Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-three.  Sunrise is 7:02 AM and sunset 7:03 PM, for 12h 01m 23s of daytime.  The moon is in its third quarter with 49% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Community Involvement & Cable TV Commission is scheduled to meet at 5 PM. (Now canceled)

On this day in 1987, Milwaukee forms a committee to study whether to renovate County Stadium or build a new ballpark.

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert J. Samuelson writes of The politics of trust — and mistrust:

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inaugural address, March 4, 1933

When Roosevelt uttered these famous words, the nation was grappling with more than fear. For all intents and purposes, the economy had shut down. Roughly a quarter of the labor force was out of work. Thousands of the nation’s banks were shut after repeated panics. Hardly anyone knew which were solvent and which weren’t. Roosevelt had to convince Americans that he could restore confidence in a way that would revive the economy.

To this end, he invented fireside radio chats. “My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he began on March 12, 1933. He rebuilt trust between the governed and the governors. Roosevelt could close worthless banks, in part because he was ruthlessly honest about the outlook. “Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment,” he said.

….

But instead of rising to the occasion, Trump has slumped. He has only belatedly — and apparently reluctantly — concluded that the virus can’t be fooled and that the effort to do so has made matters worse, not better. Initially, he played down the threat posed by the virus, and when that seemed contradicted by the facts, he sought to shift blame to former president Barack Obama.

Trump’s “truths” are all politically expedient, undermining confidence. As my colleague Catherine Rampell has correctly argued, once you acquire a reputation for distortion and falsehood, it follows you everywhere.

Scott Girard and Abigail Becker report ‘It’s time to be aggressive’: Dane County closes schools, bans large gatherings, caps restaurant capacity:

All Dane County public schools are closed immediately to slow the spread of COVID-19, local officials announced Sunday.

“Schools play a crucial role in providing nutrition and other critical services to students, but they also pose a risk to children and staff with underlying health conditions,” Public Health Madison and Dane County director Janel Heinrich said at a Sunday press conference. “We have been in contact with the schools for a number of weeks now and are at the point where we want to make an aggressive decision, so that we don’t reach the point of other communities where they have community spread.”

Why We Still Don’t Have Electric Planes:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of forty.  Sunrise is 7:04 AM and sunset 7:02 PM, for 11h 58m 27s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 59.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 44 BC, Caesar is assassinated in Rome.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Cohen reports Illinois governor: ‘Federal government needs to get its s@#t together’ (‘He complains of impossibly long lines at O’Hare Airport’): 

Enhanced screening for returning travelers from Europe is creating massive logjams at U.S. airports, with travelers waiting hours in long lines to get their luggage and clear customs. Having travelers stuck in huge crowds — while public health officials urgently advise people to keep their distance — is also creating concerns that the virus could spread at airports.

“To the frustrated people trying to get home, I have spoken with the mayor and our Senators and we are working together to get the federal government to act to solve this. We will do everything within our power to get relief,” the governor tweeted.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot echoed Pritzker’s criticisms on Twitter: “This is unacceptable. The reactionary, poorly planned travel ban has left thousands of travelers at ORD forced into even greater health risk. @realdonaldtrump and @CBP: no one has time for your incompetence. Fully staff our airport right now, and stop putting Americans in danger.“

Amanda Sloat writes Is Trump Right That Britain Is Handling the Coronavirus Well?:

The British government is relying on scientific advice, particularly from Sir Patrick Vallance, England’s chief scientific adviser, and Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer. They have defended the government’s decision not to introduce social distancing, arguing the country is at a different stage than its continental neighbors. As the virus is not expected to peak in the U.K. for 10 to 14 weeks, they argue that introducing drastic measures too soon could lead to less vigilance later. Professor Whitty warned that people could become “fatigued” by repeated self-quarantine, closed schools could limit the availability of health workers with kids, and sports fans could still risk contact by gathering in pubs in lieu of stadiums. Sir Patrick explained the government was seeking to create “herd immunity” by building up resistance within the population, suggesting an ideal scenario would involve 60% of the public becoming affected to help everyone be “a bit protected.”

Critics are charging that the government is doing too little, too late. One health expert called the response “pathetic,” suggesting ministers were “behaving like 19th-century colonialists playing a five-day game of cricket.” The editor of The Lancet, a renowned medical journal, accused Johnson of “playing roulette” with the public’s health and making a “major error.” Johnson’s former colleagues have also been critical. Jeremy Hunt, the former health secretary, described the lack of action as “surprising and concerning.” Rory Stewart, the former international development secretary who is running as an independent in the London mayoral race, attacked the government’s “half-hearted response” and said schools should have been closed weeks ago. Opposition parties met on Friday with health ministers, reportedly raising concerns about the government’s over emphasis on behavioral science and failure to explain its different approach.

Go Green With Mochi, Green Tea, and Cold, Hard Cash:

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight.  Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 7:01 PM, for 11h 55m 31s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 69.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1903, Pres. Roosevelt establishes the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge by executive order.

Recommended for reading in full —

Linda Qiu reports Trump’s False Claims About His Response to the Coronavirus:

Mr. Trump wrongly blamed the Obama administration for coronavirus testing shortages and falsely said it “didn’t do testing” during the swine flu epidemic of 2009.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID: “If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didn’t do testing like this, and actually they lost approximately 14,000 people, and they didn’t do the testing. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late.”

False. This is blatantly wrong. Diagnostic tests for the swine flu were approved and shipped out less than two weeks after the H1N1 virus was identified and a day before the first death in the United States.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified the first case of the virus on April 14, 2009. The Obama administration declared swine flu a public health emergency on April 26. The Food and Drug Administration approved a rapid test for the virus two days later. At the time, the C.D.C. had reported 64 cases and zero deaths. The C.D.C. began shipping test kits to public health laboratories on May 1 (at 141 cases and one death) and a second test was approved in July. From May to September 2009, the agency shipped more than 1,000 kits, each one able to test 1,000 specimens.

….

Mr. Trump said he was not responsible for disbanding the White House’s pandemic team.

WHAT MR. TRUMP SAID: “When you say me, I didn’t do it. We have a group of people I could ask — perhaps my administration — but I could perhaps ask Tony about that because I don’t know anything about it.”

This is misleading. The top White House official tasked with leading the country’s response to a pandemic left the administration in May 2018 and his team was disbanded by Mr. Trump’s national security adviser at the time, John R. Bolton, The Washington Post has reported.

While there is no evidence that Mr. Trump personally directed the ousting of these officials, he also did not replace them in the nearly two years since, despite repeated bipartisan urgings from lawmakers and experts.

The Washington Post editorial board writes Putin is brazenly trying to make himself president for life:

Mr. Putin described his maneuver as necessary for Russia’s “internal stability.” In fact, it is a recipe for stagnation, akin to the corrosive paralysis that plagued Moscow during the late Soviet era. Even Mr. Putin appears to recognize that, at least as a theoretical matter: He said the limit on two terms for president ought to be left in the constitution to apply to future presidents. “Alternation of power …. is necessary for the development of the country,” he said in a speech to the State Duma. But not as necessary, evidently, as preserving his own authority.

It’s not hard to see why. During his time in office, Mr. Putin and his cronies have accumulated not only extraordinary power but also vast riches, including sprawling compounds and billions stashed in foreign banks. A change of power, even to a successor of Mr. Putin’s choosing, might imperil those gains, or even expose the ex-leader to accountability.

The Future Of Energy Storage Beyond Lithium Ion:

Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 7:07 AM and sunset 7:00 PM, for 11h 52m 35s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 80.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1969, Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.

Recommended for reading in full —

Philip Rucker, Ashley Parker, and Josh Dawsey report Ten minutes at the teleprompter: Inside Trump’s failed attempt to calm coronavirus fears:

In the most scripted of presidential settings, a prime-time televised address to the nation, President Trump decided to ad-lib — and his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus.

Even Trump — a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes — knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode.

Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser who has seized control over some aspects of the government’s coronavirus response, reassured Trump that aides would correct his misstatement, four administration officials said, and they scrambled to do just that. The president also told staffers to make sure other countries did not believe trade would be affected, and even sent a cleanup tweet of his own: “The restriction stops people not goods,” he wrote.
….

Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.

Tim Murphy writes Joe Biden’s Coronavirus Speech Was Everything Trump’s Wasn’t:

Biden’s “road map,” he explained, wasn’t something he intended to push through if elected. It was “the leadership that I believe is required at this very moment.” A friendly bit of advice, if you will, for Trump and Congress. His plan called for a mix of funding and accountability measures. Tests (and vaccines, when they’re available) should be “free of charge” and made widely available to the communities most in need, such as nursing homes and senior centers, and “drive-through testing” should be available at select locations.

But the problem went deeper than the lack of testing kits, he continued—hospitals need “surge capacity.” He proposed having the Federal Emergency Management Agency work with local governments to ensure they can “establish temporary hospitals” if necessary, and getting the Department of Defense involved in “planning now to prepare for the potential deployment” of “medical facility capacity and logistical support that they can only do.”

“We can do that but we are not ready yet, and the clock is ticking,” Biden said.

The other prong of Biden’s plan was economic. He laid out a list of ideas that would, he believed, serve as both stimulus and safety net—meals for kids who have to miss school, relief for “people who have difficulty paying their rent or mortgage” (something already happening in Italy), interest-free loans for small-business owners. “It’s a national disgrace that millions of our fellow citizens don’t have a single day of paid sick leave available,” he said, and stated that his priority would be gig-economy workers and others on the lower rungs of the economic ladder, not “Google or Goldman.”

Protecting Vulnerable Populations as the Coronavirus Spreads:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of fifty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:09 AM and sunset 6:59 PM, for 11h 49m 40s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 88.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1933, Pres. Roosevelt delivers his first Fireside Chat (audio embedded below).

Recommended for reading in full —

David J. Lynch reports Fears of corporate debt bomb grow as coronavirus outbreak worsens (‘Risks in financial markets that were ignored during long expansion are being exposed’):

The coronavirus panic could threaten a $10 trillion mountain of corporate debt, unleashing a cycle of layoffs and business spending cuts that would hit the economy just as some analysts are warning of a recession.

Financial markets already are showing signs of major stress. Investors are demanding higher interest payments in return for lending to less creditworthy companies; some businesses are delaying their planned bond sales while they wait for Wall Street to settle down; and ratings agencies are moving toward downgrading the shakiest corporate borrowers.

The mammoth debt bulge includes a significant increase in borrowing by firms with the lowest-quality investment grade — those rated just one level above “junk.” More than $1 trillion in “leveraged loans,” a type of risky bank lending to debt-laden companies, is a second potential flash point.

Watchdogs including the Federal Reserve have warned for years that excessive borrowing by corporations, including some with subpar credit ratings, might eventually blow a hole in the U.S. economy. Now, as Wall Street wrestles with a global epidemic, the debt alarms show how investors are reassessing risks they overlooked during the long economic expansion.

“It is a big concern,” said Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley. “We’re dealing with the unknown. But given the enormous increase in leverage, the system is fragile and vulnerable.”

Daniel Dale and Tara Subramaniam report A list of 28 ways Trump and his team have been dishonest about the coronavirus [full list at linked article]:

February 26: Trump wrongly says the flu death rate is “much higher” than Dr. Sanjay Gupta said
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN chief medical correspondent, told Trump, “Mr. President, you talked about the flu and then in comparison to the coronavirus. The flu has a fatality ratio of about 0.1%.” Trump said, “Correct.” But Trump later disputed the figure, saying, “And the flu is higher than that. The flu is much higher than that.” — February 26 coronavirus press conference

Facts First: Gupta was right, Trump was wrong. Even if Trump meant that the flu has a “much higher” fatality rate than 0.1% — rather than meaning that the flu’s mortality rate is “much higher” than that of the novel coronavirus — he was wrong, according to Fauci, other experts and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.<

….

March 5: Trump wrongly claims the virus only hit the US “three weeks ago”

Trump said, “We got hit with the virus really three weeks ago, if you think about it, I guess. That’s when we first started really to see some possible effects.”

Facts First: The US had its first confirmed case of the coronavirus on January 21, more than six weeks before Trump spoke here.

Iran Played Down the Coronavirus. Then Its Officials Got Sick:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:57 PM, for 11h 46m 45s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1941, Pres. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease bill.

Recommended for reading in full —

Tom Nichols writes Trump’s critics aren’t ‘politicizing the coronavirus.’ Trump is:

A week before he was replaced as acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney said the media was overblowing coronavirus coverage because “they think this will bring down the president.” The same day, President Trump accused Democrats of “politicizing the coronavirus,” describing it as “their new hoax.” On Saturday, conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted that media coverage is helping Americans view the outbreak “through partisan framing instead of as a health situation.” By Monday night, Fox Business’s Trish Regan had taken it over the top, railing that Democrats’ criticisms of Trump’s coronavirus response were “another attempt to impeach the president,” while blaming “the liberal media” for using the coronavirus to try to “demonize and destroy the president.”

As Harvard Medical School’s Maia Majumder tweeted Saturday, the coronavirus crisis is inherently political because “an administration’s priorities can absolutely impact the trajectory of a pandemic.” It’s political because every government is — and should be — measured by its ability to protect its citizens to the best of its ability from the ancient threats of disease, violence and starvation.

For any national leader, this is the job: protecting the public, not flinging Twitter insults or goosing the stock market. To complain about politicization, as Trump and his supporters have done, is to say that the president should be above criticism from the people whose welfare he has sworn to protect. And by deflecting the criticism that’s being — rightly — directed at him for his bizarre and contradictory statements about the coronavirus outbreak, for his self-proclaimed faith in his own uninformed “hunch” about the severity of the crisis, and for his defensiveness about his administration’s flailing response, it is Trump and his supporters who are politicizing the coronavirus threat, and not the other way around.

Radio Free Europe reports Russian Lawmakers OK Constitutional Change That Would Allow Putin To Run In 2024:

MOSCOW — Russia’s lower chamber of parliament, the State Duma, has approved a constitutional amendment that would allow President Vladimir Putin to run for a new term in 2024.

Currently, the constitution allows for a president to serve for two consecutive six-year terms. Putin, 67, is set to step down in 2024 when his second sequential presidential term ends.

On March 10, 380 lawmakers voted for the amendment, 43 voted against it, and one lawmaker abstained.

Just ahead of the vote to approve the measure, Putin said he agreed with it, but only if it is approved by the Constitutional Court.

“In principle, this option would be possible, but on one condition — if the Constitutional Court gives an official ruling that such an amendment would not contradict the principles and main provisions of the constitution,” Putin said in an address to the State Duma.

Why Don’t We Have Flying Cars Yet?: