Good morning. 
St. Patrick’s Day in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-three. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 7:04 PM, for 12h 04m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 38.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred twenty-fifth day.
On this day in 1941, Milwaukee’s airport was named to honor the city’s famous air-power pioneer, General William “Billy” Mitchell.
Recommended for reading in full —
Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lipman, and Dan Diamond report Before Trump’s inauguration, a warning: ‘The worst influenza pandemic since 1918′:
Seven days before Donald Trump took office, his aides faced a major test: the rapid, global spread of a dangerous virus in cities like London and Seoul, one serious enough that some countries were imposing travel bans.
In a sober briefing, Trump’s incoming team learned that the disease was an emerging pandemic — a strain of novel influenza known as H9N2 — and that health systems were crashing in Asia, overwhelmed by the demand.
The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama.
And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst.
….
Lisa Monaco, Obama’s homeland security adviser, explained the thinking behind the January 2017 session in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs. “Although the exercise was required, the specific scenarios we chose were not,” she wrote. “We included a pandemic scenario because I believed then, and I have warned since, that emerging infectious disease was likely to pose one of the gravest risks for the new administration.”
Michael Gerson writes Never have GOP votes against impeachment seemed more shortsighted:
Every time Vice President Pence appears for a coronavirus briefing, it is a reminder what the votes of just 20 Republican senators for impeachment might have accomplished for the republic.
Pence is no Franklin D. Roosevelt, but neither is he an obviously outmatched leader like his boss. The vice president is a sycophant but not an incompetent. He possesses the type of qualities one might find in an effective governor facing a hurricane. President Trump possesses the qualities one might expect in a shady businessman trying to shift responsibility for bad debt and mismanagement — which was the main leadership qualification on his pre-presidential résumé.
Paul Farhi and report On Fox News, suddenly a very different tune about the coronavirus:
For weeks, some of Fox News’s most popular hosts downplayed the threat of the coronavirus, characterizing it as a conspiracy by media organizations and Democrats to undermine President Trump.
Fox News personalities such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham accused the news media of whipping up “mass hysteria” and being “panic pushers.” Fox Business host Trish Regan called the alleged media-Democratic alliance “yet another attempt to impeach the president.”
With Trump’s declaration on Friday that the virus constitutes a national emergency, the tone on Fox News has quickly shifted.
On his program on Friday, Hannity — the most watched figure on cable news — lauded the president’s handling of what the host is now, belatedly, referring to as a “crisis.”
SpaceX rocket stage separation captured in amazing ground view: