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?:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-nine.  Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:56 PM, for 11h 43m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 99.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School District’s Policy Review Committee meets at 8 AM, and Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

  On this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson successfully test bi-directional telephone transmission of clear speech.

Recommended for reading in full —

David Frum writes Trump Is Counting on the Supreme Court to Save Him:

Sometime before June 29, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court will either plunge the United States into the severest constitutional crisis of the Trump years—or save Americans from that crisis.

Three different committees of Congress, as well as New York State prosecutors, have issued subpoenas to President Donald Trump’s accountants and bankers for his tax and business records. Trump has sued to stop the accountants and bankers from complying. He has lost twice at the district-court level and twice at the appeals-court level. Now he is looking to the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to rescue him.

On March 31, the court will hear oral arguments in the cases of Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Deutsche Bank. The decision will be rendered sometime between then and the court’s summer break.

Although Trump is suing his accountants and his bankers as a private citizen, his case has been joined by the Department of Justice. Solicitor General Noel Francisco has signed an amicus brief on behalf of the United States. It is an astonishing document. It invites the Supreme Court to junk two centuries of precedent—and to substitute an entirely new system of judicial review of congressional subpoenas that involve a president.

A legislative subpoena must therefore satisfy heightened requirements when it seeks information from the President. At the threshold, the full chamber should unequivocally authorize a subpoena against the President. Moreover, the legislative purpose should be set forth with specificity. Courts should not presume that the purpose is legitimate, but instead should scrutinize it with care. And as with information protected by executive privilege, information sought from the President should be demonstrably critical to the legislative purpose. A congressional committee cannot evade these heightened requirements merely by directing the subpoena to third-party custodians, for such agents generally assume the rights and privileges of their principal, as this Court has recognized in analogous cases.

All the requirements in that above paragraph were devised for purposes of this litigation. None of them has ever been enforced—none of them has ever been imagined—in the previous 230 years of skirmishing between Congresses and presidents. Every must and should and cannot was invented in this very brief, for the immediate legal purposes of this president in this dilemma. The solicitor general might as well have said that subpoenas must be delivered by a sled pulled by flying reindeer, for all the connection between these demands and the previous constitutional history of the United States.

SpaceX Dragon spacecraft captured by Space Station in time-lapse video:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-two.  Sunrise is 7:14 AM and sunset 6:55 PM, for 11h 40m 54s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets at 6 PM.

  On this day in 1954,  CBS television broadcasts the See It Now episode, “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy.”

Excerpt – Murrow on McCarthy —

Recommended for reading in full —

Margaret Sullivan writes The media is blowing its chance to head off an Election Day debacle:

Political reporters scrutinize every public-opinion poll as if it were the I Ching. Cable pundits blather about the potential impact of the candidates’ latest gaffes, despite how notoriously bad they are at such prognostications.

What they are not obsessed with, sadly, is the very core of Election Day: voting itself.

“The media has a huge role to play in helping things to go well,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and the author of “Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust and the Threat to American Democracy.”

But, Hasen said, that has to happen now, not in September or October when it’s too late.

If journalists turn their searchlights on potential problems, Hasen told me, they can help prevent “situations where losers don’t accept the results as legitimate.”

They can do this by reporting stories that put pressure on local and state officials to take remedial action.

There’s no shortage of potential targets for journalists: malfunctioning equipment, insufficient or poorly run polling places, unfair or discriminatory voter registration, and flawed methods of doing recounts.

Many experts are convinced that the gold-standard method for casting votes is the old-fashioned hand-marked paper ballot, which Hasen calls “the least hackable and the most audit-able.” But, as Sue Halpern wrote in the New Yorker last year, vendors of fancy new voting systems have been aggressive in their efforts to sell municipalities on their frequently opaque products.

David Knowles reports Trump’s mental state — not Biden’s — is the real concern, mental health professionals say:

Mental health professionals who have expressed concern over what they see as Donald Trump’s declining faculties say that similar fears about Joe Biden’s are overblown.

“A few stumbled words are not the same as the extreme danger that result from a list of signs that Donald Trump has shown,” Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist on the faculty at the Yale School of Medicine, told Yahoo News, “and none of them apply to Joe Biden.”

Lee edited a collection of essays written by 27 mental health professionals titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” which detailed what the authors see as the risks posed by a leader who they regard as mentally and emotionally unfit for the most powerful office in the world.

Yet since Biden’s reemergence as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Lee has been flooded by requests to assess the former vice president’s string of stumbles in public appearances. In response, she published a piece on Medium correcting what she sees as the false equivalence between Trump’s “mental instability” and Biden’s occasional gaffes.

….

Biden “digresses and gets tangential, that’s not cognitive decline,” Lynne Meyer, a California psychologist told Yahoo News. “Trump’s cognitive decline or problems are that he doesn’t even seem to have comprehension of reality. That’s what it looks like.”

The Daredevil Aviatrix That History Forgot:

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of sixty-one.  Sunrise is 7:16 AM and sunset 6:54 PM, for 11h 37m 59s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

  On this day in 1862, the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry musters in: “It would go on to fight in the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863 and in the Atlanta Campaign the following year. It also helped capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis on May 10, 1865. The 1st Cavalry lost about half its men in three years: six officers and 67 enlisted men were killed in combat and seven officers and 321 enlisted men died from disease.”

Recommended for reading in full —

Philip Ewing reports Russian Election Trolling Becoming Subtler, Tougher To Detect:

Russia’s trolling specialists have evolved their disinformation and agitation techniques to become subtler and tougher to track, according to new research unveiled on Thursday.

A cache of Instagram posts captured by researchers showed that the Russians were “better at impersonating candidates” and that influence-mongers “have moved away from creating their own fake advocacy groups to mimicking and appropriating the names of actual American groups,” wrote Young Mie Kim, a University of Wisconsin professor who analyzed the material with her team.

Kim, who is also affiliated with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, discussed the analysis in a new report that also included images of some of the posts.

Kim and her team identified 32 Instagram accounts they said appeared to be linked to Russia’s now-infamous Internet Research Agency, of which 31 later were confirmed to be IRA-linked by an analysis commissioned by Facebook, which owns Instagram.

….

Russian influence operations are aimed at sowing chaos and amplifying division as much as bringing about a specific political result, national security officials say.

To that end, influence specialists posed as American grassroots or community activists and targeted populations with the intent to divide them or convince them not to vote, Kim wrote.

“The IRA is well-versed enough in the history and culture of our politics to exploit sharp political divisions already existing in our society,” Kim wrote. “American nationalism/patriotism, immigration, gun control and LGBT issues were the top five issues frequently discussed in the IRA’s campaigns.”

Josh Gerstine reports Feds: Mystery witness will implicate ‘Putin’s chef’ in election interference:

U.S. prosecutors say they have a witness who will directly implicate a Russian businessman known as “Putin’s chef” in schemes to carry out election interference overseas.

The mystery witness is prepared to testify at a criminal trial set to open in Washington next month in a case special counsel Robert Mueller brought accusing three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a prosecutor declared at a recent court hearing.

The anticipated testimony will focus on the most prominent Russian national charged in the indictment, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg restaurateur who enjoys close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and who has expanded his business empire to become a key contractor for the Russian military.

Prosecutors say Prigozhin ran the Internet Research Agency, a Russian firm that allegedly sponsored and coordinated online troll activity during the 2016 U.S. election.

How to Make a Record-Setting Paper Plane: