Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will see afternoon showers with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:17 AM and sunset 7:33 PM, for 13h 16m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred fiftieth day.
On this day in 1945, troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Infantry Battalion liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Recommended for reading in full —
Susan Glasser writes The Coronavirus and How the U.S. Ended Up with Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags:
On Saturday, March 21st, while Donald Trump was tweeting about the “Chinese virus” and circulating praise for the “great job we’ve done,” Eric Ries received a phone call from another Silicon Valley C.E.O. His friend Jeff Lawson, of the firm Twilio, told Ries that, to deal with the rapidly escalating coronavirus crisis, the White House was recruiting tech executives to help. Ries—the founder and C.E.O. of a new company, the Long-Term Stock Exchange, and the author of a best-selling book, “The Lean Startup,” which had made him a well-known figure in the Valley—was an obvious choice for someone looking to stand up a high-tech solution to the disaster quickly.
….
America was watching, shocked, as doctors and nurses pleaded for protective gear and medical equipment such as ventilators. Ries was asked to help start a Web site that would match hospitals and suppliers. Sure, Ries said, he could have something up and running by Monday. What followed over the next two weeks was an inside glimpse of the dysfunction emanating from Trump’s Washington in the midst of the pandemic, a crash course in the breakdown that has led to nurses in one of the wealthiest countries in the world wearing garbage bags to protect themselves from a virus whose outbreak the President downplayed until it was too late to prepare for its consequences.
Stephanie Mencimer writes Peter Navarro Is the Worst Possible Person to Be in Charge of Pandemic Supplies:
Dubbed “Trump’s looniest economic adviser” by the Wall Street–focused Dealbreaker, Navarro is an academic who famously made up a fake expert to quote in his books. A five-time failed political candidate in San Diego, Navarro is widely known there “as a nut,” says one veteran California GOP political consultant. Navarro’s views on trade are considered so fringy that, for years, reporters covering him have been trying unsuccessfully to find a credible source who may agree with him. Nonetheless, since 2016, Navarro has been advising Trump on trade policy, first on the campaign trail and then in the White House as the director of the newly created Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. And on March 27, Trump appointed Navarro to enforce the DPA, the Korean War–era law that allows the administration to force a company to prioritize government orders in production.
The new job gives Navarro immense power to order supplies like ventilators and masks, block exports, and even commandeer products made overseas by US companies to ensure delivery to American hospitals. It’s a massive logistical undertaking involving federal central planning, production, and distribution, and one urgently needed to combat shortages and prevent states and hospitals from competing for scarce supplies. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) told Trump in a letter last week that Navarro was “woefully unqualified for this task.”