Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see clouds, scattered showers, and a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 19m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 It’s Cinco de Mayo: Mexican troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla.

Recommended for reading in full —

William Booth, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Carol Morello report The world came together for a virtual vaccine summit. The U.S. was conspicuously absent:

LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.
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A senior Trump administration official said Monday the United States “welcomes” the efforts of the conference participants. He did not explain why the United States did not join them.

 Danielle Moran reports Red States Will Need Coronavirus Bailouts Too:

On April 27, President Trump took to Twitter to escalate the spat over the next coronavirus stimulus, questioning whether the federal government should rescue “poorly run” states led by Democrats. His tweet echoed the comments of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who suggested during a radio interview that states with large pension obligations under union contracts could pursue bankruptcy instead of federal aid. The Kentucky Republican’s office gave his comments a twist in a press release with a section titled “On Stopping Blue State Bailouts.”

It’s true that many of the states that are ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic—New York and New Jersey, as well as California and Illinois—are solidly Democratic. But the fiscal challenges that states now face aren’t limited to the blue ones and go well beyond pension obligations. States across the country are reeling from a brutal double whammy of lost revenue: With 30 million people thrown out of work in the past several weeks, income tax collections are tanking, and sales taxes have evaporated after stores and restaurants shuttered. Most states receive a majority of their revenue from those two sources.

Moody’s Analytics projects a fiscal shock to states of $158 billion to $203 billion through the end of the fiscal year ending in June 2021, resulting in almost half of states having to fill a budget gap of at least 10%. (Their ability to weather the impact will depend in part on the amount in their reserves.) Under Moody’s most severe scenario, Louisiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—all red states—are projected to lose more than 39% of their revenue. Another Republican stronghold, Alaska, is poised to see the largest loss, potentially as much as 79.6% of its general fund. That’s because the state gets much of its revenue from the oil and gas industry, and prices have crashed.

I.C.U. Doctor Brings Music, and Hope, to Coronavirus Patients:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinction committee meets via Zoom at 9:30 AM and district’s school board via Zoom at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Peter Baker reports Trump Foresees Virus Death Toll as High as 100,000 in the United States:

President Trump predicted on Sunday night that the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country may reach as high as 100,000 in the United States, far worse than he had forecast just weeks ago, even as he pressed states to reopen the shuttered economy.

Mr. Trump, who last month forecast that fatalities from the outbreak could be kept “substantially below the 100,000” mark and probably around 60,000, acknowledged that the virus has proved more devastating than expected. But nonetheless, he said that parks, beaches and some businesses should begin reopening now and that schools should resume classes in person by this fall.

(A respected model from MIT now projects that America will suffer – and then continue to exceed – 100,000 deaths as soon as May 22nd. )

William H. Frey writes COVID-19’s recent spread shifts to suburban, whiter, and more Republican-leaning areas:

There is a stereotypical view of the places in America that COVID-19 has affected most: they are broadly urban, comprised predominantly of racial minorities, and strongly vote Democratic. This underlines the public’s perception of what kinds of populations reside in areas highly exposed to the coronavirus, as well as some of the recent political arguments over social distancing measures and the states easing their restrictions.

While that perception of high-prevalence areas was accurate during the earlier stages of the pandemic, COVID-19’s recent spread has changed the picture. During the first three weeks of April, new counties showing a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases are more suburban, whiter, and voted more strongly for Donald Trump than counties the virus hit first. These findings result from a new analysis of counties with high COVID-19 prevalence rates (more than 100 confirmed cases per 100,000 population) based on data available from The New York Times and the U.S. Census Bureau.

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The shift was most marked with respect to urban residence status. On March 29, four-fifths of high-prevalence county populations resided in the urban cores of large metropolitan areas. This fell sharply in the subsequent weeks, as more shares of residents in new high-prevalence counties lived in suburbs and smaller areas. Among residents of counties which entered high-prevalence status between April 6 and April 12, for example, only 31% lived in urban core counties, while 45% lived in suburbs and 24% lived in small and nonmetropolitan areas.

Counties entering high-prevalence status during the April 13 to April 19 period showed a rise in shares of urban core residents, due largely to the inclusion of the three populous California counties. But overall, there has generally been an increased spread to areas outside of urban cores.

Celebrating May the 4th in a Galaxy Far, Far Away:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 5:44 AM and sunset 7:58 PM, for 14h 14m 39s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 78.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court rules in Shelley v. Kraemer that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities are legally unenforceable. (Three justices—Robert H. Jackson, Stanley Reed and Wiley B. Rutledge—recused themselves from the case because they owned property subject to restrictive covenants.)

Recommended for reading in full —

Tom Hamburger and Juliet Eilperin report Maryland cancels $12.5 million PPE contract with firm started by GOP operatives:

The state of Maryland on Saturday terminated a $12.5 million contract for personal protective equipment with a firm started this spring by two well-connected Republican operatives.

State officials said the company, Blue Flame Medical, failed to deliver masks and ventilators as promised and that the matter has been referred to Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh (D) for review.

Blue Flame received a down payment of nearly $6.3 million from Maryland in early April — after promising to provide within weeks desperately needed PPE for front-line medical personnel dealing with the novel coronavirus.

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Blue Flame was started in late March by Michael Gula, a Republican fundraising and lobbying consultant in Washington, and John Thomas, a California political consultant.

Before moving in to the medical supply business, Gula was known in GOP circles for his political fundraising prowess. His firm has raised campaign funds for Sens. Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.), Steve Daines (Mont.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and dozens of other influential Republicans. He startled some longtime clients in March when he announced he was quitting the fundraising world during an election year to start the medical supply business with Thomas.

Derek Willis reports A Conservative Legal Group Significantly Miscalculated Data in a Report on Mail-In Voting:

In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.

However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.

The PILF report said that one in five mail ballots issued between 2012 and 2018, a total of 28.3 million, were not returned by voters and were “missing,” which, according to the organization, creates an opportunity for fraud. In a May 1 tweet that included a link to coverage of the report, President Donald Trump wrote: “Don’t allow RIGGED ELECTIONS.”

This Voice Actor Can Mimic Any Animal:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 14h 12m 13s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1957, Sen. Joseph McCarthy dies of liver failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.

Recommended for reading in full —

 John Cassidy asks Who’s Right About the Economy—Jared Kushner or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve?:

Jared Kushner was up early on Wednesday to offer his opinions about the coronavirus crisisto the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” his father-in-law’s favorite morning show. Kushner virtually crashed the Internet with his claim that the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic “is a great success story.” He also made some rosy predictions about the reopening of the economy, saying that by June “a lot of the country should be back to normal,” and adding, “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”

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Amid all this upbeat feeling, the policymakers at the Federal Reserve completed a two-day meeting, at which they reviewed the state of the economy and the impact of the emergency measures that they and Congress have introduced during the past six weeks. A Fed statement released after the meeting evinced none of the sunny optimism displayed elsewhere. “The coronavirus outbreak is causing tremendous human and economic hardship across the United States and around the world,” it said. “The ongoing public health crisis will weigh heavily on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term.”

At a video press conference, the Fed’s chairman, Jerome (Jay) Powell, said that “economic activity will likely drop at an unprecedented rate” in the second quarter of the year, and he said the jobless rate could leap to double figures when the April employment figures are released, next week. Even as Powell noted that the Fed’s emergency actions, which have involved pumping more than $2.3 trillion into the financial system, have “helped market conditions substantially,” he deferred from making any specific longer-term predictions about a broader economic rebound. The depth and duration of the current slump, he said, are “extraordinarily uncertain.”

Julio Vincent Gambuto writes Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting* (‘You are not crazy, my friends):

*Gaslighting, if you don’t know the word, is defined as: manipulation into doubting your own sanity. As in, Carl made Mary think she was crazy, even though she clearly caught him cheating. He gaslit her.

Pretty soon, as the country begins to figure out how we “open back up” and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. That never happened. What are you talking about? Billions of dollars will be spent in advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. It will come in the traditional forms — a billboard here, a hundred commercials there — and in new-media forms — a 2020–2021 generation of memes to remind you that what you want again is normalcy. In truth, you want the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.

8 People On Every Conference Call:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-five. Sunrise is 5:46 AM and sunset 7:56 PM, for 14h 09m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 57% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1956, the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is made available to the public.

Recommended for reading in full —

John J. Pitney writes Donald Trump, Un-American  (‘Again and again, the president has rejected America’s founding principles’):

For all his “America First” sloganeering, the term that applies best to Donald J. Trump is “Un-American.” He has repudiated the oath of office and the documents at the core of our national identity: the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Consider how he describes presidential authority. At a recent press briefing, he suggested that he could order states to reopen businesses. “The federal government has absolute power … I have the absolute right to do if I want to.” He has often made similar claims, including his assertion that he has an “absolute right” to seek foreign investigations of American political figures–an offense that triggered the first article of his impeachment.

Absolute power was precisely what the Founders sought to avoid. The word “absolute” appears three times in the Declaration, always to proclaim what the patriots were fighting against: “absolute Despotism,” “absolute Tyranny,” and “absolute rule.”

Trump’s threat to adjourn Congress calls to mind the Declaration’s charge that George III had “dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”

To prevent anyone from gaining absolute power, the Constitution included elaborate checks on the government and provided that all officials would be accountable for their actions. Alexander Hamilton wrote that a British monarch “is the absolute master of his own conduct in the exercise of his office,” whereas in a republic, “every magistrate ought to be personally responsible for his behavior in office.”

Margaret Sullivan writes Trump has played the media like a puppet. We’re getting better — but history will not judge us kindly:

Even if you get past the objectionable notions of “winning” and “losing,” I very much doubt that history will judge mainstream journalism to have done a terrific job covering this president — including in this difficult moment.

On the contrary, the coverage, overall, has been deeply flawed.

Those flaws were on full display over the past few days, just as they have been every day since a real estate mogul/reality TV star grandly descended a goldtone escalator into the marble atrium of Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his presidential campaign.

For nearly five years, the story has been Trump. And, in all that time, the press is still — mostly — covering him on the terms he dictates.<

We remain mesmerized, providing far too much attention to the daily circus he provides.

We normalize far too much, offering deference to the office he occupies and a benefit of the doubt that is a vestige of the dignified norms of presidencies past.

Tonight’s Sky for May: