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.
Today is the one thousand two hundred nineteenth day.
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.