Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a few scattered morning showers, and a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:25 PM, for 12h 56m 39s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 81.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred forty-third day.
On this day in 1865, shortly after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, President Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
Recommended for reading in full —
Shawn Boburg, Robert O’Harrow Jr., Neena Satija and Amy Goldstein report Inside the coronavirus testing failure: Alarm and dismay among the scientists who sought to help:
On a Jan. 15 conference call, a leading scientist at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention assured local and state public health officials from across the nation that there would soon be a test to detect a mysterious virus spreading from China. Stephen Lindstrom told them the threat was remote and they may not need the test his team was developing “unless the scope gets much larger than we anticipate,” according to an email summarizing the call.
“We’re in good hands,” a public health official who participated in the call wrote in the email to colleagues.
Three weeks later, early on Feb. 8, one of the first CDC test kits arrived in a Federal Express package at a public health laboratory on the east side of Manhattan. By then, the virus had reached the United States, and the kits represented the government’s best hope for containing it while that was still possible.
For hours, lab technicians struggled to verify that the test worked. Each time, it fell short, producing untrustworthy results.
That night, they called their lab director, Jennifer Rakeman, an assistant commissioner in the New York City health department, to tell her it had failed. “Oh, s—,” she replied. “What are we going to do now?”
In the 21 days that followed, as Trump administration officials continued to rely on the flawed CDC test, many lab scientists eager to aid the faltering effort grew increasingly alarmed and exasperated by the federal government’s actions, according to previously unreported email messages and other documents reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as exclusive interviews with scientists and officials involved.
CREW – Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington – Requests Records on Strategic National Stockpile Coronavirus Response:
The Trump administrations’ unequal responses to states in supplying medical equipment to fight the coronavirus raises questions of whether President Trump is biasing the Strategic National Stockpile’s distribution of supplies.
As the pandemic has grown, the Strategic National Stockpile has received an overwhelming number of requests for supplies, and the disparity in response to different states has been suspect at best. For example, Michigan—whose governor has been outspoken in her criticism of the federal response—has received far less from the stockpile than the state needs to combat the coronavirus, while Florida—whose governor has been praised by the president—received everything it requested. Additionally, HHS Secretary Azar reportedly anticipated the need before the coronavirus had spread to the U.S. and sought $2 billion to buy emergency medical equipment—a request OMB cut to $500 million in a supplemental budget request it sent to Congress.
CREW requested records on the FEMA and HHS criteria used to make distributions to states from the Strategic National Stockpile to address the coronavirus pandemic.
Connecticut National Guard Converts Sports Arena Into Covid-19 Field Hospital:
The Wisco-World R-Team is doing itself proud. Unless they change their minds later this afternoon, we will all be flocking to the polls in the midst of a pandemic on Tuesday.
Why would any legislator in their right mind want us to do this?? The answer is in the utter depravity of the “Right Mind”. “Leaders” Vos and Fitz have certainly noticed that the centers of COVID in Wisco-World are in the hot-beds of Democratic voting of MKE and MSN, and in-person voting is guaranteed to be depressed because of this. They are risking the health of their voters and the poll workers to exploit the God-given gift of Coronavirus to advantage their Walker-appointed stooge for the Supreme Court, Dan Kelly. Think of it as situation-based Gerrymandering, done by a virus. Vos and Fitz have *never* passed up an opportunity to suppress voting, and This fruit was low-hanging and just begging to be exploited. So, of course, they did.
Thanks for being dicks, Vos and Fitz.
Yes, indeed. The WISGOP has its own 2020 coronavirus version of 2016 Trump’s call for black support: “Go ahead and vote in person during a pandemic. What have you to lose?”