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Daily Bread for 3.13.20

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.

Today is the one thousand two hundred twenty-first day.

  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:

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