Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of seventy-three. Sunrise is 5:45 AM and sunset 7:57 PM, for 14h 12m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 67.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred seventy-first day.
On this day in 1957, Sen. Joseph McCarthy dies of liver failure at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland.
Recommended for reading in full —
John Cassidy asks Who’s Right About the Economy—Jared Kushner or the Chairman of the Federal Reserve?:
Jared Kushner was up early on Wednesday to offer his opinions about the coronavirus crisisto the hosts of “Fox & Friends,” his father-in-law’s favorite morning show. Kushner virtually crashed the Internet with his claim that the Trump Administration’s handling of the pandemic “is a great success story.” He also made some rosy predictions about the reopening of the economy, saying that by June “a lot of the country should be back to normal,” and adding, “the hope is that by July the country’s really rocking again.”
….
Amid all this upbeat feeling, the policymakers at the Federal Reserve completed a two-day meeting, at which they reviewed the state of the economy and the impact of the emergency measures that they and Congress have introduced during the past six weeks. A Fed statement released after the meeting evinced none of the sunny optimism displayed elsewhere. “The coronavirus outbreak is causing tremendous human and economic hardship across the United States and around the world,” it said. “The ongoing public health crisis will weigh heavily on economic activity, employment, and inflation in the near term, and poses considerable risks to the economic outlook over the medium term.”
At a video press conference, the Fed’s chairman, Jerome (Jay) Powell, said that “economic activity will likely drop at an unprecedented rate” in the second quarter of the year, and he said the jobless rate could leap to double figures when the April employment figures are released, next week. Even as Powell noted that the Fed’s emergency actions, which have involved pumping more than $2.3 trillion into the financial system, have “helped market conditions substantially,” he deferred from making any specific longer-term predictions about a broader economic rebound. The depth and duration of the current slump, he said, are “extraordinarily uncertain.”
Julio Vincent Gambuto writes Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting* (‘You are not crazy, my friends):
*Gaslighting, if you don’t know the word, is defined as: manipulation into doubting your own sanity. As in, Carl made Mary think she was crazy, even though she clearly caught him cheating. He gaslit her.
Pretty soon, as the country begins to figure out how we “open back up” and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. That never happened. What are you talking about? Billions of dollars will be spent in advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again. It will come in the traditional forms — a billboard here, a hundred commercials there — and in new-media forms — a 2020–2021 generation of memes to remind you that what you want again is normalcy. In truth, you want the feeling of normalcy, and we all want it. We want desperately to feel good again, to get back to the routines of life, to not lie in bed at night wondering how we’re going to afford our rent and bills, to not wake to an endless scroll of human tragedy on our phones, to have a cup of perfectly brewed coffee and simply leave the house for work. The need for comfort will be real, and it will be strong. And every brand in America will come to your rescue, dear consumer, to help take away that darkness and get life back to the way it was before the crisis. I urge you to be well aware of what is coming.