Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will see showers of rain and snow with a high of forty-five. Sunrise is 6:20 AM and sunset 7:31 PM, for 13h 10m 54s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred forty-eighth day.
On this day in 1865, Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Recommended for reading in full —
Margaret Sullivan writes New Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany could do the impossible: Make us miss Sean Spicer:
Kayleigh McEnany got the job Tuesday. She got it despite her appalling Twitter joke in 2012 about President Barack Obama’s brother having never left his Kenyan hut and smears centered on “birtherism” conspiracy theories — unfounded questions about whether Trump’s predecessor was born in the United States — to stoke racism.
She got it despite confidently stating that President Trump doesn’t lie (everybody knows he does, a lot) and that in 2002 “President Obama” (actually a state senator then) went golfing after journalist Daniel Pearl was abducted and killed.
And perhaps worst of all, Trump’s former 2020 campaign spokeswoman got the job after spouting rose-tinted hype about the president’s supposed victories over the coronavirus. That included this beauty, uttered Feb. 25 on the since-canceled Fox Business show hosted by Trish Regan: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.” Five weeks later, 13,000 have died of the disease in the United States and hundreds of thousands more are infected.
David Frum writes This Is Trump’s Fault:
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities.