Good morning. 
Tuesday in Whitewater will see an afternoon thunderstorm with a high of seventy-one. Sunrise is 6:23 AM and sunset 7:29 PM, for 13h 05m 13s of daytime. The moon is full with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred forty-sixth day.
Whitewater’s School Board meets in closed session again today via videoconference at 5:45 PM to conduct to conduct district administrator screening interviews.
On this day in 1970, the Milwaukee Brewers play their first game.
Recommended for reading in full —
Philip Rotner writes America Is Hostage to the Stories Trump Wants to Tell About Himself:
Trump’s narrative at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis was that by acting before anyone else to ban travel from China, when “everybody said, it’s too early, it’s too soon,” he had reduced U.S. COVID-19 cases to “a very small number.”
But every single thing about this narrative was false.
- There was never a travel ban, only restrictions with gaping exceptions that included Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and every American returning home from China.
- Trump did not act before everybody else.
- His travel restrictions were effective as of February 2. Dozens of countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, also issued travel restrictions in the first week of February, many of which were effective before February 2.
- Trump did not act contrary to the advice of government health care professionals. According to HHS Secretary Alex Azar, the restrictions were “the uniform recommendations of the career public health officials.”
- And Trump’s limited China travel restriction didn’t hold U.S. COVID-19 cases to a very small number. At most, it bought a little time, which Trump promptly squandered by inaction, resulting in more COVID-19 cases in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. (Though of course it’s possible that China has more cases and is lying about their numbers—justy as they’ve lied about nearly everything else concerning the pandemic they allowed to fester.)
But forget—just for a moment—about the dishonesty of Trump’s narrative and what it says about Trump’s character.
The real problem is that his false narrative shaped the actual, real-world action—or, more accurately, inaction—of the government in response to the crisis. And not just the federal government. Republican governors across the nation—not all of them, but enough to cost many, many lives—adopted Trump’s narrative and acted accordingly.
Alison Dirr reports Milwaukee has just 5 polling places for Tuesday’s election:
The City of Milwaukee on Friday announced five in-person voting centers for Tuesday’s election – just a fraction of the 180 polling sites that are usually open on election day.
Officials had said previously that they expected to have 10 to 12 voting sites, or possibly fewer, open for in-person voting citywide.
A severe shortage of poll workers has forced the city to decrease the number of polling locations. According to a statement from the city Friday, only 350 poll workers are scheduled to work the election, down from about 1,400 the city normally has.
The nightly ovation for hospital workers may be New York’s greatest performance: