Corner.

It’s “impossible,” fellow anchor Lawrence O’Donnell told Maddow on April 7, to rule out that “Vladimir Putin orchestrated what happened in Syria this week – so that his friend in the White House could have a big night with missiles and all of the praise he’s picked up over the past 24 hours.”

Maddow concurred, suggesting that only the FBI’s ongoing probe into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russian electoral interference will determine the truth. “Maybe eventually we’ll get an answer to that from [FBI Director] Jim Comey,” Maddow said.

The Washington Post noted that the “conspiracy theory” drew “derision from across the political spectrum.” But it was not out of place.

There’s a video compilation at the link, and you’d be forgiven if you mistook it for a postmodern riff on Dr. Strangelove.

It’s always the Russians with these people — makes you wonder what they’d have thought back in the day of Ted Kennedy getting into bed with the Soviets to hack the 1984 presidential election.

On the other hand, for leftists it’s probably perfectly acceptable to pussyfoot with Russian Communists.

POOR THING: Kaepernick Has Been Blackballed by NFL for Anthem Protest.

With great salary comes great responsibility.

IRA STOLL: The McConnell Method Emerges as a Strategy For a Republican Era.

Senator McConnell’s success in getting Neil Gorsuch confirmed to the Supreme Court is a reminder that there’s no limit to what can be accomplished in Washington if conservatives don’t waste their time worrying about what the liberal press says about them.

And:

A lesser politician than Mr. McConnell — a politician who cared more what the New York Times, President Obama, or PBS had to say about him — might have caved to the pressure. Instead, the senator from Kentucky stood his ground and held his caucus together.

This disregard for liberal conventional wisdom — and higher regard for the Constitution — is a habit for the Senate majority leader. It was on display during the George W. Bush administration, when Mr. McConnell brought a lawsuit, McConnell v. FEC, arguing that the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that President Bush had signed into law was an unconstitutional infringement on liberties protected by the First Amendment.

If Mr. McConnell seems at times to relish his role as villain, Mr. Ryan, on the other hand, sometimes seems like he covets the John McCain-Lindsey Graham title of every liberal journalist’s most favorite Republican.

Not giving a damn about what the media said about him — thriving on it, perhaps — won Donald Trump the GOP nomination and then the White House.

EVERYBODY’S BLOGGING FOR THE WEEKEND: Start it off right with Liz Sheld’s morning brief at Hot Mic.

BOMB DAMAGE ASSESSMENT: MOAB bombing of IS in Afghanistan ‘killed dozens’

Just as importantly, the strike “also destroyed a large stash of weapons,” and it doesn’t much imagination to glean what became of the network of caves where the enemy forces were dug in.

RICK MORAN: A genuine horror story from the Detroit area where a female doctor, Jumana Nagarwala, has been charged with mutilating the genitals of two 7-year-old girls.

“It Can’t Happen Here” was always meant in tragic irony.

BUT OF COURSE: The NYT’s Ignores Jihad AND Protects the Muslim Brotherhood in Coverage of Egypt Palm Sunday Bombings.

ANYBODY BUT HER: Clinton Campaign Left Frustrated, Angry After Bill and Hillary Continuously Blamed Them For Sucking.

“Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations,” the authors wrote.

“The underlying truth — the one that many didn’t want to admit to themselves — was the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her,” Allen and Parnes concluded.

Clinton continues to blame FBI director James Comey’s decision to re-open the investigation into Clinton days before the election as well as Russia for hacking into the campaign’s email server.

And don’t forget men. Men did this to Madam not-President.

HEALTH: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading.

A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.

That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.

Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.

Eat more good stuff than bad stuff and don’t worry so much.

JAMES COMEY: FBI ‘Confused’ People Last Year, ‘We’re Not on Anybody’s Side’

It hardly seems possible that anyone paying attention wasn’t confused by Comey’s performance last year.

MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS: Astronomers piece together first image of black hole.

It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is made of and how it came into being.

“Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror,” said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope.

“This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth — about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) is diameter,” he told AFP.

The bigger the telescope, the finer the resolution and level of detail.

The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth.

I’v waited for this since I was about eight years old, so a few more months won’t hurt.

RSVP GBU-43: Kim Jong Un invites the world to see his new symbol of strength.

MARK RIPPETOE IS BACK WITH THIS MODEST PROPOSAL: End Men’s and Women’s Divisions in Sports.

Normally I find myself in agreement with Mark, but this time I’m going to have to wait until he agrees to some kind of exemption or carve-out for beach volleyball.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Ohio CPS took 7-year-old from parents without cause.

WASHINGTON IS WHERE BAD IDEAS GO TO BECOME ENSHRINED IN LAW FOREVER: Trump’s Budget Director Confirms the Export-Import Bank Will ‘Continue to Exist’

President Trump fully supports the flip-flop, saying the Ex-Im Bank is “a very good thing.”

RELIGIOUS CLEANSING: Bishop says state of emergency not enough to protect Egypt’s Copts.

Bishop Macarius, head of the Coptic diocese in Minya, south of Cairo, was skeptical that a state of emergency imposed after the Islamist attacks on Palm Sunday was adequate security and said the church wanted further guarantees.

Copts make up about 10 percent of the 92-million population of mostly Muslim Egypt and are the region’s largest Christian denomination, with a nearly 2,000-year-old history in the country.

The Coptic church in Egypt will mark Easter in a subdued fashion, Macarius said, with the usual prayers and religious observances but none of the celebrations and visits from dignitaries that would normally enliven the day.

“We can consider ourselves in a wave of persecution, but the church has gone through a lot in 20 centuries,” the bearded Macarius told Reuters in an interview.

“There are waves of persecution. It reaches to the highest point like a pyramid and then it goes down again,” the bishop said on Wednesday. “We are at a very high point.”

Still, the el-Sisi government is doing more to protect Copts than the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Morsi regime it overthrew.

FASTER & FURIOUSER PLEASE: Suspected Triggerman in Border Agent Brian Terry’s Murder Arrested.

ON A MISSION: Restoration to Return NASA Mission Control Room to Apollo Glory.

The Mission Operations Control Room, located on the third floor of the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, is about to get a $5 million restoration to mark the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and serve as an inspiration for the generations of visitors who come to see it on public tours.

“I believe this is going to be the tribute that the men, and a few women, are provided for the years of dedication,” said Eugene Kranz, the famed flight director who led the room when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969 and when the Apollo 13 astronauts radioed, “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” a year later. “It’s a real pleasure to address the era that we worked in, with technologies that we worked with in the 1950s and 60s.”

Designated by the National Park Service as a landmark in 1985, the Apollo-era Mission Operations Control Room-2 (MOCR-2, also known as Flight Control Room-2, or FCR-2) has been left in more or less the condition it was when it controlled its last flight, space shuttle Discovery’s STS-53 mission in December 1992. The restoration will strip away the later-era modifications to present the room in the state for which it is best known.

“The room was actively in use for 30 years. It was used for the shuttle program, so it has been adapted,” said William Harris, president and CEO of Space Center Houston. “The room is very barebones at this point. It is kind of shell of what it had been during that era.”

This seems backwards. Renewed mission before renewing Mission Control.

UH-HUH: Assad Says Chemical attacks ‘100 percent fabrication’

PROMISES, PROMISES: The Future Of Energy Isn’t Fossil Fuels Or Renewables, It’s Nuclear Fusion.

One day this will be true. I hope.

GOOD LORD: 1st Female Muslim Judge Found Dead in Hudson River.

The life of a trailblazing New York judge has come to a tragic—and currently unexplained—end. The body of Sheila Abdus-Salaam, a 65-year-old judge on the state’s highest court, was found floating in the Hudson River on Wednesday afternoon, around a mile from her Harlem home, the New York Daily News reports. Police say there was no sign of traumatic injuries or foul play. Her husband, who reported her missing Tuesday morning, was brought in to identify the body.

No sign of foul play, but found in the Hudson — very odd.

Tyler O’Neil has more.

Bad link — fixed now!

SHOT: Trump and Xi – Tensions Turn to Friendship.

It’s safe to say very few people saw that coming. China was, as much as any country, the target of Trump broadsides during the 2016 presidential campaign—for not playing fair in the world economy, for taking advantage of the U.S., for stealing American business, for intimidating its neighbors.

Meantime, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin was the great-power leader who was supposed to emerge as the Trump favorite, the one who would develop a close relationship and be forgiven for past transgressions.

Yet somehow in the five months or so since Mr. Trump’s election victory, almost the reverse has happened. Now it appears the Trump-Xi relationship may be emerging as the world’s most important.

As Mr. Trump recounted in the interview, he spent hours with Mr. Xi at his Mar-a-Lago resort last week, including long stretches minus their retinues. An opening discussion between the two “was scheduled for 10 to 15 minutes, and it lasted for three hours,” Mr. Trump said. “And then the second day we had another 10-minute meeting and that lasted for two hours. We had just a very good chemistry.”

CHASER: Kim Jong Un’s rockets are getting an important boost — from China.

When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.

Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.

The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team concluded in a report released last month. When U.N. officials contacted the implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.

It is, as they say, complicated.

BRUCE BAWER: Is Marine Le Pen France’s Very Own ‘Pinkwasher’?

I’d never heard of pinkwashing — which turns out to be nothing new in that it is anti-Israel, yet reaches entirely new levels of self-deception and twisted logic.

JEFF GREENFIELD: Why the First 100 Days Concept Is Bogus.

It “hangs over the West Wing like the sword of Damocles as the unofficial deadline to find their footing—or else,” according to a fascinating story this week by POLITICO’s Shane Goldmacher.

Why? Because it marks the 100th day of Donald Trump’s presidency. And, according to one White House official, “One hundred days is the marker, and we’ve got essentially 2½ weeks to turn everything around.”

Really? What happens if, in the next 18 days or so, Obamacare isn’t repealed, the new travel ban isn’t upheld and investigators don’t discover that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower? Do impeachment proceedings start? Do prominent Republicans launch primary challenges to Trump’s renomination?

Well, maybe you can’t blame the White House for panicking; what they really are responding to is the massive media exercise in premature evaluation that has become as inevitable as it is asinine.

“The first 100 days” concept was begun in 1933 by FDR, to spur Congress into passing a flurry of mostly harmful New Deal legislation.

But, it was FDR — and therefore good, and therefore every President who followed must be measured against it.

And, if Republican, found wanting.