Provo • Ten or eleven days after he retired as BYU’s head men’s basketball coach, Dave Rose sat down for lunch with then-prospective Cougar coach Mark Pope in Minneapolis, site of the Final Four, and answered any and all questions about the program that his former assistant would inherit a few days later.

Oh, to have been privy to what was discussed.

Pope offered few details when he was asked about it at his introductory news conference on April 10, but whatever Rose said didn’t deter Pope from taking the job. He did, however, drag his feet just enough to get BYU officials to pay him more than they originally offered, and got more for his yet-to-be-named assistants, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.

It remains to be seen whether the 46-year-old Pope, who has aspirations to lead one of the top programs in the country down the road, made the right call or not. A better job won’t come if he can’t get BYU back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2015.

According to longtime observers of the program, Pope’s task won’t be easy. The program has been shackled by a combination of academic restrictions, a strict and perhaps outdated honor code and unyielding policies in regards to international students and language barriers. How the new coach manages those obstacles will be critical.

A program in a rut

What’s is the state of the BYU basketball program?

It is certainly better than when Rose took over for Steve Cleveland in 2005. The Cougars were coming off a 9-21 season and one of their best players, guard Mike Hall, was graduating.

“It is beyond extraordinary what coach Rose accomplished here,” said the exuberant Pope, prone to a bit of hyperbole.

Pope isn’t taking over a dumpster fire, by any means. The Cougars won 20 or more games in 13 of Rose’s 14 seasons and were 19-13 last season. They have been in the top 25 nationally in attendance, and first or second in the West, most of those years. They have a supportive, interested and engaged fanbase, by any measure.

But the program began stagnating a few seasons ago, perhaps even slid backwards a bit, and Rose didn’t seem to have the energy to reverse course. He acknowledged that as much in several interviews after he stepped down.

“You can trick yourself if you want,” Rose said, admitting he was “kind of numb” in conversations with his players after the Cougars were drubbed 80-57 by San Diego in the West Coast Conference tournament quarterfinals. “But you can’t trick that feeling. That feeling is there. It was time to turn it over to the next guy. I hope this new guy can just go out and kill it.”

Attendance at the Marriott Center plummeted by more than 2,000 fans per game in 2018-19, a factor that BYU administrators surely noticed and likely took into account when they didn’t balk at Rose’s retirement plans, despite having given the 14-year coach a one-year contract extension last November.

Talent drain

Like Rose did in 2005-06, Pope will take over a roster that almost certainly will not include one of its best players. Star forward Yoeli Childs — who led the team in scoring (21.2) and rebounding (9.7) — will forego his senior season and enter June’s NBA draft, barring a major change of heart.

Childs’ departure — most likely for a professional career overseas — is symptomatic of what has plagued Rose’s program the past half-dozen or so years: the inability to keep promising players from either transferring or turning pro before they exhaust all their college eligibility.

“It is a real challenge that we have here,” Rose said, alluding to the fact that many of his players marry relatively early in life.

“They really start to look at their life in front of them, and say, ‘Hey, what can we do to enjoy this the very most?’ And that’s where we lost some guys.”

Childs is the third player in as many years to leave early, joining Eric Mika (2017) and Elijah Bryant (2018), who were also married when they bolted. All three were the team’s leading scorer the season before they left. The list of players who have transferred recently includes Oregon State’s Payton Dastrup, Utah Valley’s Jake Toolson and Isaac Neilson, Louisiana-Lafayette’s Frank Bartley IV, Boston College’s Jordan Chatman and Marquette’s Matt Carolino.

This spring, guards Rylan Bergersen and Jahshire Hardnett have entered the transfer portal and will likely leave, although Hardnett reportedly met with Pope and BYU athletic department administrators a couple days after Pope was hired and could foreseeably return if he doesn’t find a suitable landing spot.

One of the program’s deficiencies is apparent and startling, considering its players are supposed to be known as excellent shooters: The Cougars’ 3-point shooting percentage was 33 percent in 2018-19, their worst in 22 years.

“We definitely have a chip on our shoulder to go out and prove people wrong,” Seljaas said of the suddenly lowered expectations. “Those type of things are what fuel us. We want to show people that we are a great team and we want to be the best BYU basketball team there ever was. That’s every single year. We are going to push ourselves to do that. We look at it as a positive thing to push us and make last year just a learning year.”

Who’s coming back?

Senior wing Zac Seljaas said last week that he expects “almost everyone except Rylan and Jahshire” to return to play for the new coach. However, there are rumblings that more could be on their way out, including mercurial guard Nick Emery.

Thursday, Chinese big man Shengzhe Li, who signed with BYU and Rose in November, announced via Twitter that he sought, and was granted, a release from BYU. Another international player who signed with the Cougars during the early signing period five months ago, Brazilian Bernardo Da Silva of Wasatch Academy, is still on board, he said last week.

Athletic guard Taylor Miller, a walk-on returned missionary from Las Vegas and Gonzaga transfer Jesse Wade will also be eligible in 2019-20, after having sat out last season. One-time Cal commit Trevin Knell of Woods Cross returns from a church mission.

Clearly, the Cougars’ best player next season will be senior TJ Haws, a 6-4 combo guard who averaged a career-best 17.8 points last season. So Pope doesn’t inherit an empty cupboard, just one that lacks any sort of inside presence outside of 6-10 sophomore Gavin Baxter. The Timpview product excelled the latter half of the season and should continue to progress under the tutelage of Pope and likely assistant Chris Burgess, the former Duke and Utah player who is said to be outstanding at developing big men.

Speaking of developing talent, that’s something that critics contend Rose and his former staff failed to adequately accomplish. The roster does feature four ESPN top-100 recruits — Haws, Emery, Baxter and rising sophomore Connor Harding — but hasn’t produced the results many Cougar fans had hoped for.

Pope is expected to try to bolster the roster with a transfer or two — perhaps from his former school, Utah Valley. The aforementioned Toolson, the WAC Player of the Year, is available as a grad-transfer but considered a longshot, and 6-11 center Baylee Steele, another grad-transfer, has announced he’s headed to Duquesne.

Three other Wolverines — Orem High product Richard Harward, 6-10 center Wyatt Lowell of Gilbert, Ariz., and former SLCC guard Isaiah White — are also in the transfer portal according to radio station 1280 The Zone.

Another of Pope’s prized recruits when he was at UVU — American Fork guard Trey Stewart — could also be a target although the 6-3 Stewart is headed out on a church mission first.

Other impediments to success

Are expectations too high at BYU, given the aforementioned impediments? Pope doesn’t think so, saying at his news conference that the resources and facilities are in place to succeed.

“Certainly there is a standard of excellence that has been set with this basketball program, and incredibly high expectations, and that is one of the most enticing things to me about taking over this position, are those high expectations and the way we will be able to embrace them,” he said.

Pope said Gonzaga’s otherworldly success in the WCC shows it can be done out of a conference that is generally better than many locals believe it is. For instance, the WCC ranked eighth in the final RPI rankings, one spot below the Pac-12 and way ahead of the No. 15-ranked Mountain West.

Pope said he won’t schedule easier nonconference opponents just to get to 20 wins, though that doesn’t mean what is used to because teams play more games than they did 20 years ago.

“We will schedule really, really aggressively,” he said. “We will be fearless in everything we do. We will take our lumps and we will jump back off the mat and with confidence go on to the next battle. Our team will be a team that’s not afraid of failure, that’s not afraid of growing.”

Those lumps could come quickly — the Cougars will play in the Maui Invitational in November against the likes of Kansas, Michigan State, UCLA and Virginia Tech (the bracket has yet to announced) — and continue through January and February because the WCC again figures to continue its improvement, despite its perception nationally and even locally in some quarters.

Gonzaga will lose stars Brandon Clarke and Rui Hachimura to the NBA, but have another top-10 recruiting class coming to Spokane. Several other WCC programs, such as Saint Mary’s and Loyola Marymount, are going to be better.

Bottom line is that BYU right now has the resources and facilities to compete with the likes of Gonzaga in conference and Utah out of conference, but lacks the bonafide talent. That’s the upgrade the Cougars need the most, and Pope seemingly knows it.

“The guys who make it into our program are going to be guys who really really want to be here,” he said. “They want to come get what we are offering. … We need to find young men that are really talented players, that have big dreams, that have unbelievable insides.”

So a disgruntled fanbase can start believing again.

A family’s camping trip to Fraser Island in northeastern Australia was interrupted early Friday by the cries of their 14-month-old child — a disturbance that is not uncommon in households with toddlers.

But the boy's parents made an unimaginable discovery upon waking up to comfort their son: He was no longer in their camper van. Their panic was probably compounded by the fading volume of the boy's screams, which emerged from outside the trailer and were "becoming more distant."

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the boy's father raced outside and found his son, who was being dragged several meters away by a wild dingo that officials say crept inside the van.

Paramedics detailed the father's heroic effort, in which he retrieved his child while fighting off several other dingoes nearby. The 14-month-old was alive but battered, suffering from a fractured skull in addition to lacerations across the back of his head and neck, ABC News reported.

He was flown to a hospital and is in stable condition.

“If it wasn’t for the parents fighting off the dingo he could have had much more severe injuries,” rescuer Frank Bertoli told news.com.au.

In a statement to the Herald, the boy's parents, who have not been identified, said their son was "doing well" but would require further surgery.

"We would like to thank everyone who has helped and cared for our son, including the emergency services and the hospital teams," they said in the statement.

Bertoli said he thinks the dingo entered the camper trailer through its canvas. According to ABC, Australia's Department of the Environment believes two dingoes found their way inside. One snatched the toddler.

Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service officials are working to identify the dingoes, which could be euthanized, ABC reports. The service has also bolstered its infantry of "specialized dingo rangers" on the island, who will warn campers of possible dangers associated with wild dogs.

Dingoes are native to Australia and prevalent on Fraser Island, a popular tourist destination on the southeastern coast of the state of Queensland, which is known for its large expanses of sand. By some estimates, the island holds 25 to 30 packs of the dogs, with each pack containing three to 12 animals.

Dingoes prey on mammals including kangaroos and wombats, but attacks on humans are apparently uncommon. The Herald reports this is the third dingo attack on the island this year — including a January incident involving a 6-year-old boy who was bitten on the leg when he ran up a sand dune.

In March, according to the Herald, a 9-year-old boy and his mother were bitten while trying to run from a pack of dingoes, which were euthanized as a result.

Perhaps the most famous example of a dingo attack took place in 1980, when Michael and Lindy Chamberlain were wrongly convicted in the death of their 9-week-old daughter after she vanished from their tent.

The Chamberlains asserted that a dingo had taken their daughter from the tent in Australia’s Outback, but officials at the time doubted their story and instead blamed the death on Lindy, whom prosecutors alleged slit her daughter’s throat and buried the child in the desert. But the girl’s jacket was found three years later near a dingo den in the desert, exonerating her parents.

Billings, Mont. • A federal judge on Friday ruled that the Trump administration failed to consider potential damage to the environment from its decision to resume coal sales from U.S. lands, but the court stopped short of halting future sales.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Montana said Interior Department officials had wrongly avoided an environmental review of their action by describing it "as a mere policy shift." In so doing, officials ignored the environmental effects of selling huge volumes of coal from public lands, the judge said.

The ruling marks another in a string of judicial setbacks for President Donald Trump's attempts to boost North American energy production.

A previous order from Morris blocked the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would transport crude from Canada's oil sands. Other courts have issued rulings against the administration's plans for oil and gas leasing and coal mining.

More than 40 percent of U.S. coal is mined from federal lands, primarily in Western states. Companies have mined about 4 billion tons of coal from federal reserves in the past decade, contributing $10 billion to federal and state coffers through royalties and other payments.

The Obama administration imposed a moratorium on most federal coal sales in 2016. The move followed concerns that low royalty rates paid by mining companies were shortchanging taxpayers and that burning the fuel was making climate change worse.

President Donald Trump lifted the moratorium in March 2017 as part of his efforts to revitalize the slumping coal industry.

"The moratorium provided protections on public lands for more than 14 months," Morris said in Friday's 34-page order. He added that lifting the moratorium was a "major federal action" sufficient to trigger requirements for a detailed analysis of its environmental impacts.

Morris ordered government attorneys to enter negotiations with states, tribal officials and environmental groups in order to determine the next steps in the case.

"The court held clearly that the Trump administration needs to rationally consider the consequences of its decision. Those include dire impacts to clean water, public health and our climate," said Earthjustice attorney Jenny Harbine, who represents environmental groups and the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, which had sued to stop the lease sales.

The attorneys general of California, New Mexico, New York and Washington, all Democrats, also had sued over the resumption of the federal coal lease program. They said it should not have been revived without studying what's best for the environment and for taxpayers.

Interior Department spokeswoman Faith Vander Voort said the agency is reviewing the ruling.

In February, Interior officials had announced a sale of coal leases on public lands in Utah by issuing a statement headlined "The War on Coal is Over." They said the sale would not have been possible if the administration had not overturned the moratorium.

The department's Bureau of Land Management administers about 300 coal leases in 10 states. Most of that coal — 85 percent — comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. Other states with significant federal coal reserves include Colorado and New Mexico.

Production and combustion of coal from federal lands accounted for about 11 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2014.

A Utah defendant could spend the rest of his life in prison for weapons charges, but it’s the conviction for killing a police dog that drew a special audience during the trial.

Friday, a jury in Salt Lake City convicted Torey Chase Massey, 30, of five counts, including a charge for the killing a Unified Police Department dog named Dingo in 2017. The Belgian Malinois’ handler, Chad Reyes, sat through the four-day trial.

“It was a very difficult week reliving all the experiences I went through on July 6th of 2017,” Reyes told FOX 13. “The verdict from the jury today was very vindicating.”

The case already had an impact on state law. In 2018, at the urging of Reyes and law enforcement, the Utah Legislature increased the penalties for killing a police dog. The crime now carries up to 15 years in prison.

Massey was tried under the old statute — up to five years in prison. The jury also convicted Massey of two felonies related to running from police that also each carry up to five years in prison.

The most serious guilty verdicts from the jury dealt with Massey being a felon shooting a gun. He was convicted of two first-degree felonies that carry up to life in prison.

Sentencing is scheduled for June 17.

Massey had prior convictions for robbery, assault, theft and forgery. He was paroled from the Utah State Prison on April 11, 2017. He was in violation of his parole terms when a fugitive apprehension team pursued him about 12 weeks later.

Reyes and 7-year-old Dingo were part of that team. After a car chase that ended when police deployed a spike strip near 3300 South and 1100 East in Millcreek, Massey stopped his vehicle in Brickyard Plaza and began running.

Reyes sicced Dingo on Massey.

“Sgt. Reyes observed Massey look back at Dingo and then at Sgt. Reyes with a taunting smirk on his face,” prosecutors wrote in charging documents.

In those court documents, Reyes said he saw Dingo reach Massey and the suspect and the dog tumble into tall weeds. Then Reyes said he heard three gunshots, Dingo yelp and then two more gunshots.

By the time Reyes reached Dingo, Massey was gone. Other offices captured him a short time later.

Dingo received a police funeral later that month. Reyes is now the deputy chief of the Herriman Police Department.

St. George • A 29-year-old man faces up to life in prison after being convicted of murder in the fatal stabbing of a St. George woman in her apartment.

The Spectrum reports that jurors Friday convicted 29-year-old Kevin Ray Mcatlin of first-degree murder in the June 2018 killing of 33-year-old Elizabeth Carter.

Mcatlin didn't dispute he killed Carter but defense attorney Edward Flint argued that special mitigation circumstances existed that would have resulted in Mcatlin being convicted of manslaughter, a lesser charge.

Flint said Carter provoked Mcatlin by slapping him after he accused her of stealing drugs and other belongings of his. He stabbed Carter with a a short, decorative katana sword.

Sentencing is set for May 22. A Utah murder conviction results in a prison sentence of 15 years to life. The Board of Pardons will determine his exact length of sentence.

Fort Worth, Texas • Following his team’s latest disappointing result in the NCAA Championships, Utah gymnastics coach Tom Farden acknowledged he and co-coach Megan Marsden have yet to figure out how to get the best out of their team on the sport’s biggest stage.

“We have to learn how to deal with that pressure,” he said.

That thought is why Utah’s success going forward might be about coaching tactics as much as it is about talent. The Utes, who finished seventh overall and failed to advance to the finals of the NCAA Championships here, believe they have the talent to be among the top teams at nationals, but must find a way to excel when the pressure is highest.

Utah thought it had a good plan for doing so this year, by changing the lineups frequently and putting the team under numerous pressure situations in practice. There was some success too with the Utes competing well at the Pac-12 Championships and the second night of the NCAA Regionals when they had to finish on the balance beam, but Friday’s outing at the NCAA Championships showed there is still something missing, whether it is a lack of pizazz, confidence or that extra sense of urgency most of the other teams seemed to show.

“It’s something that Tom and I have to work on,” Marsden said. “We need to continue to assess our training methods. One of the first things we will do as coaches is meet and discuss some of that and try to get better in our approach in the gym and training methods.”

Doing so will be challenged by the fact that the Utes lose not only some top talent, but strong leaders in MaKenna Merrell-Giles and Kari Lee. If MyKayla Skinner decides to opt out of her senior year to try for the 2020 Olympics, that will hurt Utah in both areas as well.

Skinner said she will announce her decision this week. If she goes, the Utes will use her scholarship for another gymnast.

“We will be ready either way,” Marsden said.

Even though the Utes are looking at a major rebuilding year, they aren’t without talent.

Sophomore Sydney Soloski and freshman Adrienne Randall both made big improvements this year, particularly on the balance beam. The Utes also hope to have three returners up to full speed, too, as Cammy Hall should be recovered from her Achilles tendon injury enough to help the Utes on vault as originally planned and Cristal Isa should be recovered from her season-ending elbow injury. She is strong on the uneven bars but the Utes hope for more going forward.

“She could be a star in the all-around in my opinion,” Marsden said. “She had a difficult freshman year that didn’t go as expected, but she could have a breakout year for us next year.”

Finally, junior Missy Reinstadtler will have surgery on her foot soon. She was limited to the uneven bars for much of the 2019 season but should be available for all-around competition next year.

The Utes also signed one of their strongest classes in recent years. Two signees, Maile O’Keefe and Abby Paulson, were on the USA National Team with Skinner. The other two, Jillian Hoffman and Jaedyn Rucker, have a lot of international experience and should be able to handle several events for the Utes.

So the talent should be there. The question to be answered is, if the mentality will be there as well.

“The future is bright for those girls to keep Utah as one of the best programs in the country,” Marsden said. “We will just need to work with them a bit on handling pressure. I know Tom looks at that too when he is recruiting, finding talent and if those girls can continue to move forward.”

For the Utes’ sake, they better hope they can.

Twenty years ago Saturday, two gunmen claimed the lives of 13 victims and marked the beginning of an era in which America has repeatedly been forced to reckon with the threat of school shootings. Since the Columbine High School massacre, more than 226,000 students at 233 schools have been impacted by school shootings, according to a Washington Post analysis.

On April 20, 1999, two Columbine seniors, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a planned attack at their high school using a combination of firearms and homemade explosives. They shot and killed 13 people - twelve students and a teacher - before turning their weapons on themselves.

A memorial was designated in 2007 to honor the victims: students Cassie Bernal, Steven Curnow, Corey DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough, Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend and Kyle Velasquez, and teacher Dave Sanders. The outdoor space, which sits in a park adjacent to Columbine High School, welcomes visitors to reflect on the community's loss.

This past week, three days of commemorative events were planned in their honor, culminating with Saturday's memorial ceremony in Littleton, Colorado, a Denver suburb. The events continued despite a threat against the school that arose earlier this week: On Tuesday, the community faced danger once again after an 18-year-old woman traveled from Florida to Colorado and purchased a pump-action shotgun at a shop near Columbine High School.

The woman, Sol Pais, had left a trail of disturbing messages online. A manhunt ensued and the Jefferson County Public Schools ordered a lockout, keeping students inside for safety. As the manhunt stretched into a second day, classes were canceled. Pais was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The incident heightened already tight security measures around the week's events.

Bailey Rosiere was just a second-grader when the Columbine came under siege; she was one of hundreds who attended a vigil on Friday night at the Columbine Memorial. Despite two decades of distance from the event, she told a local ABC station that the memory would never leave her:

"It makes it not just an empty or upsetting or sad feeling; it's more of a deep impact," she said. "Because you can't ever forget no matter how young you were."

Also in the crowd was Sarah Boyd, who came to lay flowers with her husband as she has done every year.

“It can happen anywhere. No one is immune, unfortunately,” Boyd told the Denver Post. She had graduated from Columbine in 1996 and was nearby when the attack began. “I hope someday that people can look back and say these are the things that were made better because of such a terrible day.”

Many people have written letters wanting to know the answer to Ron Molen’s recent op-ed piece, “How do reasonable people become gun zealots?”

I was a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom with a bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University when I became a gun zealot.

I didn’t propose a Green New Deal, but I did help propose new pro-gun laws to the Utah Legislature and in Washington, D.C.

Although I was raised in small town Idaho, guns were considered mostly a “guy” thing. My dad was a World War II veteran who put his guns away after the war. My brothers liked to hunt.

It was a common sight to see guys driving around in their trucks with rifles being held in place with “gun racks” in the back windows. Even at my high school, it was common for the boys to take their coaches and teachers out to their pickups to show them their firearms during lunch hour and even drive to a vacant potato field near the Snake River and do some target shooting.

The first time I shot a gun was in the spring of 1983. My college roommates and I were cruising Main Street when a pickup truck full of local boys invited us to go shoot some tin cans at the sand dunes. Without even thinking twice about jumping in a vehicle with strangers with guns, we drove to the sand dunes and had a great time shooting targets.

Ten years later, I was married with two young daughters. Gun control was the number one political issue in Utah and in the nation. On a local, state and national stage, female ringleaders like Sarah Brady, Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi were claiming that passing more gun laws would protect us and keep our children safe. I believed them. I was going to join with them.

But first, I decided to do research on my own. The first statistic I found was from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI report of 1991 showed that the states and district with the most amount of restrictions against firearms ownership had the highest murder rates. For example: In a population of 100,000, Idaho had a murder rate of 1.8. The District of Columbia had a murder rate of 80.6.

Study after study from unbiased research companies showed that increasing gun laws did not decrease crime. In fact, studies showed that during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the shop owners who had firearms were able to protect their businesses from being looted.

One overlooked statistic is that most shootings take place in gun-free zones.

Since research proves that gun control does not control crime, I guess you could say, Ron Molen, that I have become a “gun zealot.” Just like you have become an “anti-gun zealot.” And I respect your courage for your convictions in pro-gun Utah.

Since The Salt Lake Tribune featured me on the front cover in a pink dress at a shooting range 25 years ago, my life was forever altered because reporters, talk show hosts, women, students and people from all walks of life have interviewed me for my opinions on why I’m a pro-gun mom volunteering my time to speak out against gun control.

I plead for society to discuss the root causes of crime. I have made the offer on television and in news publications for anti-gun zealots to sit down with pro-gun zealots and talk about ways to control crime. I’m still waiting for this to happen.

Janalee Tobias, South Jordan, is the founder of Women Against Gun Control, one of the oldest female gun rights organizations in the world. She volunteers her time fighting for causes that she believes reduces crime.

Looking at her purse, a large Dooney & Bourke handbag covered with an image from “Cinderella,” one could infer that Savannah Ostler is just a big Walt Disney fan.

But this 29-year-old Utah County actor, director, screenwriter, songwriter, producer and one-woman marketing department has something bigger in mind.

“I want to be a female version of Walt Disney,” Ostler said, “someone who has her hands in everything and oversees all aspects of her projects.”

Ostler’s first step on that journey toward being an entertainment superpower is “Twice the Dream,” an independently produced movie filmed in Utah in which Ostler is director, screenwriter, executive producer, music coordinator and star. It debuts in theaters in Utah and Idaho this Friday.

The movie has been Ostler’s pet project for more than half her life. She started writing the script in 2004, during math class at Timberline Middle School in Alpine, when she was 14.

“I had this story of these two sisters with this unshakable bond, this dream that’s keeping them together even when life doesn’t go exactly as planned,” Ostler said in an interview this week. “I knew these characters as much as I did myself.”

The story starts with Amber Bradshaw, played by Ostler, reluctantly going on acting auditions, pressured by her mother, Patricia (Sarah Kent), whose own silver screen career was thwarted years earlier. Amber, 23, confides in her 17-year-old sister, Samantha (Monica Moore Smith), what she really wants to do: Be a singer and songwriter in Nashville. When tragedy strikes early in the movie, it’s up to Samantha to carry on with their shared dream.

The details of the plot have evolved. At one point, Ostler said, Amber was a burned-out movie star who wanted to abandon Hollywood for Nashville — but Ostler said she decided Amber would be more relatable as a small-town girl torn between her mother’s ambitions and her own.

The story is more wish fulfillment than autobiography, Ostler said. “They say, ‘Write what you know.’ I kind of wrote what I didn’t know, because I thought that was more interesting.”

Her only sibling is a brother, and, she said, “part of me always wondered what it would be like to have a sister.” Where the Bradshaw sisters’ parents are divorced and their alcoholic mom harangues Amber for not going to enough auditions, Ostler said, “my parents have always been my number-one supporters.”

It was Ostler’s parents who suggested she leave her high school in Alpine after her sophomore year and enroll at East Hollywood High School, a film-centric charter school in West Valley City. At East Hollywood High, Ostler started to put her script for “Twice the Dream” into a screenwriting format, and it became her junior-year project.

After high school, Ostler struck out for Hollywood in 2010, and stayed for seven years. She waited tables to make ends meet while landing roles in a few small movies and commercials. (One commercial was a promotional video for a book by Don Hahn, a longtime producer for Disney whose credits include “Beauty & the Beast” and “The Lion King.”)

During her Hollywood years, she kept plugging away at making “Twice the Dream,” but ran into obstacles getting funding. Producers offered to buy the script, but then “I could no longer really be guaranteed to be involved in it. ... It would be like selling my baby,” she said.

Another production company suggested the movie “would be more marketable if it were two brothers instead of two sisters,” she said. “Of course, I was not OK with that.”

Something else Ostler picked up in Hollywood besides her Screen Actors Guild card: Her husband, Steven D’Alo, who was a graduate of California State University, Long Beach — where, Ostler is quick to point out, Steven Spielberg went to college.

By 2017, Ostler was beginning to lose hope in Hollywood. “Why are we even in L.A. if we’re not doing what we love?” Ostler asked D’Alo after financing to make “Twice the Dream” fell apart again. When D’Alo got a job offer in Utah, the couple decided they could live more economically and get the movie made more easily by going back to Ostler’s home state.

“There’s so much talent here, and it’s not utilized as much as they should be,” Ostler said.

Ostler shot “Twice the Dream” in Pleasant Grove and Alpine, often using friends’ houses, and some spots in Salt Lake City. Concert sequences were shot at Velour Live Music Gallery, the venue at the heart of Provo’s bustling music scene. A backyard pond where a pivotal scene is shot “is my childhood pond that I spent a lot of time going to and playing at, and it’s in my parents’ backyard, almost.”

Smith, who plays Samantha, and Mason D. Davis, who plays Amber’s boyfriend Tristan, are familiar faces in Utah (they co-starred in the movie version of “Saturday’s Warrior,” for example). Kent, who plays Amber and Sam’s mom, starred in a fantasy series, “Amarog,” that Ostler and D’Alo co-directed and co-wrote. A couple of Ostler’s acting teachers, Adrian R’Mante (a regular on the Disney Channel’s “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody”) and Anne Sward, have roles in the film. D’Alo, in addition to being cinematographer, makes a cameo appearance as a creepy guy who hits on Amber’s friends.

Ostler considered playing Sam, but opted to play Amber when she decided she would direct the film. (At first, Ostler was going to have D’Alo direct.) Because Sam has more screen time than Amber, Ostler said, “I don’t think I could have been Sam and direct, especially for my first job. It would have been way too hectic.”

Shooting happened on weekends, and the entire movie was done in 14 shooting days, meaning Ostler had to move fast. “There were some shots where it would have been awesome to get this angle, but we just had to keep rolling,” she said.

With “Twice the Dream” completed, Ostler isn’t resting. In the last month, she has been promoting the movie relentlessly on Utah TV and radio stations, and she will be doing live meet-and-greets after four screenings this weekend. Also, she wrote another script during post-production, and is writing another one now. She’s also developing a series of young-adult fantasy novels, which she describes as “Hogwarts meets ‘Once Upon a Time.’”

Having worked 15 years, since middle school, on getting “Twice the Dream” from her head to the screen, Ostler describes her situation now using another Disney movie: “Tangled.”

“I literally feel like Rapunzel right now,” she said. “Her whole life, she wants to see these lanterns, and all of a sudden she sees them and she’s, like, ‘Now what?’ That was my dream since before I can even remember. That is me right now, and my husband’s Flynn Ryder, saying it’s time for a new dream.”

———

‘Twice the Dream’ opens

The made-in-Utah drama “Twice the Dream,” written, directed and starring Savannah Ostler.

Where • Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy), Megaplex at The District (South Jordan), Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard), Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi), Megaplex Legacy Crossing (Centerville), and Megaplex Valley Fair (West Valley City).

When • Opens Friday, April 19. Go to megaplextheatres.com for showtimes.

Meet-and-greets • Ostler and other cast members will appear in person at four screenings of “Twice the Dream”: Friday, 7 p.m., at Megaplex Thanksgiving Point (Lehi); Saturday, 6:50 p.m., Megaplex Jordan Commons (Sandy); Sunday, 7:20 p.m., Megaplex at The District (South Jordan); Monday, 7:40 p.m., Megaplex Geneva (Vineyard).

There’s been so much talk in the days following the Jazz’s second straight blowout defeat at the hands of the Rockets about the team’s mentality.

The need to come out with an attitude of toughness, of aggressiveness, of physicality, of urgency, et cetera, et cetera.

At Saturday morning’s shootaround at Zions Bank Basketball Campus, Ricky Rubio had a different mentality in mind. About 10 hours before the start of Game 3, the point guard said one of the big differences in the series is that Houston’s players already have a contender-level attitude, while the Jazz are still trying to figure out how to get there.

“[The Rockets] have the mentality to win a championship. And you can tell. You can tell the way they’re playing, you can tell the way they approach every play. They’re not focusing just on this series; they’re focusing on the moment, but for bigger things” Rubio said. “And that’s the thing that we have to learn — we have to watch them play, and then learn it.”

Ricky: "You can tell [the Rockets] want more. Us, we went to the second round, and it seems like we’re cool. No — we want more. I know. And I trust all my teammates. … We’ve put a lot of work in this season just to come to this moment and show what we’re capable of doing." pic.twitter.com/ujmvnHLAdQ

— Eric Walden (@tribjazz) April 20, 2019

Part of it, he explained, stems from Houston coming so close to reaching the NBA Finals a year ago, before a Chris Paul injury and a disastrous shooting stretch against the Golden State Warriors doomed their chances.

This Utah team, he acknowledged, hasn’t quite felt that level of sting because these players haven’t made it that far, though they’re certainly feeling the sting now of a 2-0 deficit in their first-round series.

Jazz coach Quin Snyder agreed with his point guard, noting that the Rockets’ mentality has been almost tangible, manifesting itself particularly in the lopsided starts to the two games.

“It means a focus and aggressiveness on every possession. I think you’ve seen that [from the Rockets], particularly at the beginning of the game. It’s notable in that moment, as you start,” he said. “And that’s been something that I think our team has had over the course of the year, and it’s something I know we’re capable of doing. I think that’s why Ricky noticed it, is ’cause it’s something that he values and we value. And that aggressiveness is something we need to bring as well.”

Rubio seemed to obliquely reference the criticism of the two subpar playoff games tangentially being tied to bringing back so much of last season’s roster and reliant primarily upon internal development seemed to amount to settling, to tacitly accepting their place in the pecking order, to illustrate contentment with the status quo.

He’s hoping that a better showing in Game 3 will put those ideas to bed.

“[Houston] is a championship team. They went to Game 7 last year in the Western Conference finals, and you can tell they want more. Us, we went to the second round, and it seems like we’re cool. No — we want more. I know. And I trust all my teammates, I trust myself too,” Rubio said. “Sometimes when you’re fatigued, you’ve gotta believe in what you’re doing. And we’ve put a lot of work in this season just to come to this moment and show what we’re capable of doing. We haven’t shown it the first two games, but I’m sure we will do it."

After the Jazz lost their first two 2019 postseason games by a combined 52 points, The Tribune’s Jazz coverage team of Eric Walden and Andy Larsen had plenty of questions.

So they turned to a third person to for some of the answers: Aaron Falk — former Jazz beat writer for The Tribune and now feature writer for utahjazz.com.

We collectively break down the series’ first two games, look ahead to what adjustments might be made for Game 3, and relive a few past glories — all in the span of 36-ish minutes.

At 2:30 • Takeaways from Friday’s practice and the team’s comments afterward.

At 9:45 • One of the team’s biggest problems is missing wide-open shots.

At 12:20 • Impressions of the Jazz’s defensive schemes, and what improvements can be made.

At 19:00 • The struggles of the supporting cast and the lack of physicality.

At 22:35 • What to expect from the Game 3 environment at Vivint Smart Home Arena.

At 25:50 • Aaron’s insider perspective as a Jazz employee, and what his job is like now.

You can subscribe and listen on iTunes. Or, for your convenience, we’ve enabled you to just listen below on SoundCloud:

Tuesday there will be a public hearing on a proposal by Salt Lake City to encourage Single Room Occupancy (SRO) residences throughout the city. Although the proposed ordinance does not allow them in single family zoned areas, almost all other areas, including adjacent areas, will be allowed to have SROs.

SROs are small living units that function like dorms with shared bathrooms with one “water closet” (toilet) for 10 residents and one shower or bath for eight residents. SRO rooms can have a private kitchen or a private bathroom but not both. The rent can be weekly and eviction is easier than with regular apartments. There is a resident manager and video surveillance to decrease and discourage criminal activity.

SROs were added to the City’s Housing Plan (Growing SLC) to “increase housing options, promote affordability, and build more equitable and fair housing.” SROs have been allowed in some areas with TRAX, such as North Temple and 400 South — but none have been built. It is hoped that the new proposal will encourage SROs and housing options for low-income citizens.

Many feel that SROs can easily become crime magnets that can become as bad as the motels along State Street and North Temple. The Salt Lake City Police Department has not been able to stop the constant criminal activity along those corridors that are centered around those low-cost motels. Low-income housing has had a history of the housing going downhill. Some claim that they can become mini Cabrini Greens.

Salt Lake City has recognized this issue and has a policy of mixed income. There is even a group in Salt Lake City that tries to encourage relationships between higher socioeconomic individuals and low-income or homeless people, to provide support for actions that will result in moving into higher-income situations. Salt Lake City insists that SROs will be market rate and, therefore, mixed income. But the reality is that they are probably going to all be low-income. Low-income housing can result in residents enabling or ignoring criminal behavior. Despite efforts to stop criminal activity and intimidating behavior in low-cost housing, it still is a problem, even with security cameras and on-site managers.

The best example of housing similar to SROs are the college dorms. Many believe that SROs like the college dorms would be a great housing solution. But dorms on campus are totally different than SROs. College dorms have more control and the students have tasks and studies that are not similar to potential residents of SROs.

The proposal requires mixed use in the downtown areas to continue, which will have ground floor retail or offices that encourage walkability. But mixed use (and mixed income) is not required in other areas. Sugar House residents have been fighting to require ground floor retail on all new development in Sugar House to ensure walkability, without much success. The result is many new buildings with ground floor apartments (zombie buildings) which are essentially dead to public engagement. The newest project proposal (Sugar Alley – across the Street from Whole Foods on Highland) does finally put in retail on the ground floor. But the SRO proposal does not require it, which will hurt walkability.

Salt Lake City should encourage higher-density, mixed-use and mixed-income development and micro units along commercial corridors that have high frequency (15 minutes) bus transit, such as State Street. The State Street area, according to the Redevelopment Agency of Salt Lake City, has the best potential for increasing housing.

Salt Lake City can and should sell the vacant property that the city owns that has been vacant for decades. That would provide funds to encourage higher density development of State Street (and get rid of the crime magnet motels).

The City Council will have the public hearing at 7 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 400 South State Street. The Council provides validation for parking under the Library. You can also email the individual council members (on the left) or email city.council.liaisons@slcgov.com with your comments.

George Chapman is a former candidate for mayor of Salt Lake City and writes a blog at georgechapman.net.

Topeka, Kansas • City officials say a tiger mauled a zookeeper at the Topeka Zoo in northeastern Kansas.

The Topeka Capital-Journal reports the incident happened around 9:30 a.m. Saturday, when a Sumatran tiger named Sanjiv tackled the worker in an enclosed outdoor space.

Topeka Zoo director Brendan Wiley says the zookeeper suffered lacerations and puncture wounds to her head, neck and back. Wiley says she was awake and alert when she was taken by ambulance to a hospital and was in stable condition Saturday afternoon. The zookeeper's name has not been released.

The zoo was open at the time of the attack and was witnessed by some people. It reopened about 45 minutes after the attack.

Officials are investigating what led up to the attack.

Sanjiv came to the Topeka Zoo in August 2017 from a zoo in Akron, Ohio.

Utah’s elected leaders have held self-congratulatory press conferences in ornate rooms, appointed serious-minded task forces, rolled out a genuinely inventive smartphone app, furrowed their collective brows and felt our pain.

Good for them. Really.

The one thing they refuse to do in dealing with the state’s very real, and growing, mental health crisis is put up the necessary amounts of money to really help people in great need.

Sound familiar?

A recent report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor General lays out how the demand for mental health services in Utah are far outstripping the supply, particularly the supply of trained counselors and therapists who do everything from respond to calls for help via what are supposed to be 24/7 hotlines and messages sent via the state’s SafeUT smartphone app to triage and treat those seeking help in hospitals and mental health centers.

Hotlines and chatrooms simply do not work if there are not enough trained staff to answer the phone or participate in the chat. And they have to be ready to do so at any time, day or night, without letting the phone ring or go to voicemail, without text messages going unanswered. One dropped call can lead to the end of a human life.

If anything, creating and publicizing these emergency services but not funding and staffing them at necessary levels can be worse than not creating them at all. The last thing a person who is contemplating suicide needs is a broken promise of immediate assistance.

The center of these crisis services in Utah is the University of Utah Neuropsychiatric Institute. The services it offers, the audit reported, cost about $1 million a year more than the Legislature has appropriated. The difference, so far, has been absorbed in the large, but not infinite, budget of the University’s health care system. If nothing changes, that annual shortfall will reach $3 million as soon as next year.

That cannot go on forever.

There is a mental health crisis in Utah. Proof of that exists in a single statistic, our suicide rate, which has climbed 34% over the past decade to the nation’s fifth highest. Over the past two years, calls to the hotline grew 29% and messages on the SafeUT app were up more than 1,000%.

Even a cruel and unscientific belief that people suffering from mental illness or suicidal impulses are somehow to blame for their own situation would not overcome the fact that untreated patients do not harm only themselves or their loved ones.

When people do not get the help they need, they seriously increase the strain on hospitals, law enforcement agencies, schools, jails, homeless shelters, public transit services, Main Street businesses and just about every other organization and place. It would be absurd to calculate the cost of proper services without taking into account the benefits that will be felt in so many ways, at so many places, by so many people.

Meeting the needs of our mentally ill neighbors should be considered a core function of government. (One that would have been helped years ago if the Legislature were not allergic to accepting full Medicaid expansion.)

As Gov. Gary Herbert is often heard to say when discussing education, it’s not all about the money, but it’s some about the money.

And mental health services in Utah need a lot more of it. Now.

Ogden • Of all the animals kids like to draw, Joey Ross is really good at birds.

As proof, his portrait of a hummingbird, titled “The Pollinator,” won top honors at an art contest hosted Saturday at Ogden Nature Center as part of its Earth Day festival. For inspiration, he just had to look into his own yard.

“We put out feeders and there’s a horn and they suck out the liquid,” said Joey, a sixth-grader at Lomond View Elementary School. His picture showed a red-and-green bodied hummingbird pulling nectar from orange flowers, demonstrating how these tiny birds help sustain life by moving pollen from one flower to another in exchange for a sweet meal.

In front of Monday’s 49th anniversary of Earth Day, the Ogden event connected hundreds of families with the natural world through story-telling, tours, demonstrations, crafts and art. Want to learn how to make compost to nourish the garden, start seeds without plastic containers or make puppets? There were workshops for all those.

Part of another juried exhibit were dozens of birdhouses lining the path entering the nature center in the northwest part of Ogden. Its grounds spread along the Plain City Canal on former croplands that were abandoned for agriculture in the 1940s and are now reverting to wetlands that harbor migratory birds and diverse ecosystems.

Many of the birdhouses at the entrance were made from found objects and salvaged wood, like Jeff Bennett’s “Rustic Bluebird,” more of a multi-unit bird condo that looked like a slice of medieval hilltop town. Beehives, birdhouses and bat boxes are just a few ways people can make human landscapes more critter-friendly by providing habitat in the middle of urban places where natural protection is scarce.

Another birdhouse, which was available for sale, was made from a discarded plastic bear toy, that may once been a gumball machine. The bird occupant would enter through the ferocious animal’s mouth and nest in its transparent belly.

Advocates for actual predators were among the many presenters, including representatives of HawkWatch International and the Mountain Lion Foundation who came to talk about the importance of preserving the often persecuted creatures at the top of the food chain.

Cougars are often mischaracterized as vicious hunters, threatening to humans and livestock, and are unfairly blamed for declining deer numbers, but nothing could be further from the truth, according to the Mountain Lion Foundation’s Denise Peterson.

“Having a well-balanced, well-established population of mountain lions actually protects prey species, improves habitat quality and biodiversity," Peterson said. “Having a lower [hunting] quota improves safety for people. Conversely having higher quota increases risks to people, pets and livestock. The management practices we have employed in the past aren’t necessarily ideal.”

A few feet away from Peterson’s table, children gathered around a trailer rigged with a demonstration that replicated how watersheds work and listened to Mark Muir, a hydrologist with the U.S. Forest Service.

The display was filled with multi-colored plastic granules, representing the soil, with a stream flowing from the top to a lake at the bottom, through a “landscape" filled with houses, trees and animals. Muir removes the vegetation from the bank of his stream and turns up the flow to show what can go wrong when a watershed is compromised.

Without the buffer of vegetation, the stream bank quickly eroded and pulled a house into the water.

“Everything is connected in a watershed,” Muir said. “Something we do up here can have impacts way down here.”

The star of Muir’s show was a tiny beaver, another wild animal that gets an underserved reputation as a trouble maker when the flooding they cause is really a blessing — unless it’s your home being flooded.

Muir demonstrates how the beaver’s log dam across the stream dampens the erosive power of moving water. These dams, which property owners often remove, actually help the soils retain moisture and keep water on the landscape where it can support heathy habitat and protect water quality, especially during runoff periods when they block sediments entrained in the water.

“All this sediment is stopped right here and you know were it didn’t go,” Muir tells the children, pointing downstream. “If I rip out the dam, where does that sediment go? In that lake, where we get our drinking water. Bummer.”

Utah’s gymnastics team won’t leave Ft. Worth totally empty handed as senior MaKenna Merrell-Giles and junior MyKayla Skinner were honored with All-American awards Saturday.

Skinner earned four for tying for fifth on the vault (9.925) and floor (9.9375), tying for sixth on the bars (9.9125) and placing seventh in the all-around (39.55).

Merrell-Giles was recognized for her eighth-place finish on vault (9.9).

Skinner has a school record 26 career All-America awards and Merrell-Giles has nine.

Alyssa Barrera hit a grand slam in the sixth inning as Utah Softball put together a furious rally to top No. 3 Washington 5-4 on Saturday.

Trailing 4-0, Utah strung together three-straight singles off UW’s Gabbie Plain thanks to Ryley Ball, Julia Noskin and Ally Dickman. A walk to Ellessa Bonstrom brought home Utah’s first run and Barrera clobbered a 2-2 pitch over the wall in center to send the Dumke Family Softball Stadium crowd into a frenzy.

Barrera was also the hero the last time Utah beat a team ranked in the Top 5 nationally. She delivered a walk-off hit to seal the series against No. 1 Arizona in 2017, also at home.

Plain was 17-1 on the season entering Saturday’s contest, and won the first two games of this series. She had allowed just one earned run in her last eight contests and the five she was tagged for Saturday were a season-high. Utah came into Saturday just 4-for-44 against Plain over the last two seasons, including a perfect game last season in Seattle.

Baseball

Utah 6, No. 12 Arizona State 3 • Utah coach Bill Kinneberg earned his 600th career victory Saturday as the Utes upended No. 12 Arizona State 6-3 at Smith’s Ballpark.

Utah got off to a start, scoring three runs in the first eventually stretching it out to 5-0 to hold on for their 12th win of the season and Kinneberg’s 600th.

Right fielder Erick Migueles and starting pitcher Joshua Tedeschi had stellar days. Migueles went 2-for-4 with two home runs and four RBI and Tedeschi pitched 7.1 innings giving up two runs on seven hits.

The Utes couldn’t have had a better start. Oliver Dunn and Rykker Tom both singled, and Migueles hit his first homer to put the Utes up 3-0 before Arizona State could record an out. The Utes tacked on two more runs to their lead with an RBI from Isaac Deveaux to score Shea Kramer in the third, and then Dunn got an RBI in the fifth to score Deveaux.

Tedeschi was working early, only giving up two hits through six innings. The Sun Devils, one of the best hitting teams in the NCAA, got their bats going in the seventh, but Tedeschi limited them to only two runs on four hits during his outing.

BYU 4, Washington 0 • A gem by Cougar pitcher Justin Sterner helped BYU roll to a 4-0 shutout victory over Washington at Husky Ballpark on Saturday.

Coming off a 7-3 victory in game two, BYU (26-10) battled with the Huskies (17-17) through five scoreless innings. The Cougars broke through in the sixth with Brian Hsu leading off with a bunt single, the advancing to second on a sac bunt. Brock Hale doubled to score Hsu, then Jackson Cluff and Keaton Kringlen walked to load the bases.

Mitch McIntyre was hit by a pitch on a 3-2 count to score BYU’s second run; Abraham Valdez followed with a walk to bring in Cluff and give the Cougars the 3-0 advantage.

Sterner earned his seventh win of the year, allowing just one hit through six innings. He left the game in the seventh, finishing with a career-high-tying seven strikeouts with no runs and no walks allowed.

Lacrosse

Cleveland State 17, Utah 8 • James Sexton had his second hat trick of the season with three goals to lead the Utah lacrosse team, but the Utes still to Cleveland State, 17-8 on Saturday at McCarthey Field.

Although Utah scored the first goal of the game in the opening minute, Cleveland State scored the next four and continued to steadily pull away throughout the game. Utah trailed 7-4 at halftime and 11-4 after the third quarter.

“It wasn’t our day,” head coach Brian Holman said. “We made mistakes early. I didn’t get the sense that the guys were mentally in it. We tried everything we could, changed our personnel and went as deep as possible. I’m happy for some of the guys who got on the field and played well and disappointed for some of the guys who really tried hard, but they were better than us. We lacked a collective effort today, which is my fault and I’ll do my best to correct that."

Sexton led Utah with three goals and Cam Redmond had two for the Utes. Josh Stout, Liam Cavanaugh-Fernandez and Quinault Mackey each had goals. Stout also had an assist for two points, Brandon Wilson had two assists and Chris Belcher and Jack Zarnik both had assists on the day.

Donny Stock went 8-of-19 in faceoffs and led Utah with six ground balls. Samuel Cambere and Belcher had three ground balls each. Liam Donnelly, Daniel Costa and Zack Johns each saw time in goal with Johns making six saves on the day.

President Donald Trump struck back at Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a past Republican presidential nominee, Saturday, a day after Romney said he was “sickened” by the findings in the special counsel’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Trump tweeted that if Romney spent as much time fighting Barack Obama, who Romney ran against in the 2012 presidential race, as he does fighting Trump, Romney could have “(maybe)” been president.

If @MittRomney spent the same energy fighting Barack Obama as he does fighting Donald Trump, he could have won the race (maybe)! pic.twitter.com/p5imhMJqS1

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 20, 2019

A video of news footage of Romney’s loss and Trump’s win accompanies the tweet.

After reading the report of special counsel Robert Mueller on Friday, Romney tweeted a statement, saying, “I am sickened at the extent and pervasiveness of dishonesty and misdirection by individuals in the highest office of the land, including the President.”

Romney said he was “appalled” that people working for the campaign welcomed help from Russia, that no one went to U.S. police about information obtained illegally by Russia and that the campaign chairman was working to promote Russian interests in Ukraine.

“Reading the report is a sobering revelation of how far we have strayed from the aspirations and principles of the founders,” Romney said.

Another past presidential hopeful said he, too, was sick.

But Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor who twice tried for the Republican presidential nomination, said it wasn’t Mueller’s report that made him ill. It was Romney.

Huckabee quote tweeted Romney’s statement about the report, saying he wasn’t as distressed by Romney’s treatment of Trump as he was that Romney could have been a Republican president.

Know what makes me sick, Mitt? Not how disingenuous you were to take @realDonaldTrump $$ and then 4 yrs later jealously trash him & then love him again when you begged to be Sec of State, but makes me sick that you got GOP nomination and could have been @POTUS https://t.co/dmidOraRGQ

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) April 19, 2019

“Know what makes me sick, Mitt?” Huckabee asked. “Not how disingenuous you were ... but makes me sick that you got GOP nomination and could have been @POTUS”.

Romney’s remarks were among the harshest denouncements of the president from a member of his own party. However, Romney wasn’t alone.

Republican John Kasich, a 2016 presidential candidate and former Ohio governor, called the report’s finding worse than any he’s seen in his career working in government.

“[Trump’s] behavior described in the #MuellerReport is more than disappointing. It’s unacceptable & not behavior we should expect from our president,” he said, later adding that, “America deserves better.”

.@realDonaldTrump's behavior described in the #MuellerReport is more than disappointing. It’s unacceptable & not behavior we should expect from our president. It's worse than I've seen in my career observing & working with presidents or public officials. America deserves better.

— John Kasich (@JohnKasich) April 20, 2019

This isn’t the first time in Romney and Trump’s contentious relationship that Trump has mocked Romney’s presidential loss.

In 2016, Trump tweeted that Romney had lost to a “failed president.”

Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog. Now he calls me racist-but I am least racist person there is

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 11, 2016

More recently in January, after Romney wrote an op-ed criticizing Trump in The Washington Post, Trump responded on Twitter, wondering if Romney would be a “TEAM player” or follow in the shoes of former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, who took a stand against Trump before deciding against running for reelection in 2018.

Here we go with Mitt Romney, but so fast! Question will be, is he a Flake? I hope not. Would much prefer that Mitt focus on Border Security and so many other things where he can be helpful. I won big, and he didn’t. He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2019

“I won big, and [Romney] didn’t,” Trump said. “He should be happy for all Republicans. Be a TEAM player & WIN!”

Washington • The oral arguments the Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday will be more decorous than the gusts of judicial testiness that blew the case up to the nation’s highest tribunal. The case, which raises arcane questions of administrative law but could have widely radiating political and policy consequences, comes from the Enlightenment mentality of the nation’s Founders, and involves this question: Does it matter that a conspicuously unenlightened member of the president’s cabinet lied in sworn testimony about why he made a decision that he arguably has the statutory power to make?

Because America’s 18th century Founders were rational, empirical, inquisitive pursuers of evidence-based improvement, they placed in the Constitution’s second section after the preamble a requirement for a census. And the 14th Amendment stipulates the required actual enumeration, every 10 years, of “the whole number” of persons residing in the country. From 1820 (when Congress wanted “foreigners not naturalized” to be counted) through 1950, the census almost always included a citizenship question, and in 2018 Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided that the 2020 “short-form” questionnaire, the one that goes to every household, should include one. Ross has testified that he was “responding solely” to a Justice Department request for the question to provide data helpful to enforcement of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965.

A federal district judge called this Ross rationale "pretextual" because Ross was justifying a decision "already made for other reasons." This was a polite but still stinging way of saying Ross lied, which he almost certainly did: Justice officials initially rejected Commerce's request that it ask for a citizenship question, and said such data was unnecessary for VRA enforcement. The district judge said Commerce sought the Justice letter to "launder" the request for the citizenship question "through another agency," this being just one of "a veritable smorgasbord" of rules violations by Ross and his aides.

Ross also testified that he was “not aware” of any discussions of the citizenship questions between Commerce and the White House. But after 18 states, 15 municipalities and various immigration advocacy groups sued, he acknowledged meeting early in 2017 with then-presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, an anti-immigration zealot. The district judge also said Ross “materially mischaracterized” — translation: lied about — a conversation with a polling expert in order to obfuscate the expert’s objections to the citizenship question.

Because more information is preferable to less, the citizenship question might seem sensible. However, the question might result in less information because the Census Bureau's own experts believe that the citizenship question would cause 6.5 million people — almost one in 10 households includes one or more noncitizens — to not respond to the questionnaire for fear of law-enforcement consequences. The 6.5 million are approximately as many people as live in Indiana. Of the estimated 24 million noncitizens (about 7% of America's population of almost 329 million), almost 11 million are here illegally.

The citizenship question is, the Trump administration insists, "a wholly unremarkable demographic question." But why, then, was Ross so dishonest concerning its genesis? This is probably why: A substantial undercount would affect the formulas by which hundreds of billions of dollars of federal spending are dispersed, to the disadvantage of blue states and cities with large immigrant populations. Furthermore, because the 14th Amendment stipulates that seats in the House of Representatives shall be apportioned on the basis of "the whole number of persons in each state" regardless of citizenship, an undercount could cost some states, particularly blue states, congressional seats, and hence electoral votes.

The district court judge was scalding about the "egregious" behavior of Ross, who "in a startling number of ways" either "ignored, cherry-picked, or badly misconstrued" evidence, and "acted irrationally … in light of that evidence." Yet the judge professed himself "unable to determine — based on the existing record, at least — what Secretary Ross' real reasons for adding the citizenship question were." Perhaps the judge was precluded from coming to a conclusion about Ross' motives; the public is not.

This is another case in which Trump administration behavior (following equally indefensible Obama administration behavior) is provoking plaintiffs to ask the judiciary to police the blurry boundaries of executive discretion. The Supreme Court, however, is apt to decide that Ross' wretched behavior does not alter the fact that Congress has granted to him sufficient discretion over the census to accommodate his decision to include the citizenship question. This, in spite of reasonable surmises about his motives that his behavior seemed designed to disguise.

George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.