In the first 10 days of March, some of the commentators on Fox News and Fox Business played down the threat of what would soon be recognized as a pandemic.
Many of the networks’ elderly, pro-Trump viewers responded to the coverage and the president’s public statements by taking the virus less seriously than others.
But one elderly Fox News viewer, a crucial supporter of President Trump, took the threat seriously: The channel’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who was to celebrate his 89th birthday on March 11.
On March 8, as the virus was spreading, the Murdoch family called off a planned party out of concern for the patriarch’s health, according to a person familiar with the cancellation. There were about 20 people on the guest list.
Fox News consistently reports lies and reports unverified information as fact. Their “coverage” of Covid19 has revealed just how low they are willing to go to remain in Trump’s good graces.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 6:48 AM and sunset 7:13 PM, for 12h 24m 47s of daytime. The moon is new with nearly none of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Police & Fire Commission meets at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1874, Harry Houdini, who lived during part of his childhood in Appleton, is born.
The U.S. has all but exhausted its supplies of two anti-malarial drugs that are being used by some doctors in the U.S. and China to treat the coronavirus, but which lack definitive evidence as effective treatment or approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Hopes that the decades-old drugs could be effective against the coronavirus were also boosted by President Trump, who told a White House press briefing last week that the compounds were “a game-changer” and have shown “very, very encouraging results.” He made similar remarks Friday and tweeted the recommendation again on Saturday morning, saying he hoped the medicines will “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”
The sudden shortages of the two drugs could come at a serious cost for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who depend on them to alleviate symptoms of inflammation, including preventing organ damage in lupus patients.
It is obvious that Donald Trump thinks he can score political points with the coronavirus. There is no other reason for him to show up at a news conference every day and spew one lie after another.
He stands there with an approving look on his face, seemingly stalking speakers at the podium to make sure they give him sole credit for everything the many smart, brave and committed health professionals and government workers are doing on the front lines to combat the virus.
Though most people on the stage have much more useful — and accurate — information to offer than Trump, they are forced to cede the platform to him while he babbles on for an hour. The nation is held captive while he verbally attacks reporters, recreates history and makes up stuff as if we are too dumb to know it.
Festivals are canceling and postponing all over the world because of the coronavirus pandemic.
For Summerfest in Milwaukee, the show will go on — in September.
Officials with parent company Milwaukee World Festival Inc. announced that the annual 11-day festival — originally set this year for June 24 to 28 and June 30 to July 5 — will now run nine days in 2020, taking place on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays across the first three weeks in September.
The new dates: Sept. 3 to 5, Sept. 10 to 12 and Sept. 17 to 19. Festival officials Monday did not reveal if any of the 32 acts already announced for 2020 will be available in September.
A worthy person – a man or woman committed to reason, honesty, and seriousness of purpose – would have little respect for the Janesville Gazette. This critical view is not a new one, truly: the paper’s work has been inferior during the Great Recession, during an opioid crisis, during cheerleading for countless state and local corporate welfare schemes, and continues this way even during a pandemic.
Boosterism – accentuating the positive no matter real conditions – plagues and degrades communities wherever it is found. It’s a doctrine – and after a time, an addiction – of mendacity.
Look no farther than the Gazette’s already-stale series of stories published this weekend under the “Progress 2020” tag. They’re from a special standalone section of boosterism’s greatest hits:
From the editor: Momentum grows in our communities “Part of the job of a local newspaper is to report on the challenges faced by area communities, and we take that responsibility seriously. But it’s a change of pace for our journalists to seek out and dive into stories about what’s going right in our communities.
That’s what this section is about.
We hope you enjoy reading about local Progress and are encouraged by the momentum in southern Wisconsin.
If the editor of this newspaper – Sid Schwartz – took his job seriously, then he would not publish out-of-date, repackaged stories about economic conditions that most certainly will not appertain to 2020.
Schwartz is like a man who predicts sunny weather ahead as a hurricane approaches. A worthy man, by contrast, would help others take shelter and prepare for the advancing storm.
Does Schwartz think that the stories in his “special section” describe conditions that will yet come to pass in 2020? If he does, then he’s a dunce. If he does not think that they’ll come to pass, then he’s a liar who deliberately publishes erroneous forecasts.
Everyone connected with this broadside of boosterism – every last person who has allowed his or her name to be connected with the Gazette’s work – should rethink his or her ethical obligations to the truth.
Communities benefit from accurate descriptions, and practical advice, grounded always in realism.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-seven. Sunrise is 6:50 AM and sunset 7:11 PM, for 12h 21m 52s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Community Development Association meets in a closed session conference call at 5 PM, and the Whitewater school board meets in a closed session video conference at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1968, NASA launches Gemini 3, the United States’ first two-man space flight.
President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sparked uproar and alarm among governors and mayors on Sunday as Trump and his administration’s top advisers continued to make confusing statements about the federal government’s scramble to confront the crisis, including whether he will force private industry to mass produce needed medical items.
As deaths climbed and ahead of a potentially dire week, Trump — who has sought to cast himself as a wartime leader — reacted to criticism that his administration has blundered with a torrent of soaring boasts and searing grievances. He tweeted that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) and others “shouldn’t be blaming the Federal Government for their own shortcomings. We are there to back you up should you fail, and always will be!”
(Emphasis added. Note well: Trump doesn’t grasp that the federal role is to prevent states from failing during a national emergency.)
China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.
Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.
In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately.
Those experts included international public health officials who have fought AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, flu and Ebola; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials who led major American global health programs in both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.
….
The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.
Sunday in Whitewater will be cloudy, with a high of forty-one. Sunrise is 6:51 AM and sunset 7:10 PM, for 12h 18m 57s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 3.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.
What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.
Self-aggrandizement. When asked how he would grade his response to the crisis, the president said, “I’d rate it a 10.” Absurd on its face, of course, but effective enough as blatant propaganda
Media-bashing. When NBC News’s Peter Alexander lobbed him a softball question in Friday’s briefing — “What do you say to Americans who are scared?” — Trump went on a bizarre attack. “I say, you’re a terrible reporter,” the president said, launching into one of his trademark “fake news” rants bashing Alexander’s employer.
….
Exaggeration and outright lies. Trump has claimed that there are plenty of tests available (there aren’t); that Google is “very quickly” rolling out a nationwide website to help manage coronavirus treatment (the tech giant was blindsided by the premature claim); that the drug chloroquine, approved to treat malaria, is a promising cure for the virus and “we’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.” (It hasn’t been approved for this use, and there is no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness in fighting the virus.)
Emily Landon, the chief infectious disease epidemiologist at University of Chicago Medicine, took the lectern after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D), who on Friday afternoon announced that the state would undergo a shelter-in-place order for 2½ weeks starting Saturday evening.
“The healthy and optimistic among us will doom the vulnerable,” Landon said. She acknowledged that restrictions like a shelter-in-place may end up feeling “extreme” and “anticlimactic” — and that’s the point.
“It’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens,” Landon said. “A successful shelter-in-place means you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing, and you’d be right: Because nothing means that nothing happened to your family. And that’s what we’re going for here.”
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of thirty-seven. Sunrise is 6:53 AM and sunset 7:09 PM, for 12h 16m 01s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 7.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, the 21st, 22nd, and 25th Wisconsin Infantry regiments are victorious at the Battle of Goldsborough, North Carolina as three Union armies totaling 100,000 men capture the city and its railroad facilities.
Alton was closed — all the public schools in Brenham, a rural Texas town of 17,000 about 90 miles east of Austin, have shut for the coronavirus — but one vital piece of the school day lived on: free lunch. Ms. Mossbarger rolled down the window of her used, 15-year-old S.U.V. as school employees handed her six Styrofoam containers.
Even as the carnival aroma of mini corn dogs filled the vehicle on the drive back home, and even as the children sat on the porch and ate from their flipped-open containers with the family dogs running around, Ms. Mossbarger ate nothing.
She skipped breakfast and lunch, taking her first bite of food — food-pantry fried chicken — at about 5:30 p.m. All she consumed from the time she awoke that morning until she ate dinner were sips from a cherry Dr Pepper.
Money was tight. Ms. Mossbarger, 33, a disabled Army veteran, does not work. Her husband’s job as a carpenter has slowed in recent days and gotten more unpredictable as people cancel or delay residential construction jobs. She had plenty of worries — paying the $1,000 rent was at the top of the list — but lunch for her children was not one of them.
“If we didn’t have this, I probably would have a mental breakdown with stress,” she said of the free meals at Alton. “I’m not going to let my kids go hungry. If I have to just eat once a day, that’s what I have to do.”
U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting.
The intelligence reports didn’t predict when the virus might land on U.S. shores or recommend particular steps that public health officials should take, issues outside the purview of the intelligence agencies. But they did track the spread of the virus in China, and later in other countries, and warned that Chinese officials appeared to be minimizing the severity of the outbreak.
Taken together, the reports and warnings painted an early picture of a virus that showed the characteristics of a globe-encircling pandemic that could require governments to take swift actions to contain it. But despite that constant flow of reporting, Trump continued publicly and privately to play down the threat the virus posed to Americans.
